Microsoft Inc is in talks with Yahoo Inc to buy the U.S. internet company’s online search business for $20 billion, according to a report in Britain’s Sunday Times.

The proposal under discussion involves a complex transaction that would see the U.S. software giant support a new management team to take control of Yahoo, but it has no intention of refreshing its bid, said the newspaper.

SanDisk is soon to announce new technology needed for its solid state drives to take on hard disk drive storage.

SSDs are appearing in netbooks and notebooks and in enterprise storage arrays where they provide accelerated I/O, either as a separate tier of flash storage or as a flash cache accelerating the array controller’s operations. But the appeal of flash SSD technology is limited because today’s NAND chips don’t have enough capacity, making them expensive. Writes take too long, being slower than reads, particularly random writes, and the write cycle endurance is too short with the flash wearing out after a set number of write cycles.

SanDisk thinks it can solve all three problems. By adding bits to a NAND cell it can increase capacity with 2-bit multi-level cell (2x MLC) technology here and higher-capacity 3- and 4-bit MLC coming. It has also come up with its Extreme Flash File System (ExtremeFFS) to accelerate random write speed by up to 100 times and so be much closer to sequential write speed.

But it is not enough. SanDisk’s Senior Director of Marketing, Don Barnetson, revealed this at a Tokyo press conference on 27th November, saying: “We need one more step of improvement besides ExtremeFFS.” He didn’t say what that was but he did say: “Please wait a little while for our announcement … We are preparing a technology to solve these issues.”

Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost’s iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost’s 46,000-plus videos for free.

Say what you will about Joost’s library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary–after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn’t a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.

I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.

Sears.com was inaccessible to U.S. shoppers for two hours on Friday in what was the most notable Web hiccup of the holiday gift-buying season’s official start.

Other sites, including Amazon.com Inc., experienced minor slowdowns, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based research group.

Starting a week and a half ago, Keynote began tracking the performance of about 30 big online retailers, logging the time it took to find a product and start checking out.

Keynote’s list includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy’s Inc., Circuit City and others; the system takes measurements every 15 minutes from computers in 10 major U.S. cities.

Sears Holdings Corp.’s site started to crawl at around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, when loading a page on the site topped one minute. From about 10:30 to 12:30, Sears posted a message asking shoppers to try again in a few minutes.

White said Sears was among the retailers that stumbled last year on Black Friday.

But while Sears’ problems returned this year, others including Neiman Marcus seem to have resolved past issues.

Amazon and Target Inc., which uses Amazon’s e-commerce technology, were slower Friday than in recent days, but not unbearably so, White said. At the slowest point, a transaction that took 25 seconds last week required about 40 seconds Friday morning.