potential buyers

Yahoo Inc's long-time advisers Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Allen & Co are preparing to give potential buyers financial information, in a sign the troubled Internet giant is ready to put itself on the block, sources close to the situation said.

Over the last few weeks, potential buyers including large technology and media companies, private equity and international companies have proposed many different options regarding Yahoo's various businesses, one of the sources said.
"Almost everyone on the street has some angle they are trying to play," the source said.
Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, told an audience at Stanford University that he would be "very interested" in buying the entire Yahoo.
The executive, who was speaking at the China 2.0 conference, said he had not visited Yahoo to discuss a deal since he arrived in the United States 15 days ago.
The struggling company is expected to take months to decide its future. Yahoo announced it had retained Allen & Co to help it conduct a long-term "strategic review."
Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is among the parties that have been in touch with Allen & Co, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A Silver Lake spokesman declined to comment.
In a memo to employees last month, Yahoo executives said its advisers were "fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options."
Goldman and Yahoo declined to comment. Allen & Co was not immediately available for comment.

Google, Visa team

Google Inc has enlisted Visa Inc in its effort to push mobile payments, striking an agreement to allow Visa account-holders to pay for store purchases with their smartphones.

Visa comes onboard a "Google Wallet" project already supported by Citigroup, MasterCard, Sprint Nextel Corp and First Data. In May, the group announced a trial of a system that lets shoppers store money on phones and pay at checkout.
Rival Isis, a venture between Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA, has already signed partnerships with all the major card networks, including MasterCard and Visa.
But while Sprint announced the launch of the Google Wallet service on Monday, Isis has said its rival service will not launch until early next year.
Google's system competes with plans by other top U.S. banks and mobile phone companies and employs near-field communication (NFC) technology, used widely in Asia.
On Monday, Google and Visa said the Internet search leader had received a worldwide license to Visa's "paywave" -- similar to Mastercard's PayPass -- enabling its installation on Android smartphones. Customers link their credit or debit bank accounts to Android phones with the Google Wallet app installed.
They can then tap their phones -- which come with an NFC chip -- at specially installed terminals at checkout to effect a purchase.
"This agreement extends Google Wallet to Visa account holders worldwide," said Stephanie Tilenius, Google's vice president of Commerce and Payments.
"This is a crucial step towards realizing our shared vision for the future of mobile commerce."
For U.S. banks, mobile payments are a way to wean their customers off the use of cash and generate more revenue. Merchants pay banks a fee every time a shopper buys something with a credit or debit card and Google said it would not take a cut of those fees from the new pay-by-phone system.

Pessimism over Europe

Asian stocks floundered Tuesday as investors digested a credit downgrade slapped on Italy and awaited the outcome of a two-day Federal Reserve meeting that many hope will announce measures to boost U.S. growth.

Oil prices hovered below $86 a barrel while the dollar strengthened against the euro but slipped against the yen.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 1.4 percent to 8,739.74 as export shares sagged amid a persistently strong yen that weighs on company profits.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 dropped 1 percent to 4,042.90. Benchmarks in Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines also fell.
But Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.1 percent to 18,938.48 and South Korea's Kospi was 0.1 percent higher at 1,823.63. Indexes in mainland China, India, Singapore and Thailand also gained.
Investors are reluctant to engage in big moves as talks dragged on between international lending officials and Greece, which is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
"Today you don't have the panic selling you had yesterday, but still there is no buying. So we are in for a long bear market. I don't think the market is ready to rebound yet," said Francis Lun, managing director of Lyncean Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, Standard & Poor's downgrade of Italy's credit rating Monday added to "the pain and fear across eurozone markets," Credit Agricole CIB said in a research note. Italy's rating was cut by one notch due to weakening economic growth prospects and higher-than-expected levels of government debt, S&P said.
"Risk aversion remains highly elevated, with little prospect of a drop any time soon as Italy's downgrade adds to Europe's woes," Credit Agricole said.
In Tokyo trade, Honda Motor Corp. dropped 2.3 percent and electronics giant Sony Corp. fell 4.2 percent. Fujitsu Ltd., which provides technology services for mobile devices and servers, tumbled 4.2 percent.
Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi told reporters Tuesday that the recent sharp rise of the yen has slowed the pace of the country's economic recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami. Tokyo has not ruled out intervening in the currency market to stem the yen's rise against the U.S. dollar and other major currencies.
Investors are looking to the U.S. Federal Reserve in search of positive news. Many economists expect the Fed, which starts a two-day policy meeting later Tuesday, to announce something to jolt the sputtering U.S. economy.
Last month, the Fed took the step of endorsing a plan to keep short-term interest rates near zero through mid-2013.
Some economists expect the Fed to eventually try for the third time to stimulate growth through a program to buy Treasurys to lower long-term interest rates. That's a step known as "quantitative easing."
But hopes of Fed action did not mollify intensifying worries over Greece. Investors fear the nearly bankrupt country won't be able to convince lenders that it can pay its debts — and that it won't get the money it needs to avoid a default.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 0.9 percent at 11,401.01 on Monday. The drop ended five days of gains for stocks and marked the return of the back-and-forth trading that has accompanied the uncertainty about Europe's debt crisis.
The Nasdaq composite fell 0.4 percent to 2,612.83. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 1 percent to 1,204.09.
Benchmark oil for October delivery was down 3 cents at $85.67 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Crude dropped $2.26 to settle at $85.70 on Monday.
In London, Brent crude for November delivery was up 18 cents at $109.32 on the ICE Futures exchange.
In currencies, the dollar rose slightly to 76.53 yen from 76.50 yen in late trading Monday in New York. The euro fell to $1.3616 from $1.3671.

Computers To Pinpoint Wild

Computer simulations of the weather workings of the entire planet will be able to make forecasts to within a few kilometers accuracy, helping predict the effects of deadly weather systems.
But the world may have to wait 20 to 40 years' for such accurate information on weather events like El Nino as computer capacity grows, a senior British scientist said Thursday.
"If we step forward 20 to 40 years into the future of climate science, it is conceivable we can have climate models down to a scale of a few kilometers' resolution," Alan Thorpe, director general of the UK-based European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), told reporters.
"That would add a huge amount of information to this variability question."
A climate model is a computer-based version of the Earth's climate system, based on physics and complex equations. Such models can be used for weather forecasting, understanding the climate and projecting climate change.
A model with a very fine resolution could produce more accurate results but this depends on computer capacity.
Thorpe said some climate models are now nearing a resolution of 100 km, compared to around 300 km 10 to 15 years ago.
"We are running global weather picture models at a 16 km resolution already so we have the science and the models to reduce the problem of high resolution but we need the computer power to do it," Thorpe said.
It would cost up to 200 million pounds to buy a top-end super computer, he added, which is around 7 percent of the UK's yearly science budget of 3 billion pounds.
"The impact of climate change needs to be seen as sufficiently important to society to devote this level of resource to it," Thorpe said.
Some experts warn that some of the most devastating impacts of climate change could be felt before and during the period 2030 to 2050.
Some climate models have been criticized for not being accurate enough or not predicting extreme events far enough into the future.

Thorpe said ECMWF scientists are doing a lot of research into so-called tipping points, when there is a rapid change in the climate which is irreversible or which would take a long time to reverse.
"Inevitably, those are the aspects of the system we have to worry about most because they are not linear behavior. How many of those there are is still an open question," he added.
If we devoted the whole of the science budget to these questions we could make more rapid progress but we are doing a lot of research on these areas."
Some tipping points are seen happening in the coming decades, such as the loss of summer Arctic sea ice or the loss of the Amazon rainforest.