Business Tech- Page 496

Observations from an EMC analyst day

On the one hand, vendor analyst events are a good opportunity to spend focused time diving deep into individual products, roadmaps, and corporate initiatives. On the other, they're a useful forum for getting the feel of a company's overall zeitgeist in a way that narrower discussions don't. EMC's event, held last week in Franklin, Mass., was no exception.

Perhaps the single thing that struck me most about the event as a whole was the full integration of VMware into the discussion as a whole. I've been following both companies since before EMC acquired VMware in 2003. … Read more

Microsoft, ex-worker settle claims

Microsoft and a former employee have settled litigation involving allegations of patent infringement and trade secret theft.

Microsoft sued a former employee earlier this year for allegedly stealing trade secrets that were later used in a patent lawsuit against Microsoft partners, in which Microsoft later intervened as a party-defendant.

All parties deny any liability in the settlement, the terms of which were not disclosed, Miki Mullor, founder of Ancora Technologies, said in a statement.

Microsoft's lawsuit alleged that Mullor took a job at Microsoft in 2005 while he was still chief executive at Ancora. While working on the Windows … Read more

IBM chip to speed medical diagnostic testing

IBM researchers have cooked up a quick medical diagnostic testing system based on a silicon chip that can get by on a small sample and test for multiple diseases.

The breakthrough to be announced Tuesday means that physicians can test a patient immediately following a heart attack to improve survival rates. The test checks for disease markers, proteins that can be detected in blood using "capillary action force." In a nutshell, capillary forces refer to the tendency of a liquid to rise in narrow tubes or be drawn into a small opening.

The IBM Research-Zurich findings will be … Read more

Report: Twitter still 'missed opportunity' for Fortune 100s

A new report from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick has found that when it comes to Fortune 100 companies, they just don't get Twitter...not yet anyway.

According to the study (PDF), which looked at how the world's 100 top companies used Twitter between late August and early September, the companies have a grand total of 540 Twitter accounts owned by just 73 companies; 27 firms don't participate in the microblogging tool/social network. Some 76 percent of those 540 accounts weren't "updated often" and 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured … Read more

Gartner: Semiconductor sales to rebound in 2010

Global semiconductor sales are now expected to fall this year by 11 percent--an improvement over the previous estimate of a 17 percent drop, according to research released Monday by Gartner. And the outlook for 2010 is sunny.

Revenue is projected to drop this year to $226 billion, an 11.4 percent decline from last year's $255 billion. Next year however, it's expected to bounce back by 13 percent from this year's level, hitting the same $255 billion figure it did in 2008.

Personal computers are the largest factor driving semiconductor sales. In another recent report, Gartner said … Read more

Chip designer ARM leads Android alliance

ARM on Tuesday announced the launch an alliance of 35 tech companies to support development of Android-based products using its widely used chips.

ARM-based chips power the world's most popular smartphones, including--in the U.S.--the Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid.

The Solution Center for Android alliance will serve as a resource for designers and developers of ARM technology-based products running on the Android operating system, which is the software on the popular Motorola Droid smartphone and Acer Liquid.

In addition to smartphones, Android powers digital picture frames and smartbooks--what the Windows-Intel camp prefers to … Read more

Google scoops up ex-Microsoftie Don Dodge

As you may remember, in Microsoft's most recent round of layoffs, the company laid off Director of Business Development Don Dodge. Dodge is very respected in the start-up community and tirelessly defended Microsoft's technologies at conferences and to developers during his time at the company. When he was let go, many people were shocked by the move and were watching intently to see who would pick him up. On Monday, Dodge announced on his blog that he will be joining Google in a similar capacity to his role at Microsoft.

Now, Dodge will focus on evangelizing Google's … Read more

Upping the ante in the supercomputer stakes

This week's Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Ore., puts the spotlight on the highest of high-end computing systems.

Intel unveils supercomputer chip, NEC partnership The chipmaker has disclosed a version of its Xeon processor line optimized for high-performance computing. The company also announces it's teaming up with NEC. (Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers) November 16, 2009 1:35 PM PST

Microsoft testing Excel for supercomputers At the SC09 conference, Microsoft releases an updated version of Windows Server for high-performance computers as well as a compute cluster version of its Excel spreadsheet. (Posted in Beyond Binary … Read more

Intel unveils supercomputer chip, NEC partnership

Intel on Monday disclosed a version of its Xeon processor line optimized for supercomputers and announced a partnership with NEC to develop future supercomputers.

At Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Ore., Intel unveiled a future version of its "Nehalem-EX" processor optimized for supercomputers. The six-core chip will run at higher speeds than eight-core versions of the Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages for supercomputer specific tasks, Intel said in a statement. Intel also refers to supercomputing as high-performance computing, or HPC.

The chip architecture will offer greater memory speeds and capacity and will allow customers to build single computers … Read more

Five competitive differentiators for cloud services

Cloud computing providers have a difficult marketing challenge, in my opinion. Think about it--no matter what service model or deployment model a provider is delivering, they must differentiate their service while meeting the "commodity" needs of as many customers as possible. It would seem these businesses are stuck between providing least common denominator service capabilities and being accused of intentional customer lock-in.

From a customer perspective, it is equally challenging when one is "looking for servers and storage" and must choose between a bunch of services that essentially run Linux or Windows and store your files. … Read more