Hitachi changes the Fabrik of its consumer HDD strategy
The fastest growing sector of the storage industry these days is personal external storage, where consumer demand is being triggered by the growing availability of multimedia and the increasing need to procrastinate before deciding how to keep track of it all. It's what's helping keep Western Digital and Seagate afloat in a time when business orders for equipment have plummeted; and it's making competitors with lesser market share like Hitachi GST have to play catch-up very quickly.
This morning, Hitachi announced its solution to that little problem: It's acquiring Fabrik, a (re-) manufacturer of fashionable external hard drives and backup systems. The move will probably immediately ensure that Fabrik's good-looking, environmentally-friendly models use Hitachi GST internals; but it also means that a key former Maxtor veteran -- a refugee following its acquisition by Seagate -- will join Hitachi's executive team, in a thus-far unnamed capacity: Mike Cordano, Fabrik's founder and CEO, will be in charge of helping Hitachi assemble a more consumer-oriented brand for storage, frankly for the first time. Hitachi has suffered in this department in the past, trying in previous years to be the first to unveil high-capacity storage for the system builders market, but failing to match Seagate's and WD's performance numbers.
Ballmer: Could netbooks rescue Microsoft after all?
Dow Jones is reporting this afternoon that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made comments to financial analysts in New York this morning, reiterating his company's warning of continued weakness in the negative economy, coupled with uncertainty as to the degree or extent of the ill effects.
According to the Associated Press, Ballmer went on to say that his company's strategy out of this dark period will resemble that of one of America's former technology giants, RCA, when it resorted to investing heavily in research that enabled the US to become the leader in television production after the end of World War II. As an example, Ballmer -- according to the AP -- appeared to change course on a key technology, alluding to the possibility that Windows 7 could eventually appear on netbooks, and even referring to "netbooks" by name -- something Microsoft spokespersons had earlier been cautioned not to do.
Irish ISP to block P2P and music sharing sites
Eircom will be blocking the Pirate Bay and sites of that nature under threat of legal action from the Irish Recorded Music Association.
In late January, Irish ISP Eircom adopted the now famous "graduated response" to illegal file sharing pioneered by the French, where suspected file sharers are given three strikes and then cut off from the Internet entirely. Now, Ireland's Sunday Business Post reports that Eircom is working with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) to block all music swapping sites from general user access. The ISP's move was reportedly made under threat of legal action from IRMA.
One way to end a lawsuit: Visto gets Good
What started out as a move by Motorola to become a serious contender in the mobile e-mail services space has ended up playing into the hands of a company with a familiar name among certain attorneys.
Visto -- which held several patents in mobile e-mail, whose litigation against Research in Motion is still pending, and which settled its suit against Microsoft last year -- has agreed to acquire Good Technology from Motorola, which only purchased it in 2006.
Chernin's exit from FIM casts doubt on monetizing social search
This morning's announcement of the June exit of Peter Chernin from the Chief Operating Officer's post of News Corp. -- a post that's more influential than most COO positions in the world -- is probably more than what financial journalists are speculating this morning: a way for CEO Rupert Murdoch to pave the way for a line of succession for his immediate family. Chernin's position put him in effective operational control of Fox Interactive Media, with the mandate to work out some kind of workable business model for the operation.
Square one for Chernin came in August 2006, brokering a deal with Google that led to Google paying FIM's MySpace $900 million to be its search provider. But every other component of the business model -- some way to monetize the indisputably high-traffic business of social networking -- never came together. During its last earnings call, Google said it was having trouble monetizing the business of search with social networking, and Google's biggest deal to date in that department was with MySpace. In response, Chernin attempted to reassure analysts last Feburary 4 (our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript) that FIM and Google were still trying to work out a way to make that business profitable.
Confirmed (via Twitter): HTC's Touch HD coming to America
Using just a few tweets on Twitter, HTC has confirmed that its Touch Pro2 is coming to North America.
The news wasn't any great surprise, really, because the press release for the Touch Pro2 did mention something about "global availability." Still, in a series of three tweets, HTC made future availability of the Windows Mobile-based phone on the North American continent definite, although without being specific about when, which carrier, or even which country.
Gmail service outage points to a hole in the cloud
A service outage that impacted users of Google services including Gmail for approximately 75 minutes early this morning, is calling attention to a potential kink in the cloud: While an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google's new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company's central source of service authentication.
The outage came at the worst possible time for users in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where users were just getting settled to work. Google Apps can work offline, though the degree of offline functionality they offer has only been increasing in small steps. Calendar functionality through Google Gears, for instance, was only introduced earlier this month, although the company announced its trend toward the "offline cloud" in April 2007.
Apple debuts a new way to pre-pay in iTunes
Apple's iTunes today opened the first iTunes Pass purchases, which lets users pay a fee up front to receive every piece of content an artist releases for a certain period of time.
While this has not officially been announced by Apple yet, a diligent Mac Forums reader located details on it in the Spanish iTunes store terms of service:
Vudu makes HD titles downloadable
Highddefinition video-on-demand service Vudu has been making an honest play at becoming the set top box that brings streaming video to the home theater enthusiast market. Today, the company has begun to offer HD movies as downloads in addition to streams.
Vudu's library of high-definiton titles is around 1,400 and downloads will cost between $13.99 and $23.99. Vudu set top boxes are all equipped with HDDs, which could conceivably fill up quickly when downloading HD movies. For example, the company's top-of-the-line STB, the XL, can hold approximately 500 standard definition titles on its terabyte drive. Vudu however, reinforces the user's account with a free cloud storage service called Vudu Vault. Archival in the Vudu Vault is currently limited to select movies, but all television content can be stored there.
OneSwarm network improves file-sharing control, anonymity
University of Washington researchers this week have released a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that actually does, or can, limit one's sharing to one's actual peers. The client, called OneSwarm, uses a "friend-to-friend" (F2F) model that gives users extremely granular, extremely hard-to-expose sharing capabilities.
The OneSwarm technical paper, (PDF available here) submitted by graduate students Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek and faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson, is quite explicit in its concerns about the dangers of indiscriminate sharing. "Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to scrutiny by third parties," the paper's conclusion states.
Citibank nearly duped by Nigerian scam
Minyanville.com's headline probably puts it most bluntly: Citibank officially dumber than your spam filter. A Nigerian man, Paul Gabriel Amos, has been indicted in New York for allegedly attempting a fraud that would have pulled over $27 million from Citibank's coffers into two dozen receiving accounts around the world.
Citibank, which received $45 billion in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds from the US government last year, did not perceive irregularities with the attempted withdrawal from the account of the National Bank of Ethiopia (a real bank). Instead, the scam was foiled only when some of the receiving banks warned Citibank that they were unable to process the transactions.
Check Point checks in with 64-bit ZoneAlarm updates
The ZoneAlarm family of security software expanded on Monday as Check Point debuted three 64-bit-compatible versions of their flagship software. The company also launched an all-in-one version of ZoneAlarm combining the line's firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-spyware tech with online backup capabilities.
ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, the new suite, builds in a few features that should add a layer or two of extra security, particularly on machines piloted by the unwary and click-happy. ForceField, a virtualized browser security application introduced last year, keeps an eye on sites visited and flags things that seem dicey -- the "banking site" that isn't what it appears to be, for instance. The package also includes protective features such as (optional) private-key encryption capabilities and system-maintenance and online backup tools for tending one's more critical data.
AT&T to spend $1B on global network, business services this year
With a planned expenditure of $1 billion this year, AT&T intends to keep building out its global network -- as well as that of IBM -- while also delivering new services and network-based applications to businesses of all sizes.
Through an expanded agreement with IBM inked in 2007, AT&T and IBM are now teaming up on providing networking and computer-based services and applications to multinational corporations on a platform that increasingly integrates the global networks of both vendors. However, AT&T's $1 billion investment will also support many new services for customers of its own long-time global business network.
Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades: Difficult, but not impossible
It shouldn't surprise many testers that Microsoft has shrewdly closed the upgrade channel for users who will -- probably sooner this year than later -- be making the switch to Windows 7. Many who had chosen to steer clear of Windows Vista and hang on to Windows XP -- by all rights, a decent operating system, at least for Service Pack 3 users -- are pondering the nightmare scenario of having to upgrade to and validate (which usually means, pay for) both Vista and Windows 7, if it so happens that Windows 7 proves to be desirable or simply necessary.
This led us to thinking: Windows Vista can run without being purchased and activated, albeit for a limited time (usually 30 days). During that time, it behaves as though it were a fully operational trial edition (except for the Ultimate SKU, where several of the "Extras" aren't available except after validating). But it doesn't take a month to install an operating system; so what if a valid XP user could simply borrow the promotional edition of Vista, if you will, to make the skip over to Windows 7?
Find out where TV's 'white spaces' are, online
A new Web site at ShowMyWhiteSpace.com is aimed at giving consumers, businesses, and government agencies comprehensive information and interactive tools for using the wireless "white space" TV channels opened up to the public by the FCC last fall.
Launched today, the Web site already includes a tool for finding these open TV channels anywhere in the US. In a visit to the site, Betanews noted that you can search for the white spaces by either street address or x-y coordinates.
BetaNews, your source for breaking tech news, reviews, and in-depth reporting since 1998.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.