No more Hitachi monitors after July's restructuring
After suffering the shame of pleading guilty in the US Justice Dept.'s ongoing investigation of price fixing in the TFT-LCD monitor industry, Hitachi announced this afternoon, Tokyo time, that it had gone about as far as it could in the present economy, in its current structure. Beginning this July, the division responsible for engineering and building those monitors probably won't even be known as Hitachi.
Spinoffs of the Consumer Business Group and the Automotive Systems Division are now fully underway, with the current executive vice president slated to take charge of the new consumer products manufacturer. That group will still downsize -- or, as Hitachi's statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange calls it, "rightsize" -- to about 750 employees, and will outsource some of its development to Panasonic, so the new company will start out small.
SHOUTcast founding father to leave AOL
Steven "Tag" Loomis, who wrote the server software for Internet radio service SHOUTcast (with Nullsoft founders Tom Pepper and Justin Frankel) will be leaving AOL. With Loomis' departure, and the large-scale structural changes taking place at Time Warner's AOL, the future of SHOUTcast becomes uncertain.
Sources at Nullsoft suggest that SHOUTcast will simply go into maintenance mode as daily responsibilities are turned over to Shoutcast developers Faisal Sultan and Neil Radisch.
Cisco unveils Unified Computing System, with lots of big partners
Hand-in-hand with a long list of influential partners -- ranging from Microsoft and Red Hat to Accenture and EMC -- Cisco is extending upon its legacy networking heritage by jumping into server, storage, cloud and virtualization markets already occupied by major OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell.
While corporate IT spending is strapped, analysts predict future growth across these markets such as blade computing, cloud storage, and virtualization. Although Cisco is largely new to these areas, the networking giant plans to leverage relationships across its large ecosystem of technology, systems integration, and channel partners to gain customers and contracts.
The Korean iPod, now 30% more expensive!
The Korea Times reports that the price of Apple's iPods will be increased in Korea due to the diminished value of the Korean won.
The international exchange of currency has had a varied impact on the tech industry recently. In January, for example, Nintendo had to tune down its 2009 revenue projections because the Yen increased in value, thereby devaluing exports by a fraction when weighed against the softening dollar and euro. Korea's currency has slid down from about 1,100 on the dollar to the neighborhood of 1,500 on the dollar.
Intel fires a warning shot across AMD's bow on Global Foundries
When AMD spun off a huge chunk of its manufacturing operations two weeks ago, creating a new and instantly major chip making firm called Global Foundries, it was with the idea of enabling the new entity to manufacture CPUs using AMD's designs. But a good portion of the intellectual property for those designs comes to AMD by way of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies, that Intel fears AMD may be breaching.
This morning, Intel announced it has formally informed AMD of its opinion that Global Foundries is not an AMD "subsidiary," and therefore does not qualify to make use of Intel's x86 intellectual property in building chips for AMD or anyone else.
Pandora comes to set-top boxes via Vudu
Users of the Vudu high definition video on demand service now have access to Pandora Internet radio, the company said today.
At the end of 2008, set-top box company Vudu unveiled its open source Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform for Vudu hardware, which allowed the device to access Internet services like YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr. The announcement was similar to one made by budget set top box maker Roku several months before. That company's successful Netflix streamer later got Amazon's Video on Demand, and is expected to get a YouTube upgrade in the near future. The move to bolster a discrete service with rich Internet content is one that has been taken by most set-top box competitors.
Maybe it really is over: New Broadcom suit against Qualcomm tossed out
Southern California District Court Judge William Q. Hayes last Thursday dismissed without prejudice the latest claim brought by handset chip maker Broadcom against its principal rival in that market, Qualcomm. That claim was that Qualcomm, by means of its Subscriber Unit License Agreements (SULAs) passed on to reseller customers who purchase handsets made with Qualcomm chips, charges a second time for the use of patents it already charged the manufacturer for once.
It's a serious double-dipping claim, which if true, could hurt Broadcom and other competitors in the following way: A company that would double-dip in this manner wouldn't have to set its prices too high for the first dip in order to make a big profit. That could result in such a company undercutting its competitors who may only (assuming no one else double-dips as well) be profiting from the initial patent license to manufacturers.
Sony and Comcast to jointly open retail store tomorrow
Sony and Comcast announced this morning that they will open the doors to a new co-branded retail storefront tomorrow in the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Called "Sony Style Comcast Labs," the store will be similar to the 40 Sony Style stores in the United States, but will include Comcast's roster of products as well, with a special focus on emerging technologies from the service provider.
Berners-Lee warns of privacy threat on the Web's 20th birthday
It was twenty years ago today: Tim Berners-Lee taught the band to play wrote up his "Information Management: A Proposal" paper and hatched the idea for the "Mesh," which on further review he'd decide to call the World-Wide Web. What started as a simple tool for managing the dataflow at CERN has become the most disruptive technology of our lifetime. If you're reading this, raise a glass -- but don't get too comfortable.
If you've never taken a look at the document that set it all off, you should -- there's even a little diagram that reminds you of what flow charts looked like before Powerpoint. (Scroll down.) Terms like VAX and hypercard and uucp are used, which should make all the old guard around here feel sort of happy and nostalgic. Making us all feel rather less happy and nostalgic is Sir Tim's address to Parliament this week, in which he warned that the looming loss of privacy thanks to Internet tech would mean more than just privacy lost: "We must not snoop on the internet... What is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium."
ACTA shielded from sunlight as court rejects FOIA claim
A request filed by various public-interest groups asking that details of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act be revealed to the public has been denied by an official of the Office of the US Trade Representative. Knowledge Ecology International made seven document requests, all of which were denied "in the interest of national security."
Nice transparency, one might snark, though Ars Technica points out that the acting US Trade Representative (Peter Allgeier) is an appointee of the previous administration. ACTA, which has been under negotiation since that administration, has been made available to an assortment of lobbyists and other corporate entities. Other organizations besides KEI calling for more transparency for ACTA negotiations include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the European Parliament. (Cloud-over-sun image by Simon Eugster, via Wikimedia Commons.)
It's a more solid-state Sun, embedding flash memory in servers
This week, Sun announced solid-state disk technology as an option for its x64 and chip multi-threaded (CMT) rack and blade servers, along with free trial and pricing discount offers. In addition, it rolled out the Sun Flash Analyzer, a new software tool for helping customers leverage SSD-based servers to raise application performance.
The company's overall flash effort is particularly ambitious and far reaching, even though Sun isn't the first vendor to offer SSD flash as a server option, according to some analysts. IBM, for example, beat Sun out the door with SSD-enabled servers way back in 2007, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, in an interview with Betanews.
It has come to this: A claim that patent reform threatens the environment
Much of America's ability to once again play a contributing factor in the restoration of balance in Earth's natural environment depends on the continuing creation of new technologies, both for replacing other technologies that damage our planet and for simply curing the problem at hand. Some of these technologies are being created at the grass roots level, by entrepreneurs and experimenters, often with the intention of licensing or selling that technology once it receives its US patent -- its assurance of originality and viability.
But the value of that patent in the modern market is determined by its defensibility -- literally, how much it can rake in, in infringement cases. Without that market value, much of the incentive for trying to build new technologies in the first place, may be lost.
Vivek Kundra's maiden-voyage speech: content 8, timing 2
The FBI's been pretty emphatic so far that Vivek Kundra's not the target of the investigation that resulted in yesterday's raids on his old offices in DC, though a person can't blame the White House for putting the guy on administrative leave anyway until the details are clear. (The guy the FBI nabbed is, after all, acting CSO for the district.) In all the hubbub, however, the press has mainly passed over Kundra's speech on Thursday to FOSE, in which he laid out his ideas for shaping up the tech aspects of the ship of state. The audacity of the free market, anyone?
Kundra's speech (transcribed in its entirety at Government Computer News) made the case for government-led innovation, when it's done right -- DARPA and the NSF with the early Internet, for instance, and the National Institutes of Health with the Human Genome Project -- while emphasizing the need to provide public access to the data, bring the public into policy discussions, and lower the cost of government.
Intel's Atom and the return of the thin client
Decades ago, one of the most viable arguments for major enterprises holding onto their "big iron" -- their aging mainframes -- was that they could still provide processing power for thin clients, the smaller and less expensive terminals that didn't need the speed to crunch numbers. Today, in the era of virtualization, the concept of shifting processing power back to the data center has been reborn, especially with the deployment of lighter-weight, single-core processors that only provide the power needed to render results.
With that, a thin-client manufacturer named Devon IT this week announced it's shipping a little PC called the TC5 that frankly isn't much smarter than many smartphones these days...but it doesn't need to be. It's shipping with Intel's single-core Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, which isn't much; it uses Intel's GMA 950 embedded graphics, which also isn't much; and it has Windows XP or Linux on board rather than Windows Vista, and you know the drill there now.
So what's its purpose? To serve as a wired or wireless network receiver and to pump data to the screen as fast as possible...and besides gathering user input, that's about it. Its design enables it to run one program -- maybe the only one it ever has to run: a desktop virtualization host.
Analysts predict smartphones will thrive, even in this market
Last week, market research company NPD released findings that showed the touchscreen smartphone market has been thriving. Today, Gartner market research has released its figures for 2008, confirming the shift toward a smartphone-dominated market.
The overall mobile phone market is expected to shrink by about 10 percent in 2009, while smartphones will comprise an ever larger segment of that contracting market. Informa Telecoms and Media last week predicted a 35.3% growth in smartphone sales this year, and Gartner this week predicted a growth of 28%.
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