These days, €40m ($51m) is a big funding round for any company whose revenues are based entirely on advertising. Blyk provides free mobile calls to 200,000 British 16- to 24-year-olds in exchange for them receiving advertising messages, a membership it reached much faster than expected. Its response rates of 25 per cent have attracted 180 advertisers – but is even that enough to maintain revenues, with advertisers pulling budgets from even the most tried and tested of media?

Blyk’s fundraising – its third, coming from existing investors, who include Goldman Sachs and Sofinnova Partners – was accompanied by a “new media partnership strategy”. Blyk currently operates using a mobile virtual network, airtime purchased wholesale from Orange in the UK and Vodafone in the Netherlands. But for further international expansion, Blyk’s co-founder and chief executive (and a former Nokia president), Pekka Ala-Pietila, says: “We don’t need to work purely on our own.”

A strategy of partnering more closely with operators or local media companies was prompted by interest in Europe and Asia “at such a level it has given us a lot of food for thought, to take into account how we have the ability to be fast in expanding in new countries and also more flexible in pursuing different kinds of opportunities”, he states. “Where there’s high demand then it makes sense to move and ride with the wave when the time is right.”

In constrained times, anything that cuts phone bills is prone to be popular, but Mr Ala-Pietila is thin on specifics of how such partnerships will work. Alexandra Rehak, mobile media analyst at Analysys Mason, a research group, expects Blyk to offer consulting services to operators impressed by those response rates and its mobile advertising technology.

Blyk also states it is pruning back from its estimated 60 people, among other undisclosed “streamlining” efforts. But in spite of the change in business model, cost slicing and a statement that Blyk is “feeling the impact of the world’s financial situation”, Mr Ala-Pietila insists that advertising on Blyk remains robust.

But Ms Rehak finds that hard to believe. “Obviously the advertising market in general is taking a large hit and that is going to carry over into mobile even more than advertising at huge, because it is new and untested,” she states. “Blyk’s whole business model is based only on advertising… they really have nothing to fall back on.”

Maybe, as Mr Ala-Pietila states, the advertising environment is not hurting Blyk in the UK yet. Mobile is an unproven medium, but demands only a small fraction of marketing budgets.

Reaching 100,000 subscribers – the point at which it states advertisers started to take it seriously as a “youth media” – by itself in a new country would be a much tougher proposition. In the meantime, the extra funds will help service the network costs of those 200,000 subscribers if advertisers do start to pull out.

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Wi-fi can be a hard thing to figure out for a user on-the-go - all those networks, signal strengths, passwords and WEP encryption keys.

While popularising wi-fi with its Centrino chipsets for laptops, Intel did a pretty poor job with the software, in my view, making it impossible for me to log on to some networks from my corporate notebook.

So I’m glad they’ve now handed the job to someone else, in the shape of Devicescape, a Silicon Valley company backed by VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.

Its software is now used in most Intel-based laptops, as well as a host of other devices.

For example, I downloaded its popular Easy Wi-Fi application for the iPod touch and entered my login details for AT&T Wi-fi. Now, when I go into a Starbucks coffee store, I just press a button on the app screen to instantly connect. Before, I had to fire up the Safari browser and re-enter all my details on the AT&T website to get on the web.

David Fraser, Devicescape’s chief executive, tells me it should be even easier than that. As more smartphones, such as the iPhone, incorporate wi-fi chips, manufacturers are embedding Devicescape’s software to switch seamlessly between 3G and wi-fi, without the user noticing.

“We’ve moved from text messaging to watching YouTube videos on the phone and this explosion of data traffic can cause problems for carriers,” he states.

By shifting users onto wi-fi, where available, operators can ease any congestion. Devicescape’s technology is used in Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia and Palm smartphones. As more categories of devices include wi-fi, the company sees its market expanding - it is in the new Nintendo DS handheld console and sees opportunities in personal navigation devices and digital cameras.

The company maintains a database of thousands of networks, enabling simple connections to hotspots, municipal wi-fi and services such as Meraki and Fon.

The San Bruno start-up, employing 30 people, was known as Instant 802, before Mr Fraser joined four years ago and rebranded the company. It is now at cash flow break-even and is hiring staff, at a time when everyone else in the Valley seems to be slicing back.

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After all the personal criticism he has taken in his 17 months as CEO, it’s worth remembering the reception Jerry Yang got when he was picked by Yahoo’s board to replace Terry Semel.

The assumption on Wall Street was that he would be a stop-gap boss, there to keep the seat warm until Sue Decker had done enough to prove she was up to running the show. According to people who know him, he was always happiest in the Chief Yahoo! role, where he could exercise significant behind-the-scenes influence (the relationship with Jack Ma of Alibaba owes much to Yang) while still getting the time to hone his impressive golf game.

What came next would be enough to make the toughest CEO blanch: an unsolicited bid from Microsoft, a proxy fight with Carl Icahn, regulatory opposition to a major strategic move (the Google partnership) and a collapsing advertising market. For good measure, Yang also had to last Congress’s version of a public flogging at a hearing over Yahoo’s role in the jailing of a Chinese dissident.

The question that remains is not so much why Yang failed, as why Yahoo’s board left the company so exposed. Semel, who served as chairman after first handing over the reins, must take much of the blame. Roy Bostock, who succeeded Semel, may have had tiny choice but to support Yang through much of this year’s turmoil, but he personally bears much of the blame for the debacle of the Microsoft talks.

Yang may be stepping out of the firing line, but Bostock - and the rest of Yang’s board - are still very much in it.

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Livescribe’s digital pen, the Pulse, is just the sort of gadget that should appeal to a Mac user.

It is innovative, comes with cool software that can search your handwriting and is aimed at an audience - college students - which is buying Macbooks hand over fist.

So it is surprising that the Bay Area company has taken more than six months to come up with a Mac version, released today, of the software only available on Windows when the pen first launched.

At a preview event last week, Jim Marggraff, founder and chief executive, told me:”I think we would have had 60 to 100 per cent more sales if we’d had the Mac software at launch. Roughly 50 per cent of college freshmen purchase Macs and there are professional Mac users such as graphic designers interested as well.”

Nevertheless, he added: “We’re doing well, we’ll make our numbers this year, I can’t announce sales now but, in a dismal retail climate, we’re a bright spot.”

The Pulse features an infra-red camera that records handwriting as the user writes on special dot-printed notebooks, with microphones in the pen picking up associated audio. Tapping on the writing, replays the audio at that particular point in the note-taking.

The software allows images of handwritten pages with audio to be uploaded, stored and searched on a Personal computer or Mac.

Livescribe appears to have suffered the usual start-up problems of delays and difficulties getting everything ready at once for a brand new product, but is catching up now. The Mac version of the software now grants pages to be saved as PDFs and audio exported to the AAC format.

I bought a pen at launch and use it daily as a journalist, finding it an indispensable tool for capturing audio with my hard-to-read shorthand. I would like to see a sleeker version 2 at some stage with a better backup system, but a software update due next week might help address the problem of slow transfer speeds from the pen to the desktop.

Also enabled will be the capability to print your own dot paper on certain laser printers and software that converts handwriting to text - as long as you don’t have my illegible scrawl.

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It seems churlish to question the success using commercial criteria of One Laptop Per Child, when as a non-profit organisation it has done much to raise awareness of the possibilities and need for cheap computing power.

Getting the XO laptop into production and use around the world was an achievement in itself,  but government orders so far have been underwhelming. Only South America has responded in significant numbers, with 100,000+ orders coming from each of Colombia, Uruguay and Peru.

Ironically, it is sales to consumers in the developed world - never part of the original plan - that’s pushing the use of the OLPC in Africa and troublespots such as Haiti and Afghanistan.

The Give One Get One campaign announced last year has led to around 100,000 laptops being sent to such countries by US consumers. They were able to pay $399 for an XO for themselves and the right to donate one to a deserving child.

Now the scheme is being extended to consumers worldwide , with the announcement this day that orders will be taken by Amazon’s UK site for sales and delivery worldwide, although it does not anticipate to have inventory until January.

OLPC came out with plans for version two of the laptop in Might, which will be more like a digital book, with two touch-sensitive screens.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC, tells me this should cost $75, while, at the same time, he admits that the original “$100″ XO laptop still costs $187. The key is integration, he states, reducing 900 parts to 50-60 components.

But in a tacit admission of the uphill battle OLPC is facing, he states the launch date of two years hence is intended to encourage others to beat the non-profit to market.

“As a non-profit we want people to copy this, the more the superior, we would love to see the competition beat us,” he states.

He is looking at the success of the small, cheap netbook category of course, but he says such commercial efforts at supplying cheap computing versus OLPC are like comparing McDonalds to the World Food Programme.

In other words, there’s no competition - different markets, different targets, which begs the question of how much any commercial solution can contribute to OLPC’s laudable aims.

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It’s understandable that companies should want to sugar the pill when they have bad news, but some pills simply can’t be sweetened.

Take Sun’s sweeping job cuts this day (nearly a fifth of the workforce.) Asked what these cuts will actually mean - surely there will have to be severe retrenchment, or even closure, of some parts of the business? - Sun had this to say: it is “amplifying focus in geographic markets where there are growth opportunities.”

Well, at least it can still see the positive side.

For anyone keeping score, this looks like the company’s ninth restructuring plan in recent years. As we pointed out recently, the total restructuring charges had already climbed over $2bn, with hits each year for seven years. That must be some sort of record.

Will this do the trick? The last quarterly numbers for the hardware side of the business were truly horrible: revenues down 11 per cent, with the gross profit margin falling by 13 percentage points as Sun cut prices and suffered from a weaker sales mix. In this sort of environment, with demand collapsing and customers able to drive a harder bargain, it isn’t clear that even cuts this deep will put Sun back into the black.

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Cable and satellite companies need to work out a way of bringing the web revolution to their TV services fast or face being trampled underfoot by world wide web innovators, according to executives at the intersection of broadcasting and the internet.

Blake Krikorian, chief executive of Sling Media, told the New TeeVee Live conference in San Francisco that the living room was cable and satellite’s to lose.

“And they very well might lose it, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel,” he said.

“They are not trying to give consumers what they want - their differentiation this day is: I’ve got more HD channels than somebody else versus how great is the particular experience.”

Sling has brought living-room Television content to Computers and phones through its Slingbox device that grants remote access and viewing over the internet. Its new Slingcatcher box goes the opposite way - pulling video content that resides on the internet or Personal computer and playing it back through the Television using a broadband connection.

The more massive challenge now, said Mr Krikorian, was that the increased choice of devices and of content meant people needed more help in finding what they were looking for. This needed to go beyond the traditional cable or satellite Electronic Programme Guide (EPG).

The web was ideal for this with its search and social Web 2.0 tools and suggestions, but “frankly the cable and satellite guys are not the innovators,” he stated.

Sling appears to be taking up the challenge with its Sling.com video destination site, due to launch fully later this month. As well as offering on the internet video, it allows Slingbox owners to watch their TV in a window in a browser, surrounded by the kind of programme recommendations and search tools that Mr Krikorian is advocating for the living-room Television.

In a keynote speech on Thursday, Reed Hastings, chief executive of online DVD rental service Netflix, put forward the idea of a straight web browser interface for Televisions, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

Microsoft had tried with this approach 10 years ago with WebTV, he stated, but that failed to take off in the days of dial-up access, standard definition, up-down remote controls and easy email services for grandparents. Now, it is broadband, high definition, Wii-type pointing controllers and video as the key application, he said.

Mr Hastings described a major battle shaping up between the Web innovators and cable and satellite operators who were trying to mimic some of the web’s features.

“Fundamentally, the web with its inventive and dynamic paradigm and openness and competition will almost certainly overcome all of the proprietary monopoly-oriented architectures,” he predicted.

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Despite the ringing of a major-warning bell by its stronger microprocessor rival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices is maintaining its commitment to returning to profitability in 2009.

AMD, which reported its eighth consecutive quarterly loss last month and softening sales, says it is cutting costs and focusing on core products to lower its break-even point.

“We are going to structure the company to a point where we have the ability to start making money while retaining core investments in research and development and products,” Dirk Meyer, chief executive, told the company’s analyst day in Silicon Valley today.

AMD also launched a key product this day - a processor codenamed Shanghai for servers, which offers major performance improvements and is its first based on a more cost-effective 45-nanometre manufacturing technology.

Last month, it announced it would spin-off its manufacturing abilities into a new company, with the help of an investment of up to $8.4bn from Abu Dhabi investors.

It is also shedding the consumer electronics business it inherited from its acquisition of the Canadian graphics chip maker, ATI.

Mr Meyer, who took over from Hector Ruiz as chief executive in the summer, stated AMD was one of only two companies, with Intel, that could produced leading-edge x86 microprocessors in volume and one of only two leading graphics chip makers, with Nvidia. It was the only company that had both capabilities under one roof.

AMD’s ambitious plans for “Fusion” of the two has led to losses, a big debt burden and a share price that has fallen 69 per cent this year and was down 9 per cent at $2.33 in trading this day.

But Mr Meyer stated AMD has a shot at a $46.5bn market - $8.5bn for servers, $4bn for graphics cards and $34bn for client Computer microprocessors.

Shanghai should give it a lift in the server category - compared to its “Barcelona” predecessor, it is on time and performing above expectations. The quad-core processor offers 35 per cent better performance with up to a 35 per cent decrease in power consumption.

“I think it will have a massive impact in the data centre around virtualisation,” Sally Stevens, director of platform marketing at Dell, told me.

“What’s nice is that there’s no change of the motherboard, so it’s a easy drop-in of the new processor.”

Dell, HP, IBM and Sun are among the first customers for the new Opteron-brand processor.

Intel is hot on AMD’s heels with a new processor design called Nehalem, which will first appear in high-end desktop PCs from Monday and in servers next year.

“I think Shanghai puts AMD back in the game, but it isn’t going to have a whole lot of unblocked sunlight,” states Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies .

“It does not make it a clear winner, with Intel breathing down its neck.”

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Console game publishers are working up a sweat in their efforts to win over a casual gaming audience.

Peter Moore, once a PE instructor but now head of EA Sports, says he has given himself some tough workouts testing its new Active personalised fitness product for the Nintendo Wii, but sees women as the natural target audience.

Women, consistently in the minority as game players, have been drawn to the Wii and the activities made possible by its motion-sensing controller. EA announced this day it will launch Active next March, leveraging the popularity of Nintendo’s Wii Fit and its balance board accessory, which resembles a lavatory scale.

EA is adding other peripherals including a resistance band and leg straps containing the controllers - enabling monitoring of fitness levels within a personalised workout programme.

“This will complement the Wii’s balance board, which is more about the Eastern philosophy of fitness with balance and coordination. In the West, we’re all about getting a sweat on and getting your heart rate up,” states Mr Moore.

EA Sports core audience up to now has been predominantly young male players, who have bought millions of duplicates of Madden NFL and other sports titles.

“We’re in no way blind to the challenges that speaking to a mid-30s woman presents for EA Sports, but we think health and wellness and fitness over the next few years is going to be very important to consumers.”

Other publishers are also targeting fitness and the female demographic on the Wii. THQ has just launched its All Star Cheer Squad, teaching cheerleading and dance moves using the balance board. Another publisher has announced plans for a pole dancing game.

However, Celia Pearce, co-founder of the Ludica women’s game collective, says publishers fall into the trap of seeing women as stereotypes.

“The problem is that when you get a bunch of golf-playing guys in a room brainstorming about women’s games, you get some pretty stupid ideas,” she states.

“When I hear pole dancing and cheerleading, I just cringe, because I feel they do not get it still. I wish these companies would hire more women - there are several freelance women game designers, mostly because they can’t stand to work in the macho environments of game companies.”

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Sezmi, a start-up seeking to be at the heart of the convergence of the internet and broadcast TV, has announced the completion of the first successful technical trials of its “TV 2.0″ service.

The Silicon Valley company has been using Seattle as a testbed for its hybrid system, which combines digital terrestrial TV signals with broadband connections to offer both regular Television channels and programming on demand.

Sezmi’s partners in Seattle were Fisher Communications, Tribune Broadcasting and Daystar Television Networks - Television station owners who are licensing their spectrum and expect to earn additional revenues from advertising on local news content included in Sezmi’s service.

Sezmi expects to be able to undercut the offerings of cable and satellite providers by using the existing over-the-air TV towers and broadband infrastructure to deliver its services.

 It emerged from stealth mode in Might and planned launches in several US markets this year. But that schedule has slipped. Phil Wiser, co-founder and president, told me there had been a couple of delays “getting the pieces to fit the right way”. The next stage would be full-blown consumer trials in Seattle before moving into other markets in the course of 2009.

Despite the credit crunch, he said Sezmi was in a good position financially. Its last funding announcement was a $17.5m round in August last year.

Sezmi will be showing off its service, which grants members of a household to create separate personalised Television experiences, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

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