Cisco Straddles The Fence On Becoming A Service Provider


Cisco Systems says it will incorporate Jabber instant messaging into its WebEx Connect meeting software this summer as it beefs up its online applications.

But the company carefully vowed at the same time not to compete with its service provider customers and become a service provider itself – sort of.

On a conference call Monday Cisco said it plans to have a new version of its WebEx Connect online meeting place software available at the end of the summer. The new version will draw in technology from Jabber, which it agreed to buy in 2008.

But even as it delivers more online meeting and collaboration services, Cisco shied away delivering the services from massive Cisco-branded data centers, a la Google.

That would require the company to invest billion of dollars in data centers and compete with its service provider customers, says Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer.

“We don’t necessarily want to be a service provider,” she said on a conference call.

And yet, Cisco straddled the fence. It also vowed to deliver more applications from a “Cisco cloud.” For example, the company has large amounts of online storage and as it develops products for small businesses, storage and back-up services from a Cisco cloud are possible, says Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline.

Complex Risk Management Software May Have Softened The Recession

Could the great recession of 2008 have been prevented by better risk management software? Would these programs have exposed the deepening dangers of complex derivatives, such as credit default swaps?

The answer is perhaps. Most likely they would have helped mitigate the fall.

“I think (the turn down) could have been different,” says Sam Savage, a consulting professor at Stanford University and the brainchild of new probability-management program. “The more transparent we make probability, the harder it is to blow smoke.”

Savage hopes venture capitalist and corporate executives will use his new program to better assess the risks inherent in new startups and other business ventures.

Already he has interested software powerhouses Oracle and SAS in the software’s concepts and is working with both companies on products.

Savage claims many business decisions are made with inadequate data – often with market averages used to calculate expected product demand and pricing. Instead, a broad range of variables would provide a better tool for examining uncertainty.

For example, an examination of U.S. housing prices over several decades would show a steady upward trend. But looking at them for the past year or two paints a different picture. Both pieces of data should be incorporated in a probability assessment of business risk.

“The flaw of (using) averages arises when people plug single numbers into spreadsheets,” says Savage, who discusses his work in a new book entitled The Flaw of Averages. “We found a way to store thousands of numbers in the single cell of a spreadsheet.”

This enables the program to examine business uncertainty by calculating a range of possible outcomes – and gives business leaders the chance to measure their decisions against a complex web of variables.

For example, Shell is already using the probability techniques to better assess the profitability of new oil drilling in light of a broad range of possibilities, such increased political unrest in Africa and a spike in oil prices.

Savage says he hopes to release a first version of his software in a couple months. The cost will be $200.

It would be interesting to see what it says about the probability of his success.

Employment Picture Still Dull In High Tech

National employment demand continued to be soft in June though the picture is more encouraging than several months ago.

Since March, online job postings have been up 35,000 jobs with 24 states posting gains and 26 posting declines. The nation experienced a 1.2 million decline in the previous five months.

In particular, June brought a modest uptick in worker demand in Florida and Georgia. But high-tech center California as well as Massachusetts and New York saw continued falling demand from companies, according to the Conference Board.

Almost half of June’s 67,700 decline in online job postings came in computer and mathematical sciences, and in sales and related position, the Conference Board said Monday.

However, computer and mathematical sciences still had more vacancies than unemployed people. That should offer some note of encouragement even with the slow summer business period ahead.

Public Computing Clouds Could Be More Secure Than Private Ones

At the top of the list of corporate concerns about cloud computing is security.

But before long companies debating whether to migrate their applications into the hosted cloud may find public networks are safer than their own.

Most public clouds are run in a more secure manner than the networks enterprises maintain on their own, says Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos.

Not all private companies maintain the same discipline, he said Thursday at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco.

Cloud computing is among the most talked about trends in modern computing – especially today when its promise of lower costs turns heads in corporate suites. Many IT managers are said to be looking closely at moving applications into hosted clouds as they seek to free up technology budgets for new projects and as they hope to add flexibility to their computing infrastructures.

But the most significant drawback is security. Companies rightly fear that their important customer data could be compromised or stolen if it hosted in a public network.

During a panel discussion at the conference, Papadopoulos turned that thinking on its ear. The incentive for an employee at a public data center to rifle a company’s data is arguably less than an employee at the company itself, who knows its value, he said.

It could end up that public centers are the more compliant places to be, he said.

Papadoploulos’ thinking could be right. But it will take time for enterprise customers to swallow this counter-intuitive pill.

Gartner Sees An Uptick In Fourth Quarter Computer Sales


The global downturn has put the hurt on personal computer sales, with the market expected to be down 6 percent this year.

But the tide is turning. Fourth-quarter sales should rise after nine months of declines, and 2010 should see a surprising rebound.

This more optimistic outlook comes from Gartner and represents a revision of the research firm’s May forecast. Then, the firm expected a 6.6 percent drop in the market this year

Gartner says it anticipates the second and third quarters to see 10 percent declines followed by an increase in the fourth quarter. Shipments are projected to grow 10.3 percent in 2010.

While it is too early to say the worst of the market decline is over, the forecast is another sign that the economy has reached the bottom of the turn down.

The market appears to be strengthening, Gartner says in a press release. Part of the reason is the strength of netbooks, or small notebooks. Netbook shipments should reach 21 million units this year and 30 million next year. Mobile PCs, in total, will climb 4 percent this year while desktops fall almost 16 percent.

One observation from Gartner may prove wrong: “the impact of Windows 7’s release in October on the PC market is likely to be very modest.” Unless Microsoft mounts a big marketing campaign, consumers will wait to adopt it with new PC purchases, the firm says.

I don’t dispute the impact may be modest. But on the other hand, don’t dismiss the possibility of a big marketing splash from the Redmond marketing machine.

Microsoft Still Appears Hesitant On Cloud Computing


Microsoft has put significant development efforts behind Azure, its operating system for cloud computing.

And the company acknowledges that most corporate customers are looking closely at this latest trend sweeping the world of data-center computing.

But the software giant appears hesitant to embrace the transformation and its potential for upending the buy-and-install software business that has fueled its fortunes for more than a decade.

On-premise systems will be here for a long time,” Distinguished Engineer Yousef Khalidi argued on Thursday.

Speaking at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, Khalidi said that he wanted to “anchor” the industry’s discussion of cloud.

In general, software applications have to become more cloud-like, he said. But cloud is in its early stages.

“We will see co-existence,” he said. “Not everything will move to the cloud. At least not right away.”

He also suggested options for customers might be limited. Cloud could shakeup the hosting industry, with only a small number of big vendors surviving to operate big public clouds because of the capital cost, he said.

Smaller vendors will offer differentiated services around them.

Facebook Slams Latest Chips From Intel And AMD

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are good at rolling out new generations of computer chips each billed to outdo the performance and efficiency of the last.

But the gains of the latest round of multi-core chips may more marketing pitch than actual improvement.

“The performance gains they are touting in the press we’re not seeing,” Facebook Vice President Jonathan Heiliger said Thursday.

Heiliger, who runs Facebook’s giant data center with its massive computer farm of servers, said the company has been surprised by its observations.

The performance gains have been less than anticipated, he said at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco.

He went on to say server vendors need to design servers with greater power efficiency from wall plug to central processor.

“I’m not sure why the hardware vendors have failed us,” he said.

The one company that has done a tremendous job creating energy-efficient servers is Google, he said.

Cloud Computing Is More Than Automating Business Processes

That cloud computing is a mechanism for fostering communications and collaboration is not a new message from Hewlett-Packard.

But it is seemingly more relevant as the industry toils to make sense of this latest high-tech trend.

Cloud computing is clearly capturing the attention of data-center managers at corporations large and small. Most still wonder, however, when to migrate their applications and how the cloud differs from the traditional hosting options they have long considered

Company CTO Russ Daniels argues that viewing cloud computing simply as a mechanism for business process outsourcing is a mistake.

The difference, he said Thursday at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, is its ability to capture a huge amount of data at a low cost. This enables cloud to be “more about communicating and collaborating than automating business processes,” he said.

It isn’t a brand new marketing pitch from H-P. The company has long linked its cloud effort with the slogan: “everything as a service.”

But the emphasis is an interesting turn of the screw as the industry tries to hone its understand of the benefits and challenges of this new paradigm. If the emphasis can be shifted to cost and collaboration, the possibilities might be better understood.

Oracle Taking A Lesson From Apple

Apple has built a reputation for functional, high-quality products by closely integrating hardware and software.

Its Macintosh computers run the Mac OS X operating system. Its iPods and iPhones run their own custom software and integrate with the iTunes music, video and apps stores.

Oracle appears to be building its own strategy around hardware and software integration, and on Tuesday CEO Larry Ellison said the first attempt at integration is proving a success.

“Exadata is actually our first experiment,” he explained on an evening conference call with analysts. “We expect sales to accelerate.”

Already, quarterly sales of the database machine for data warehouses place it among Oracle’s top product introductions, he added.

The implications for the company are profound with its pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Oracle has been rumored to be shopping around Sun’s hardware business, suggesting it is mostly interested in the computer maker’s software properties, such as Java, MySQL and perhaps, Solaris.

But if it is facing up to keeping the hardware business, its integration strategy could create shockwaves across the industry and especially for competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM. They, too, might be forced to think more about the propriety nature of their products and less that one box is an easy substitute for another.

That might be easier for IBM, with its diverse software business, but more of a challenge for H-P.

It would also force the remaking of Oracle into an Apple-like vendor of hardware and software – no easy task for company with a history of software-only development.

On Tuesday conference call, President Charles Phillips Jr. suggested Exadata is an example of how Oracle will knit Sun’s hardware and Oracle’s software together. “We’re pretty excited,” he said.

Exadata is a relatively new product, added Ellison, but four-quarter customer wins against competing products from IBM, Teradata and Netezza include some long established companies – including one California computer and phone maker.

There was little mistaking the veiled reference to Apple.

Oracle Labs Running A Virtual Database Without An Operating System

When Oracle bought BEA in April 2008 it inherited a R&D project designed to run BEA’s WebLogic middleware on a virtual machine without an operating system.

The work has received a boost inside the database giant.

The company is now looking at running an Oracle database directly on a virtual machine without an operating system.

CEO Larry Ellison did not offer additional detail of the work on a Tuesday evening fourth-quarter conference call. But he said the effort is alive and well.

“We are looking at that,” he said.

The implications are clear. If a database server no longer needs to include an operating system, suppliers of Linux and Windows could suffer.

And Oracle’s push to supply a complete stack of software from virtual machine on up could be easier (even if a stripped down OS is included).

Social Gaming Ready To Take Off

Social games – those simplistic, easy-to-play 5-minutes games put up on Facebook and other social networking sites – appear ready to take off.

It is easy to dismiss these frivolous applications as faddish. They are far less sophisticated and complex than the carefully orchestrated games that run on the popular consoles – such the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3.

But they CAN be shared with a player’s friends on Facebook or MySpace – which is exactly the point.

“It’s still very early,” says Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook. But “I think there is a new type of gaming experience.”

Davis predicted Tuesday at the Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco that most of the big gaming companies would unveil games in the next 12 months incorporating the social aspects of user interaction. “I don’t think any projects have been canceled.”

In addition, the spread of smart phones with Internet connections and browsers is creating a “multi-device” world where gamers will be able to participate from whatever device they want: console, phone or computer.

“This is the very beginning of the movement,” he said. A year ago, these companies weren’t even thinking about how to make social games.

Davis could indeed be right. A dramatic change in the gaming could be on the way. The challenge will be in bring the sophistication of the console experience to the Web's social platforms.

China Has 30 Percent Of The World’s Video Gaming Revenue


Hard to believe that China’s gaming companies rake in 30 percent of the world’s gaming revenue. But that is the claim of James Liu, COO of the Oak Pacific Interactive, a private Chinese Internet company.

Liu says the country’s slice should amount to between $4.5 billion and $5 billion this year.

Perhaps the market’s size is not a surprise considering the country has 1.3 billion residents, or about a fifth of the world’s total.

But there is more to it. Chinese apparently love to play. Some Chinese games have 1 million concurrent online users at peak periods, Liu said.

Oak has games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, he added.

With that kind of online volume, there are obvious opportunities for gaming companies. That may even extend to Western companies with the right market approach.

Making Money From Twitter

Twitter is a social phenomenon. But as a business, it hasn’t yet earned a passing grade.

Until now. In the past several weeks, two online games have launched with links to the micro-blogging site. Followers say at least one has begun making money – with the potential to make substantially more.

“Revenue is being generated from Twitter,” declares Jason Bailey, CEO of the Super Rewards, the provider of a virtual currency for games.

That’s because the games – Spymaster and 140 Mafia - are attracting users and, in the case of 140 Mafia, using Super Rewards’ virtual currency to let players pay for extra features, such as weapons, casinos or cars.

Bailey declines to say how much 140 Mafia is making. But some insiders suggest the take could amount to more than $25,000 a month in a short while.

“True commerce,” says Bailey

Both games make use of Twitter’s real time communications stream by posting updates of a player’s game activities on the Twitter network.

Thousands of people are already playing 140 Mafia. Bailey projects the game could attract 500,000 players in a couple of months.

While game play is unlikely to turn Twitter into board market place, it is an interesting first step to finding financially benefit from the social-networking craze.

Data Centers Are Power Hogs, So Cooling System Efficiency Is Key


Data center efficiency is more than a luxury.

The lack of power and space is nixing the expansion of existing centers and slowing the construction of new centers at a time when demand for the facilities is outpacing supply. IT managers face few inviting options.

Because data centers don’t require a lot of manual labor, adding staff doesn’t solve the problem.

Instead, the biggest source of operational efficiency comes from power use. Already centers in the U.S. use in excess of 61.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, or more than the automobile industry.

By 2011, this should double, making data centers the nation’s top commercial consumer of power, ahead of metals production.

Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the power use goes toward cooling,. That makes Core4 Systems’ introduction Monday of a more efficient liquid-cooled air conditioning offering all the more interesting.

The Napa company claims its system is significantly more efficient than those in the market and saved its first customer, Sonic.net, 72 percent of its cooling costs.

Core4 is talking to additional potential customers, including Apple and IBM, and claims a system for a small corporate data center costs between $5 million and $7 million.

For reasons stated above, the company could find itself in the right place at the right time. A green-tech contribution to energy efficient, it could play a role in the fight against global warming.

Oracle To Launch 100 Days Of Innovation Campaign

I couldn’t help but draw immediate parallels between Oracle’s new 100 Days of Innovation marketing campaign and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional novel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

The masterful book plays off the insular nature of Latin American colonial culture to chronicle the early history of a small, isolated village, cut off from the broad currents of humanity coursing through the rest of the civilized world.

Oracle’s labs leave me with the same feeling. They are deeply private in nature, cut off from outsiders and left to their own devices, until a product is released to the world, sometimes before its time.

According to AMR Research, Oracle’s 100 Days of Innovation campaign will kick off on July 1. It will tout the software company’s developmental skills – and counter the impression that Oracle can only acquire innovation.

On July 1, the company also will unveil Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

AMR points out how the campaign creates an interesting counterpoint to a June blog post from AMR’s Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson. Richardson argues that software innovation comes from small companies, not massive software houses such as Oracle. Oracle executives bristled when they read it.

“Call me cynical, but I believe today’s large vendors are more interested in commoditization than innovation,” Richardson write. “Ideally, they want to be able to sell a generic version that will appeal to customers across dozens of verticals, hundreds of countries, and tens of thousands of customers. For them, true breakthrough innovation doesn’t scale.”

It is an interesting point well worth a debate. Perhaps the first leg of that debate will take place even as we hear about 100 Days of Innovation.

Cloud Computing Will Spawn IT Experimentation


Of course cloud computing promises to save businesses money.

But its simplicity and ease of use also may spawn an unprecedented increase in business experimentation.

This compelling thesis comes from analyst Charles Burns, a research vice president at Saugatuck Technology, and it just might prove itself out.

With cloud’s lower cost, “you can afford to have a lot of (project) failures” without the bottom line suffering, Burns said Thursday at Navigating the Cloud, a discussion sponsored by IBM.

Burns argues that cloud computing is likely to change every company’s business – dismissing the deep-seated debate around the veracity and historical roots of the emerging computing scheme.

He calls cloud computing pragmatic, whether or not it is a follow-on to the autocratic computing structure of the mainframe era.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter. It can save companies money, shorten the development time of new applications, allow small business to better meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and shift capital expenses to operating expenses with software as a service.

Its ease of use is still evolving (there are no standards in place for interoperability so every cloud implementation is different.) But as simplicity improves, business department experimentation will take place on the cheap, says Burns.

At first this will seem like a threat to IT managers fearing a loss of control. But they too will see a bright light.

Overtime, they will be able to shift staff from server and disk array maintenance to high-level business support.

That should make everyone happy. But don’t hold your breath. Standards are nowhere in sight and the ease of use necessary for widespread experimentation is a work in progress.

Fibre Channel And Ethernet Conversion Is Still A Distant Dream


Vendors love to talk about a converged storage network. But a unified infrastructure with Ethernet at its core is still a distant reality.

The goal behind such an infrastructure is to both save money with less expensive Ethernet switches and achieve improved speeds with 10-gigabit Ethernet ports.

But data center owners don’t appear to see an immediate need to spend the money in an era of tight IT budgets. And they don’t want to give up the familiar security and manageability of fibre channel.

Fibre channel over Ethernet technology was developed as the first step toward this networking conversion by companies such as Cisco Systems and Brocade Communications Systems. But even it is proving something of a half step.

According to Dave Stevens, CTO of Brocade, it is being deployed only at the perimeter of the network and not at the core. Data traffic from a server travels on a fibre channel over Ethernet pipe for about five feet until it reaches the first network access point, where it is split back into Ethernet and fibre channel, he says.

“It is changing the landscape for the first five feet” of the network, Stevens said at a Brocade Tech Day.

Oh well, back to the drawing board! The long sought convergence may take a new generation of network managers.

More Evidence That Social Network Marketing Can Work


Just over a week ago, Gam Dias stumbled upon the unexpected when he checked into a Chicago Hyatt: a room with a view.

In fact, the vice president of product management at software maker Overtone of San Francisco was so impressed he Tweeted his good fortune.

A short while later a message came in reply – from Hyatt – asking if there was anything else the hotel could do. Apparently, Hyatt had been monitoring micro-blog site Twitter and responding when its name was mentioned.

Dias said he was impressed with the efficiency the hotel’s operation. But he said Hyatt is not alone in mining the wealth of customer data on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Social networking represents a challenge for companies. Many don’t have the resources or know-how to fully monitor, process and respond to the millions of posts generated every day by the hoards of people frequenting the sites.

But perhaps they should consider allocating them, says Dias, whose company offers systems for culling data from consumer-generated postings.

Among his corporate customers are two of the nation’s most prominent: Wal-Mart Stores and Microsoft.

Wal-Mart uses Overtone technology to help customers find items in online catalogs and to route consumers with problems to staffers who can help.

Microsoft keeps close tabs on what people say about its products online and uses the information to improve its software.

“There is a huge amount of feedback that comes in,” Dias said Tuesday at the Semantic Tech Conference in San Jose.

Bing Sees Traffic Growth But Are Microsoft’s Search Gains Temporary


Microsoft’s new Bing search engine continues to attract new search traffic to the company.

But is that traffic boost temporary or permanent? So far the early data suggests the interest in the search engine is persisting.

According to comScore, Microsoft’s share of the U.S. online search market rose to 12.1 percent for the work week ending June 12.

This is up from 9.1 percent at the end of May, before Bing’s launch two weeks ago.

Last week’s traffic showed an increase over the search engine’s first week of operation, when it captured an 11.1 percent market share.

Google is the leader in the market with more than 60 percent of search queries.

Microsoft executives must so far be pleased with the introduction. But they will be watching the share numbers for the coming weeks closely to see how much of the traffic is due to initial experimentation.

The Nation Will Toss Off Recession By Late 2010, Says California Gubernatorial Candidate Tom Campbell

California gubernatorial candidate Thomas Campbell said he is optimistic the nation will come out of the current recession by the end of next year.

But California is in danger of lagging the rest of the country in the recovery, the Republican candidate and former five-term Representative told a Silicon Valley crowd.

During a stump speech at the Open Forum ’09 conference late Saturday, Campbell said the typical recession in the United States lasts 2 years and 10 months.

There is “every reason (to think) we will come out on this schedule or faster,” said Campbell, who is seeking his party’s nomination to replace present Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger is being forced from office by term limits. “We have the most accommodating monetary policy in history.”

Campbell cited several reasons in addition to monetary policy for his economic forecast. Worker productivity has held up during the downturn and gas prices remain lower than when the recession began, he said.

Yet, the nation may be sowing the seeds of a new bout of inflation by pouring as much money as it is into the economy, he said.

In California, the state’s lingering budget crisis may slow its recovery, he added. He went on to say he favors establishing a state rainy-day account to be funded in good times and tapped during financial crises.

There is nothing about California that can’t be fixed, he said referring to the budget difficulties.

Facebook Should Embrace Micro Payments


Facebook likes to say its business is all about users and growth. Expansion is the priority at all costs.

But it is missing huge opportunities to turn its social networking platform into the next Google.

Members expect everything on Facebook to be free. But many would probably not balk at paying small sums for add-on services and virtual goods, and Facebook would find it is not just a social phenomenon but a financial one.

For instance, the company this week began offering vanity URLs to users who might like to customize their site addresses. Why not charge $5 for the feature, asks Dan Merritts, vice president of marketing at the Internet company Eduify.

It is important to get people used to notion that things on a site have a cost, agreed Rashmi Sinha, co-founder of the Internet site SlideShare, speaking at the OPENforum 2009 conference in Mountain View. “I do believe in building a product structure where monetization is a crucial piece.”

Some argue that Facebook is paying enough attention to revenue. After all, estimates are that its annual sales are about $500 million.

When users reach half a billion, revenue will be $1 billion, predicts Ro Choy, chief revenue officer at RockYou.

But the potential is much greater. “There is so much time being spent on these platforms,” such as Facebook’s, says Sharethrough CEO Brett Keintz. “That is going to keep growing over time. We see them as NBC and Fox.”

Sun Will Become Part Of Oracle Because It Failed To Notice Subtle Change


Sun Microsystems has a storied past in the era of big-system computing. It was the “.” in dot com and the originator of the phrase the “network is the computer.”

Now it is to become part of Oracle and one reason is that it failed to react to subtle changes reshaping the industry, says former Executive Vice President of Global Sales Operations Masood Jabbar.

Oracle agreed to buy Sun in April after edging out rival suitor IBM, and on July 16 Sun shareholders will vote on whether to seal the deal.

“I’m deeply, deeply saddened by it because we built a great franchise,” Jabbar said on Saturday during an address at the OPENforum 2009 conference in Mountain View.

Jabbar said he remembers extraordinary times at Sun, such as renting out the Palace of Versailles in France to hold a costume party for his sales force. He boasts of flying Elton John to Hawaii to entertain his top performers.

People don’t know “how hard we played,” he said.

But while Sun worked hard, it didn’t excel when things change very slowly, he added. “That is the cancer in a company that people don’t detect, most people don’t see.”

These change took place both inside Sun and outside, where more powerful low-cost computers stole business from Sun’s high-end boxes.

Jabbar offered advice for tomorrow’s Suns:

First, be paranoid. Second, “when it ain’t broke, break it.” That way, you can fix it correctly, he said.

Third, “you must change before you have to change,” he said. And finally, pay attention to co-founder Bill Joy’s technology rule: innovation will occur and probably elsewhere.

Google Backed Kite Maker Makani Retools For Lower Altitude Kite Flying


Makani Power has been working largely in stealth for several years, developing huge wing-shaped kites to generate power from the strong winds exhaled miles above the earth’s surface.

But recently, the company has begun to redefine itself for low-altitude flying – retooling to be what it describes as a “high capacity” company instead of a “high-altitude” one.

Details were scarce during an appearance by CTO Corwin Hardham at the OPENforum 2009 conference in Mountain View on Saturday.

But he said the Alameda startup that received $5 million from Google in 2008 no longer feels it has to fly its kites at high altitudes to successfully generate substantial energy from the wind.

The new target: a couple of hundred meters to a kilometer. Makani had previously anticipated its kites would fly at 10 kilometers, or about 6 miles, above the earth.

Hardham declined to explain why the company made the change. He said details of its progress are to be unveiled in articles planned for Wired and Nature in the next couple months.

But he said the company continues to make gains on the efficiency of its kites and anticipates having products available in four or five years. For instance, it has developed higher performing airfoils.

Nevertheless, significant breakthroughs remain in front of Makani as it tries to bring its technology dream to life.

“We’re developing a whole new technology,” he said. Makani anticipates the cost of its power will be less than electricity generated from fossil fuels.

BT Group Could Rekindle Net Neutrality Debate


BT Group, the European telecom giant and owner of British Telecommunication, has admitted to throttling back speeds of the BBC video content player, iPlayer.

Now it says it wants content providers to help shoulder the financial burden of delivering video and other high-bandwidth data streams to Internet consumers.

This is exactly the type of arm-twisting proponents of net neutrality reform hoped to avoid. Recently, the momentum behind net-neutrality legislation in the U.S. has begun to pick up.

Supporters cite President Obama’s recent statement that the Internet should be “open and free” as an indication he is behind such an initiative. Obama made the comment during a speech about Internet security.

Now it is likely these backers of an initiative will have new ammunition in the BT controversy, even thought BT does not provide Internet-access in the U.S.

An article on Silicon.com notes that a BT spokesperson on Thursday admitted the company “throttles video traffic to 896 Kbps for Option 1 customers between 5 p.m. and midnight.”

As video traffic increases, it is unsustainable for ISPs to pick up the bill, the spokesperson goes on to say.

In the U.S., both Barack Obama's nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, and the new leader of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, are backers of net neutrality. In addition, Democrats run key committees in Congress.

As a result, don’t be surprised to see legislation coming from Washington and don’t be surprised to hear the BT flap waved about in the process.

No Sign The Solar Price Storm Has Ebbed


Over production continues to rile the solar cell business.

Prices entered a free fall earlier this year when declining demand and over production created an imbalance in supply and demand.

Slower than anticipated demand has since widened the imbalance, creating a black cloud over the business that worries investors and executives.

According to FBR Capital Markets analyst Mehdi Hosseini, many observers expected lower prices would by now stimulate consumer and utility interest in solar cells. They haven’t, and speculation is they won’t until early next year.

That means 2009 will be a wash out for the industry.

Hosseini recently found polysilicon spot market prices as low as $60 a kilogram compared with up to $95 in early April.

Consequently, six-inch solar wafers now sell as little as $3 a wafer, and cells for about $1.50 a watt compared with $2 in early April.

With profits harder to come up, the business is going to be in limbo until at least late this year.

Venture Capital Shifting To Clean Tech And Globalization


The recession is doing more than slowing the pace of investing at venture capital firms in the United States.

It is shifting their focus to clean -tech, where they see larger opportunities, and turning their attention abroad for creative companies and money to fill out their new funds.

These trends are not new. They have been playing out for nearly a decade as the high-tech industry, the traditional venture investing ground, has matured and growth slowed.

But the great downturn of 2008-09 is accelerating the changes as a Darwinian survival instinct grips an industry already suffering from a multi-year slowdown in public market IPOs.

For many VCs, the difficult economy has brought a cold splash of reality. Limited partners in the United States were already cautious about the venture business and are now almost certain to reduce their investments in venture funds over the next three or so years. That is driving many funds overseas for capital.

According to a survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, more than half of firms expect to have more limited partners from outside their home countries.

And while half say they will invest in fewer startups because of the worldwide downturn, roughly the same percent say they will increase investments in Asia. Forty-three percent see higher spending in India while just 17 percent plan to fund more companies in North America.

At the same time, nearly two thirds of VCs intend to increase their investments in clean-tech companies during the next five years. Many figure it will be where the real money is made.

Cisco Sees Brave New World, But Consumers May Not Be Ready

Cisco Systems is good at writing self-serving press releases.

But many of them are interesting in their own right. Wednesday’s is no exception.

The networker claims that in the next five years Internet traffic will increase by a factor of five. In other words, by 2013, net will carry an astonishing 56 exabytes of data a month, or the equivalent of 9 billion bytes of data for each of the 6 billion people on the planet today.

(An exabyte is a 1 with 18 zeros behind it.)

This is mind numbing. But the Cisco release wades even deeper into the digital morass. During the same period, mobile broadband traffic will double annually, or grow 66 times in total.

Fueling this growth of both mobile and Internet traffic is video. The release claims that 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2013 will be TV signals, video on demand, Internet video and peer-to-peer sharing.

Of course all this would be good news for Cisco, which supplies the routers and switches that carry Internet traffic.

But it implies dramatic changes in consumer behavior to go hand in hand with a substantive build out of the broadband network. This makes me skeptical. Will we really be such ardent subscribers to video in five years, and will our measly 3 Mbps home connections expand enough to support it?

I’m emotionally ready for this brave new world. I don’t think our service providers are.

Of course, Cisco could be right.

Intel Loses Market Share To AMD


It is a surprise seeing Intel lose microprocessor market share to Advanced Micro Devices.

But that is exactly what happened in the first quarter, according to iSuppli. Intel’s share slipped a substantive 2.5 points to 79.1 percent from 81.6 in the fourth quarter while AMD gained about as much to hold a 12.8 percent share.

ISuppli says AMD had a strong performance in desktop, server and particularly in notebook. But it is hard to believe the company’s competitive position has been strengthened that much in the past several months.

More probably, the PC market paused to digest the gains Intel has made since coming out with an improved lineup of chips more than a year ago.

With better products in the market, Intel gained share in each of the previous four quarters, its market dominance rising from a 78 percent share to the fourth quarter’s 81.6 percent, iSuppli data show.
This is in part due to the release of the Atom processor, which became the computer brains in a first generation of netbooks. But it also is linked to the Core 2 Duos Intel has been fielding with better power management and performance.

The company has been manufacturing with 45-nm technology and the nano-sized circuits give it a cost advantage.

Anyway, the winning streak came to an end during the first three months of 2009 as the microprocessor market declined 20.6 percent to $6.9 billion in size. Don’t expect it to continue.

(Oh, by the way, do expect the market declines to continue. ISuppi expects full year microprocessor revenue to be down 15.8 percent to $28.6 billion.)

Apple Expands Flagship Franchise With New IPhone And Lower Laptop Pricing


Hoping to stimulate demand for its popular iPhone and MacBook laptops, Apple unveiled a faster phone on Monday and cut prices on modestly refreshed versions of its portable computers.

The series of announcements at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference confirmed some product speculation on the Web and dashed other rumors.

The new iPhone makes use of a new processor to run applications faster and had been expected. But it remains the same size as existing models, confounding Apple watchers who have been anticipating a smaller version of the smart phone.

The $199 and $299 prices of the two versions of the new phone enabled Apple to lower the price of an entry-level version of the existing iPhone to $99. This also had been anticipated and duplicates pricing already available in Europe.

Apple added fixed, non-removable batteries to its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops, extending their battery life. It also installed SD card readers and returned the missing Firewire port to its 13-inch model.

In doing so, it cut prices across the board. The high-end version of the MacBook Air now sells for $1,799 instead of $2,499 and the low-end version now is priced at $1,499.

Prices for the 13-inch MacBook Pro start at $1,199 and the 15-inch machine starts at $1,699.

Apple will release the latest version of its OS X computer operating system, Snow Leopard, in October. The software will be available as a $29 upgrade to users of the existing Leopard software.

http://techpulse360.com/2009/06/08/apple-expands-flagship-franchise-with-new-iphone-and-lower-laptop-pricing/