Since 2005, when Apple first announced plans to switch to Intel, the companies have been joined at the microchip. Intel even tweaked its chip designs, reducing the size of the circuitry surrounding a cutting-edge chip to accommodate the tight confines of Apple's new MacBook Air. But a new report suggests Apple is getting antsy about Intel. AppleInsider says that while Apple will continue to use Intel CPUs, it will start designing its own custom chipsets — the motherboards on which processors sit and which houses all the supporting silicon. Could this have anything to do with Apple's recent purchase of chip designer PA Semi?

In an interview with ZDNet, Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield says that he wished Microsoft's bid for Yahoo had gone through — and that the now-scuppered deal wasn't the reason he resigned from Yahoo earlier this month. "Once the ball was rolling I would have rather seen the acquisition happen, he said. "I think a lot of damage was done to Yahoo." The admission will likely shock the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site's faithful core of hardcore fans, who created satirical Microsoft Flickr logos in response to the software giant's bid. Butterfield also implies that Flickr would have been better off under Google's ownership, since that company was more willing to spend on speculative ventures. It's not a purely hypothetical question: Google was very interested in buying Flickr, but the search engine hesitated, and Yahoo ended up buying Flickr instead. I could go on analyzing Butterfield's comments, but I've become too distracted by a Flickr search of photos which demonstrate how fricking cute he is. The results:

A tipster tells us Google has backed out of talks to buy Digg, the popular news-discussion site fronted by Kevin Rose, the Web-video personality and San Francisco Casanova. There have been hints all week that Google has been cooling on Digg. Marissa Mayer, Google's reigning princess of pageviews, had once fancied Digg as a means of improving Google News, one of her Web properties. Last month, at her behest, acquisition talks were getting serious. But then Mayer brashly (and perhaps foolishly) announced Wednesday that Google News generated $100 million a year in revenues for Google. Translation: Who needs Digg?Shortly thereafter, reearsh firm Hitwise ran numbers which showed that Digg would be inconsequential for Google's traffic, only the 13th largest Web property, well behind Google News. Coincidence? Perhaps, but they can't have been helpful for Digg's negotiations. One other sign that the deal has been going nowhere: Digg has been interviewing for a head of PR. That's a position they wouldn't fill if they were close to a sale. That said, we hear Digg board member Brett Bullington, who helped sell JotSpot to Google in 2006, has been pushing to keep negotiations alive. So are things on? Are they off? Never say never in deals. But even Digg CEO Jay Adelson acknowledged this week, at a meetup with Digg users in Chicago, that his company has been too prone to leaks during negotiations. Could he be getting a taste of the same from the Google side? That's a theory I dig.

At a Chicago meetup yesterday, Digg CEO Jay Adelson would not comment on recent rumors that Google has renewed talks to buy the site. “There is no word,” Adelson said. “We commented on one of these rumors before and it got us in trouble. There is nothing to say.” Digg founder Kevin Rose wasn't so shy, joking with the audience: “We’re buying Google.” Adelson did, however, tell the audience that following smaller social-news rivals Reddit and Mixx, Digg will soon allow users to create their own sites using Digg's technology. Adelson said the new feature would be out in six months. The Windy Citizen reports:

The International Monetary Fund says the mortgage mess is "the biggest financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression," which means one thing for John Wren, CEO of ad-holding giant Omnicom: acquisition prices for companies in the advertising industry are low, and it's time to get shopping. Wren told analysts on earnings call yesteday that Omnicom will get more active with is wallet “perhaps now, as the economy worsens." Last December, Wren promised Omnicom would, like rivals Publicis Groupe and WPP Group already had, go on something of an acquisition spree in the interactive space. Didn't happen, Wren said, because Publicis and WPP "aggressively paid, in our opinion, uneconomic prices." Unfortunately for Wren, that means that the only companies left are the ones not worth overpaying for.

Google cofounder Larry Page and Digg CEO Jay Adelson were all smiles at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley retreat. Was it because they had just wrapped up a long-rumored deal for Google to buy Digg, with the price in the neighborhood of $200 million? TechCrunch says talks are on again. (Photo by Reuters)

We hear that some Yahoo executives charged with developer relations, in their eagerness to reach more programmers and have them hook their software into Yahoo services, have been talking to source-code repository GitHub about an acquisition. GitHub's intended audience, programmer Ted Dziuba explains, is "people who spray their shorts over Git because it was invented by Linus Torvalds," the inventor of Linux; it's an alternative to Subversion, a tool for managing software's source code. But this move to fold a community of Torvalds fanboys into Yahoo has been stalled by the recent unpleasantness with Carl Icahn. All acquisitions are on hold until the next board meeting, champions of a GitHub acquisition have been told. Just as well; this deal sounds like a nonstarter, which should be killed for reasons beyond testy shareholders. Yahoo has enough gits as it is.

South of the City and hard by the shores of San Francisco Bay, Genentech rarely attracts the attention of the founders of flashy Internet startups as they drive past its offices on the way to the airport. But the biotech company's longtime CEO, Art Levinson, is an integral part of the Silicon Valley scene, serving on the boards of both Google and Apple. That's why Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche's move to buy the 44 percent of Genentech it doesn't already own for a price north of $38 billion could have reverbations well beyond the world of automated pipetting systems.

Behavioral targeting is all the rage in online advertising. The technology aims to show ads to Internet users based on the sites they visit and the actions they perform, rather than targeting words they search for, as Google does, or matching advertisers' desired demographics to a site's audience, as most banner-ad purchasers do today. ValueClick has introduced its own product, in competition with AOL's Tacoda and Yahoo's BlueLithium. But ValueClick's executives may not be particularly confident in the product — if rumors are true that they're talking to startup Revenue Science about an acquisition. Revenue Science has raised more than $70 million in venture capital, and recently appointed former ValueClick executive Jeff Hirsch as its CEO.

With the Icahn business settled, Jerry Yang can move on to more important questions: For example, is he going to the Beijing Olympics? A week ago, he hadn't quite made up his mind.The dithering was utterly characteristic for the perennially indecisive Yahoo cofounder. But you'd think he could commit to a no-brainer like attending the Games. Yang is a Taiwanese native, and no fan of the Communist regime — China's jailing of a blogger, aided by Yahoo China's handover of email records, led to a humiliating session where he was called to the carpet in front of Congress. But the Beijing Olympics is a seminal event in the rise of Asia, where Yahoo has significant investments — one of the few areas where it has an edge on Google.

Legg Mason portfolio manager saved Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's job this morning, and far be it from the always-exclamatory Yang to hide his relief. Yang recorded a companywide video address, and reading a transcript filed with the SEC, we can't help but wonder if Yahoo's lawyers missed a few exclamation marks. "Hi guys," the transcript begins — but we're betting it sounded more like "Hi guys!!!!11!!!!"

Depending on how much of Yahoo's search business it ends up running, Google could soon take in up to 95 percent of all search-advertising spending in the U.S. So other than secular growth, there isn't much more room for Google to grow domestically. The second reason: Russia's economy continues to boom while the U.S. dollar continues to sink. Google owed much of its first quarter growth to foreign revenues that look even better when converted to the dollar.

PodTech, the online video startup left to reliving better days when charming shill Robert Scoble was a frontman for the company, has found a buyer, ViewPartner, and for the paltry sum of $500,000. Hopefully the company's creditors will be getting more than a few pennies back on their dollars — the company has been at the mercy of their bankers, and one commenter says that they were racking up tabs with vendors. VCs like US Ventures and Venrock probably won't be getting any of the more than $5.5 million invested in the company, however. Founder and chairman John Furrier must be relieved, as he was all smiles at recent reunion of DEMO conference attendees.(Photo by Brian Solis, bub.blicio.us)

Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock says that if Microsoft had handled itself the way InBev did, buying Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion even after A-B rejected an initial offer, Yahoo and Microsoft would probably be one company by now. "InBev was a classic, perfectly managed takeover," said Bostock.

A startup founder tells us that, over the weekend, he and his friends overheard TechCrunch writers celebrating the sale of Michael Arrington's blog to News Corp.'s Fox Interactive unit — Rupert Murdoch's home for MySpace, Rotten Tomatoes, and other wayward websites. The source tells us that the deal has been signed, but TechCrunch is waiting for its summer party at August Capital's Sand Hill Road offices to announce it. Another source who's spoken recently to Arrington says that a deal is on. But a highly placed News Corp. source says there's "no truth" to the rumor. What's behind this wave of TechCrunch sale talk?

Twitter has bought Summize, a search engine which indexes Twitter messages. It's hard to imagine Summize going anywhere else. But this deal is not about "strategic fit" or any such nonsense. No, it's about how the cleverly lazy founders of Twitter have found a way around the biggest management headache of all: Hiring employees. Twitter's substantial downtime, and a subsequent blame game about whether former architect Blaine Cook was at fault, shows how often technological problems come down to people. We actually don't think Cook made bad technical decisions — but it's now pretty clear that he was more interested in moving on than staying at Twitter and arguing with founder Ev Williams about how to fix the site. At $15 million, Summize might actually be a cheaper solution than trying to hire a conventional replacement for Cook.

Time Warner's AOL and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington have been talking for the past two months, with AOL offering Arrington $20 million to $30 million to acquire tech's most dutiful clearinghouse for startup PR. Kara Swisher says that TechCrunch wants more than $30 million; we've heard he's looking for more like $100 million. Arrington has perpetually shopped his site around; all this deal talk reminds us how, just the other weekend, we overhead him wishing he could just sell out and move to Hawaii. Which makes for a nice pipe dream, but a weak negotiating position. Another reason to be skeptical: This is not Arrington's first flirtation with Time Warner.

Reason No. 8347 why we're glad we're not Jerry Yang: We like weekends away from work. Yang never gets them anymore. On Saturday night, Yahoo released a statement letting the world know it rejected yet another Microsoft offer to acquire Yahoo's search business. Kara Swisher reported the terms of that deal today. $2.3 billion a year for outsourcing search — why didn't Microsoft offer that in the first place, without corporate raider Carl Icahn holding a gun to Yang's head? That seems easier. The bullet points, below:

Is blogging the future of the media business? If so, it's in a very small way. That's what I gather from the purchase by Guardian Media Group, a British ink-on-dead-trees concern, of PaidContent.org for $30 million or so. It's a satisfying outcome for Rafat Ali, PaidContent's founder; he now has bragging rights to a bigger blog deal than the sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million by Jason Calacanis, his former boss.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who says shareholders shouldn't give corporate raider Carl Icahn control of the company because he has no plan other than to sell to Microsoft, got a boost from an unexpected supporter: News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch told reporters at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley retreat that "in six months, (Microsoft) will walk away." The crusty mogul added: "There won't be a deal. There's bad personal feelings."