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Microsoft opens door for ValueAct to join its board Summary:  Microsoft may be getting a new board member, investment firm ValueAct's President Mason Morfit. Microsoft and San Francisco-based investment firm ValueAct Group signed a pact on August 30 that opens the door for ValueAct President Mason Morfit join Microsoft's board of directors. ValueAct had been rumored to be lobbying to join Microsoft's board for the past few months. Some said  ValueAct officials wanted to see Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer step down  -- something which Microsoft announced earlier this month would be happening some time in the next 12 months. (For what it's worth, Ballmer told The Seattle Times that  his retirement had nothing to do with ValueAct .) ValueACt owned as of late July 66,865,530 shares of Microsoft stock , representing 0.8 percent of Microsoft's issued and outstanding shares of Common Stock. According to Reuters, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and CEo Ballmer o

NTT DoCoMo to use fuel cells at base stations Summary:  The Japanese mobile carrier plans to use fuel cells at its cellphone base stations as emergency power sources in the event of a disaster, and will select other base stations by the end of 2013. NTT DoCoMo will use fuel cells at cellphone base stations across the country as emergency power sources in the event of a disaster. Company officials from Japan's largest mobile carrier said on Friday at the moment, only one in Tokyo has fuel cells,  The Japan Times  reported. Fuel cells generate power by combining hydrogen with oxygen in a chemical reaction and do not emit carbon dioxide. However, Japan's largest mobile carrier will select other base stations by the end of this year for the introduction starting 2014, the officials noted. The telco is also installing solar power systems at selected base stations and is planning to use solar power on a routine basis to reduce power consumption at the base statio

Five alternative futures for BlackBerry Summary:  BlackBerry is exploring options ranging from joint ventures through to the sale of the company: we take a look at how each of these could shape up. BlackBerry was for a long time was the undisputed leader in enterprise smartphones, and enjoyed considerable success for a time in the consumer space too. Since then, it's faded dramatically: across five of Europe's biggest markets — Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany – BlackBerry now has a  mere 2.2 percent market share , while its new BlackBerry 10-based handsets haven't been the breakthrough hits the company had hoped. In the enterprise, BlackBerry has been undermined by the growth of the bring your own device culture — which has resulted in a huge influx of iPhones and Android devices into the business — while its attempt to break into the tablet market with the PlayBook had met with little success.  Now BlackBerry has revealed its board

Facebook engineers explain News Feed ranking algorithms; more changes soon Summary:  Curious about how the Facebook News Feed really works? Facebook engineers shed light on some of the magic underneath the stream. It's populated with content from a user's friends and favorite things running the gamut from sports teams to musicians to restaurants. MENLO PARK --  The  Facebook  News Feed is a curious place. But the way things are ordered and the reasons why certain pieces of information are displayed more prominently than others aren't always clear to everyday users. Without revealing all of the magic underneath the stream, Facebook engineers explained some of the ranking algorithms that determine which stories appear at the top of one's feed. Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook, explained that the engineering team "wanted to demystify" News Feed rankings to both the media and the user base of more than one billion people worldwide a

Facebook invents a PHP virtual machine Summary:Facebook abandoned the work of translating PHP into C++ in favor of delivering dynamically generated bytecode to the server   Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems. "Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly," said Joel Pobar, a Facebook engineering manager. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year. Pobar discussed the virtual machine at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) being held this week in Portland, Oregon. HHVM is not Facebook's first foray into customizing PHP for faster use. PHP is an interpreted language , meaning that