Yahoo!News writes that “

[a] thousand startups competed for the honor of launching their technology products—mostly software and web sites and applications, in the second annual TechCrunch50 event. The conference gave startups, some with no real funding to speak of, exposure to billionaire investors such as Marc Cuban and high-ranking officers of corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.  At the end, the last company standing, deemed the ‘most likely to succeed’ and getting a good catapult from the top honor itself, was Yammer, which asks corporate workers the question ‘What are you working on now?’ in the vein of the Twitter microblogging internet service, which has gained huge popularity among the tech set. Yammer takes the Twitter idea and tailors it to corporations’ needs, with access only to those having a valid company email address.”

ComputerWeekly.com has a great article entitled “The CERN laboratory and the Big Bang theory: an essential guide for IT professionals.”

Internetnews.com writes that “[s]earch has become so pervasive on the Web as part of our regular activities that it’s tempting to assume it will be central to any future Web advances.  Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo, didn’t get the memo.  ‘It’s very limiting to think of the Web as merely a mechanism for retrieving data,’ Raghavan said in a panel discussion here Tuesday wrapping up the two-day DEMO conference. ‘The next step is divining the intent of what people are doing and fulfilling their tasks. I’ve always believed people intrinsically don’t want to search, they come to work to do what the boss wants…. We have to get further on achievement than the notion of the retrieval engine as the ultimate target.’”

In a different article, Internetnews.com reveals that “[t]wo years after they struck their [interoperability] agreement, Microsoft and Novell have extended their partnership. The partners are now finally rolling out a supported Linux on a Windows virtualization solution.  The new supported Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization offering comes as Microsoft ramps ups it products and rhetoric ahead of VMware’s own big conference in Las Vegas next week.  It also comes at an opportune time for Novell, which is trying to differentiate itself from competitor Red Hat and its virtualization offerings.”

CNetNews.com has an interesting interview with Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore on the Zune, future phones and new iPods.