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Looks like Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s ham-handed handling of the Microsoft offer is coming back to bite him. At a Friday business lunch in Australia, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, put on the airs of a spurned lover and told luncheon attendees that he wasn’t buying Yahoo, although he might consider a search engine partnership. The Associated Press quotes Ballmer as saying:

“We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on,” Ballmer said. “We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share.”

Well it looks like Ballmer is reading his advice columns and standing up for his self-esteem. Either that or his lawyers have had a quick chat with him after his comments a few weeks ago, when he said a Yahoo deal still made sense economically.

Yahoo’s shares, which ended Thursday’s session at $13.96 a share, look like a bargain, and on Wednesday, Yang even said he’d do a deal with Microsoft after a search partnership with Google fell through. The question now becomes whether Yahoo would lower itself to a search partnership with Microsoft or if it will try to hold out for marriage. If the two companies let hurt feelings stand in the way of a partnership or a deal, it’s Google that wins.

Five years ago, the promise of a new networking technology known as Ultra-wideband was a living room without wires, where DVD players, set-top boxes and video accessories could connect with TVs over the air. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a wireless personal area networking technology that can transmit large amounts of data for short distances using very little power. Over time, its promise expanded from the living room to the home office, as backers used Ultra-wideband as the basis for Wireless USB and the WiMedia standard.

So far, this dream hasn’t materialized, and the technology has failed to find a mass market. Today, we still have wires in both the office and living room, and a host of competing standards have whittled away UWB’s opportunity. In the last week, we’ve seen players exit the UWB business, and Intel announced that it has halted research on the technology. For venture firms who have invested nearly $400 million in the space, the fate of Ultra-wideband offers a cautionary tale about the perils of betting on semiconductor standards.

On Oct. 31, five-year-old UWB chipmaker WiQuest shut its doors when it was unable to raise more money or find a buyer for its technology. That led to heralds of doom for Ultra-wideband, with analysts and media blaming long-delayed product launches, expensive chips and a hostile regulatory environment. This week, Intel said it had discontinued its UWB efforts, saying the market wasn’t worth its R&D efforts. If the technology somehow manages to revive, Intel says it could buy up one of the six remaining startups in the space.

The plan makes sense for Intel because UWB, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and WiMAX, is a standardized technology. That means any UWB chipmaker will have the basic set of characteristics Intel needs to play in the market. Standards are a double-edged sword for venture investors. On one hand they are good for consumers and electronics makers because they enable multiple devices from different vendors to work together. Any Wi-Fi router should talk to any Wi-Fi chip in a computer, phone or camera. This helps drive consumer adoption and can lead to the creation of a huge market. Venture capital firms love this, because if a standard takes off it can build a company like Broadcom or Atheros that can generate rapid returns in a relatively short amount of time.

The other edge of that sword is that chipmakers who adhere to the standard can do little to differentiate their chips, which makes it easy to switch vendors and effectively commoditizes the product. This happened for the Wi-Fi standard back in 2000-2002, when venture firms put more than $2 billion into more than 40 Wi-Fi companies, only to see a few rise to the top. There is also the risk, inherent in all technologies, that the market won’t adopt it. This seems to be what’s happening for UWB.

Instead of seeing the technology completely die out, Eric Broockman, CEO of UWB chipmaker Alereon, argues that Intel’s retreat from the technology and WiQuest’s failure mean a shakeup similar to that experienced by the Wi-Fi market is happening with UWB. “Typically in this type of semiconductor investing there is a win-place-show mentality,” Broockman says. “One wins big, one gets acquired for a good price, one gets acquired for a not-so-good price, and everyone else goes away. That process in UWB is being accelerated by the current economic downturn.”

There were at least seven UWB chipset companies formed in the 2003 time frame. Now, many appear close to failure. WiQuest, which raised about $54 million, was one. Two others, Artimi and Staccato Communications, are both rumored to be running out of cash. Artimi has raised $31.5 million and couldn’t be reached for comment for this story. Intel Capital invested in Staccato when it was pushing UWB. That could position Staccato to end up being the company in the show category, because Intel might buy it for its intellectual property at a cheap price down the road. 

Fighting for the win and place spots are Alereon, which has raised more than $70 million with a small amount coming earlier this year from SKTelecom; TZero, which raised $18 million in March led by CID Group; and Wisair, which raised $24 million in February led by Susquehanna Growth Equity. Radiospire is another player in the UWB market, but it appears to be shifting gears — or at least hedging its bets — by also making chips for transferring wireless HD video using a different standard.

Competeing standards are one of the reasons UWB is having such a hard time finding a toehold. For desktop personal area networking, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are becoming more prominent — and have the benefit of cheaper chips. In video, UWB has conceded to Wi-Fi and specialized standards such as Wireless HD and WHDI. Those left on the playing field are quick to point out that UWB still has legs — and it might, if it finds the type of killer application that can drive adoption rates and increase chip sales to the point where they cost less to embed. But the shakeup happening here proves that chip investment isn’t for the faint of heart.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

The FCC decision on Tuesday that opened up a huge chunk of spectrum for broadband services is a decided victory for its proponents, but there are still many details left to figure out, including what kind of radios will be used to “tune” into the Internet. Today, at an event, Larry Page of Google said any such chips used in these devices should cost less than $5.

One way to do that is to put multiple radios on the chip, tuned to the variety of available spectrum, and let them use the existing WiMAX or Wi-Fi protocols, rather than coming up with something new. Wi-Fi chips are cheap, and WiMAX prices should come down as more networks are deployed. Jeff Thompson, CEO of Towerstream, a provider of wireless broadband to business using WiMAX, says using an existing and open network protocol makes sense.

He doesn’t know exactly what will happen, but Thompson says many players such as Intel and Fujitsu are combining Wi-Fi and WiMAX radios in a single package, and both protocols have something to offer in the white spaces spectrum. Wi-Fi could work for local area networking while WiMAX would allow the signal to travel over a longer range. The end result would be a mobile broadband device that could work as fixed device, as well as on the go. Because the spectrum is unlicensed, a network operator could offer the broadband service at cheaper rates than current data plans from wireless carriers.