The plaintiff in this case, New York bankruptcy lawyer David Shaev, filed the action last Thursday in a Delaware Court, claiming the proposed agreement – which involves HP paying stockholders of 3Com $7.90 a share – constitutes a breach of 3Com’s fiduciary duties owed to public shareholders. He argues that 3Com’s directors should have pushed for a higher price.

The complaint, which names the entire company’s board of directors, alleges the defendants are attempting to deceive 3Com shareholders and unfairly deprive them of the true value of their investment in the company.

The acquisition – which was clearly leaked – is currently awaiting approval from regulators as well as 3Com stockholders. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Should the merger indeed be completed without a hitch, the class action will seek damages caused by the alleged breach of fiduciary duties.

(Image via eHow)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In a move that reminds me of this painful memory, the two have paired to create an iPhone app that lets people print photos on their iPhone to networked HP printers via the Phanfare Photon app. “Phanfare Updates Popular iPhone App to Enable Home Printing to HP Printers,” says the press release.

Not to pick on Phanfare, which is a great photo site. And while I’ve been hard on HP lately, I’m not one to complain about people printing too much stuff (see Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway).

But there’s a reason why no one else has licensed HP’s iPrint software yet. It’s because it’s something no one wants to use.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had prints made of a photo you took on a mobile phone. Now keep your hand up if you were so excited to print that photo that you actually did it on a home printer, sacrificing quality for immediate gratification. I’m pretty sure no one has their hand up.

But anyway, in the spirit of supporting startups, we’ll help get this thing started. The first person to download the app, take a picture, print it to an HP networked printer and then takes a picture of the printout with the iPhone next to it gets a free TechCrunch tshirt. You will definitely have earned it. Just upload it somewhere and leave a link below.*

* – Phanfare and HP employees are not eligible for the tshirt.**

** – Oh, what the hell, nevermind. Go for it. Someone has to test the software.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.

Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion).

A simple look at U.S. traffic to retail sites in December through Christmas Eve (see table below) shows that eBay had the most unique visitors (85.4 million), followed by Amazon (76.2 million), and Wal-Mart (51.5 million). Even though eBay attracted the most people, its traffic was down 4 percent from last year. Amazon saw 7 percent more visitors, which might have contributed to its claiming to have a great Christmas.

But the retail sites that saw the biggest increases in visitors was Apple (up 19 percent) and Hewlett-Packard (up 28 percent). Dell, in contrast, saw a 17 percent decline in visitors.

(Photo by Randy Son of Robert)

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The product is a distributed computing platform for third party research and application building. My live call notes are below.

Notes, in chronological order:

…waiting for call to begin

Prith Banerjee from HP began the call and introduced Andrew Chien and Prabhakar Raghavan. Summarizing the key news: HP, Intel and Yahoo are partnering with governments and academic institutions to create an open source cloud computing test bed with six distributed centers. Global, distributed, Internet scale platform. The main goal is to remove financial and logistical barriers for people to develop cloud computing application. Partners include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

HP believes we are entering an era of “everything as a service.” Businesses and users will use the services, which will anticipate your needs based on location, etc. This shift towards everything as a service will require a new approach. HP will conduct research in two areas: intelligent infrastructure and cloud services. They say they’ll experiment with radically new data center structures.

Andrew Chien from Intel: cloud computing is a big challenge. important technology issues around hardware stack to drive performance, energy usage, etc. This isn’t a “test tube” study, it’s a large scale distributed global platform. “Intel has a long history of open collaboration” he says.

Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo: Says Yahoo is pleased to be a cofounder of the project. Want to take Internet research “to the next level.” Says the next generation of the web demands collaborative research. Discussing M45 data center they launched with Carnegie Mellon and other projects where they experimented with cloud computing. Says this announcement is in the spirit of the earlier partnerships. Building and contributing to an “intellectual commons.”

Questions:

- how are each company contributing?

Each company is providing people and resources, and each is creating one of the six test beds. Research can be conducted across the stack. Yahoo has contributed open source software, from the OS to Hadoop. Chien reiterates support for open source software. Says some of the pieces of the data centers are up and running now.

- Size of investment by each company?

not disclosing financial terms. each facility will have 1,000- 4,000 processor cores.

- web needs a new architecture…please expand?

They want people to take the cloud for granted, so people can create applications at any scale.

- have they measured how much collective computing power? Why not part of IBM/Google research announced last year?

we’re complimentary to IBM/Google, and also different. they are going to allow people to run low levels of customized software. IBM/Google is focused on application level right now. In terms of scale, they say not to focus on total computational capability, but to focus on scalability.

- idea of timeline? what will finished products look like?

some of this is underway and being used. M45 datacenter has been in operation since 2007, this takes it to a broader level. they are looking to see publication of research by all parties, contribution to an intellectual commons.

- have they received government R&D funds?

says they are partnering with the national science foundation and various academic organization, never really answered the question.

- can others join this group? IP ownership?

Chien says they are taking a leadership step. open to more people contributing. On IP ownership, they are making clear statements about what is open source, commitment to openness.

Note: I was not allowed to ask a question for some reason. Things I would have asked:

1. How do third parties open their own facilities/data centers? What if Stanford wants to open a facility?

2. Pricing: How will resources be allocated to people building on the platform?

3. Where to people go for information on APIs and other tools needed to access the platform?

4. Yahoo kept referring to M45 as a version of this already deployed. Is that their contribution or are they building out a new facility.

Overall this is super squishy, and appears to be more of a hype release than anything. More details are needed. A lot more.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It’s being described as “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (which is distinct from the MDA, I believe, which is unfortunate), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany:

The test bed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence” at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year.

The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop — an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation — and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.

“The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”

Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.

More on Yahoo, HP and Intel’s websites. This gets Yahoo in the game that Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been playing for some time.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

With Flickr, for instance, you can use Tabblo to create albums, posters, or photo cubes. (Flickr has a similar deal with Blurb around photo books). Facebook artists proficient at Graffiti, can now print out their creations as posters as well. And 13-year-old fans of Disney pop star Hannah Montana will be able to create concert memento books combining glam shots with their own photos. Tabblo splits the revenues from the $30 books or other printed products with its partners. If you print it yourself, it’s free (but HP still wins if you use an HP printer).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors