Business Tech

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

IBM on Tuesday announced a pact with Intuit for an integrated server that's designed to be a small to midsized business IT department in a box. The appliance, dubbed the Smart Cube, is designed to offer e-mail, calendaring, security, finance, and other enterprise apps out of the box.

In many respects, IBM's Smart Cube emulates Apple's model with the iPod. The big pitch is to integrate software and hardware (iPod, Mac) in a tight package with a marketplace (iTunes). Big Blue's Smart Cube is lumped into … Read more

TV makers worldwide saw their revenues slide 12 percent in the last year, according to a report set to be released Tuesday by DisplaySearch.

A total of 43.3 million TVs were sold worldwide in the first quarter of this year, a 6 percent drop compared to the same quarter a year ago, and prices dropped 6 percent, too, according to the Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report.

Even Samsung, which collects more money in its coffers for TVs than any company in the world for the past 13 straight quarters, saw its revenues drop 8 percent since the … Read more

Following the European Union's decision to fine Intel for "illegal" business practices, Nvidia is crying foul too, according to a report.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Intel's chip pricing is unfair but added that the graphics chipmaker will not seek antitrust action against Intel, according to a Reuter's report.

This is a beef that Nvidia has had with Intel ever since Nvidia's Ion graphics chipset debuted last year. The competitive backdrop is Intel's longstanding vision of a CPU-centric universe versus Nvidia's creed that graphics processing matters more and more in a multimedia-intensive … Read more

Intel's Medfield is the chip that will drive the chipmaker's smartphone strategy in 2011 and beyond, according to an Intel executive speaking recently at an Intel investor meeting.

Slides (accessible on Intel's Web site) shown by Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, at last week's Intel investor meeting map out the road Intel will take to the mainstream smartphone market. (The slides were highlighted on technology sites such as Engadget and UMPC Portal).

Intel's Medfield was first disclosed in December.

Chandrasekher showed a slide that put Medfield in the mainstream smartphone … Read more

Intel is celebrating its four-decade-long relationship with Stanford University by spotlighting the school's nexus with its top executives.

The Intel-Stanford tie famously began back in 1969 when Stanford electrical engineering alumnus Ted Hoff became Intel employee No. 12. Within two years, he had invented, along with Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor, Intel's flagship product: the microprocessor.

For more than four decades, the Stanford-Intel relationship has been behind the launch of some of Intel's flagship technologies and hundreds of the company's engineering careers. (Almost 1,000 Stanford alumni have worked at Intel and a Stanford University Web page marks this relationship.)

The retirement this month of Intel chairman and former CEO (1998-2005) Craig Barrett, highlights one of the most enduring ties. Barrett was a professor from 1965 until he joined Intel in 1974.

"Industry does a good job at the D part of R&D--but we rely on the tier-one research universities like Stanford on the R side," Barrett said in an interview published on Stanford University's Web site. Barrett cited marquee research at Stanford such as semiconductor device modeling and new packaging technologies.

Senior VP Pat Gelsinger is another Stanford graduate. "We've had great results from the collaboration," said Gelsinger--also quoted in the interview--who earned an masters of science degree in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1985. "In almost every area that Intel is doing work we can point to significant collaboration and research projects with Stanford." … Read more

In open source or in product development generally, one of the biggest mistakes is to take on a deeply entrenched incumbent on its own turf. Almost inevitably, if you play someone else's game, even if you're a little cheaper/faster/better, you're going to lose. Inertia favors the incumbent, and there's a whole lot of inertia involved in switching vendors.

For this reason, I agree wholeheartedly with Bill Weinberg's suggestion that Linux's opportunity in Netbooks is to focus on the mobile side of the market, rather than bringing a traditional, personal computer bent to … Read more

AT&T is expanding its cloud-computing efforts with its new Synaptic Storage as a Service offering for enterprise customers, announced Monday. The service will let business users save and access their data via laptops, smartphones, and other Web-enabled devices.

With cloud-based storage, businesses can tap into their data as a service without having to set up their own equipment. They pay a monthly fee for storage as they use it. AT&T plans to offer the service on a limited basis starting this month, with its eye on a larger rollout to its U.S. Internet data centers … Read more

Amazon.com's cloud-computing arm has added new features to help users monitor cloud resources, adjust capacity, and balance traffic loads.

In an announcement Monday, Amazon Web Services unveiled a public beta of the three new features: the CloudWatch monitoring service, Auto Scaling for on-demand capacity adjustments, and Elastic Load Balancing for redistributing traffic.

The new features are available immediately to users in the U.S., according to a company blog, with availability in Europe set to follow in the next few months.

"You can use these services to make your...applications perform better without sacrificing application control, freedom … Read more

Updated at 12:45 p.m. PDT: adding AMD statement.

The question of whether Intel engages in abusive market behavior has been answered by the European Commission. Or has it?

To recap, the EC said:

"Intel limited consumer choice and stifled innovation by preventing innovative products for which there was a consumer demand from reaching end customers."

And: "Intel gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 central processing units (CPUs) from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it … Read more