Open-source Web conferencing provider Dimdim has raised $6 million in Series B funding, the company is set to announce on Wednesday.
The funding round, which was led by current investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, will enable Dimdim to introduce enhancements to the free service and expand its market reach.
Dimdim competes with fee-based services like Webex. Because it is open source, it could become a platform for real-time communications if it garners enough developer support, my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman predicts.
Since its private launch 10 months ago, Boston-based Dimdim has attracted more than 500,000 users in more than 180 countries, the company says.
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B spreads 1TB of capacity over only three platters.
(Credit: Hitachi)Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks--down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi's 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.
Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year's model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung's Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.
While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn't deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it's retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.
The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.
A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost 20 percent of the browser market. The bank's site lists Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Netscape as acceptable browsers.
Netscape? Even AOL, Netscape's former owner, doesn't support Netscape Navigator anymore.
Of course, Firefox, which was released in 2004 and recently set a Guiness record for downloads in a 24-hour period, still works on the BofA Web site--just not officially. The issue apparently came up when a BofA customer contacted the bank about problems he was having accessing the site using Safari. "Please don't tell me to just use Firefox instead," the Networkworld.com reader told BofA customer support.
Not a problem, according to customer support.
"Please note Bank of America does not support Firefox," was customer service's reply.
When posed with the question of why the No.1 bank's Web site did not whole-heartedly embrace the No. 2 browser's 180 million users, a spokeswoman told Networkworld.com that "there is a process that we go through to 'officially support' a browser type and version, which includes in-depth functional and regression testing cycles.
"As the usage of Firefox browsers has increased with our customer base, we will be initiating a full support model for Firefox version 2.x in the very near future," spokeswoman Tara Burke told Networkworld.com.
Think "the very near future" will prove to be very soon? Don't bank on it.
Video surveillance firm VideoIQ is set to announce on Wednesday morning a $10 million Series B funding round.
Lehman Brothers Venture Partners is leading the round, and current investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture are participating.
The funding will be used to help VideoIQ expand to new markets and continue product development of its IP video surveillance and video analytics products, the company says.
Bedford, Mass.-based VideoIQ was spun out of GE Security in 2007 and is headed by Scott Schnell, a former RSA executive.
Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.
DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.
Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.
This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona.
"AMD maintained a long and fruitful relationship with DreamWorks Animation, beginning in early 2005. Earlier this year, AMD and DreamWorks decided not to extend our marketing and technology relationship. However, DreamWorks Animation is still an important and respected AMD customer and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with them again in the future," AMD said in a statement.
Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."
Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."
DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.
He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."
DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores.
Intel Nehalem architecture
(Credit: Intel)Batter specifically mentioned both Nehalem and Larrabee as a reason for the switch to Intel. He said that Larrabee would be "complementary" to Intel's general-purpose CPUs.
Nehalem is due in the fourth quarter of this year and Larrabee is expected in the 2009-2010 time frame.
The first Intel-Dreamworks release will be Monsters vs. Aliens, which is slated to hit movie theaters in March 2009.
Fans of microblogging service Twitter are apparently impervious to repeated outages and technical problems--and their enthusiasm is spreading.
Research firm Hitwise on Tuesday reported that traffic to the Twitter site increased 500 percent the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That's a significant jump for a service that's continually up and down--and still lacking a clear revenue stream.
What's more, many users of the service appear to be unruffled by Twitter's technical issues. The share of returning visitors has averaged approximately 53 percent over the past four months, according to Hitwise.
Twitter also still has a leg up over its few rivals in the microblogging space. Twitter traffic last week was 12 times higher than that of Plurk and 24 times higher than FriendFeed, Hitwise says. So even though Tweeters may be getting restless, not all of them are abandoning the service in favor of similar finds.
"Despite user complaints about outages, Twitter has remained the most popular among the micro-blogging services," Hitwise said in a statement.
Earlier Tuesday, rumors escalated that Twitter was in the throes of buying Summize, a Twitter search engine. Neither Twitter nor Summize have commented on speculation of a possible merger.
Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.
The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.
Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.
Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.
In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.
Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty's standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo's rep, "Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship."
The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It's long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.
Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.
Tuesday brought a mixed bag of Microsoft news. On the Daily Debrief, I sit down with CNET News senior writer Ina Fried to discuss the good, the bad, and the downright embarrassing.
Let's start with the good. The company announced the pricing of the new, pay-as-you-go business apps for the Web. The whole suite of business tools, which includes a variety of office communication tools, will run you $15 a month. Individually, the apps will go for $3 a pop. Ina suspects these tools will be very handy for professionals on the go or for companies who choose not to employ IT support.
The bad and embarrassing news is all wrapped into one. On Tuesday, the company launched the Vista Compatibility Center. Yes, you read that right. We're still talking about Vista, the operating system that Microsoft released 18 months ago. The need for the Center speaks volumes about consumers' slow adoption of the OS. Ina makes the point that if this were Apple, the company would have already moved on to a new cat. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the online Center was down and unavailable for most of the morning.
Google on Tuesday said it is now using an e-mail authentication technology to keep phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in order to steal usernames and passwords.
The technology, DomainKeys, uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.
Last October, Yahoo announced that it was protecting Yahoo Mail users with eBay and PayPal accounts from phishing attempts using the same technology.
The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo. The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License (GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to approve it as a proposed Internet standard.
The Xbox 360 Pro (aka Premium) will now cost $50 less.
(Credit: Microsoft)A couple of weeks ago I wrote about rumors that Microsoft was planning to chop the Xbox 360's price in July. Well, that price cut was all but confirmed today by Kotaku.
After posting leaked photos of upcoming Best Buy, Kmart, and other circulars, the gaming blog now has a GameStop employee's cell-phone snapshots of shelf art and an internal memo announcing that the Xbox 360 Pro (aka the Premium) would drop to $299.99 on Sunday, July 13. Not coincidentally, E3 kicks off the next day with--you guessed it--Microsoft's press conference.
As Sony's PlayStation 3 has come on strong in recent months, sales of the Xbox 360 have been flat, so a price drop seemed likely. The success of Metal Gear Solid 4 continues to give the PS3 a boost, but chances are Sony, too, will have to trim the price of its console before the holiday buying season.
All that said, the big question remains whether Microsoft will announce any new configurations of the Xbox 360. Rumor has it, the company is just using the price drop to clear out inventory of the 20GB Premium before it brings out a new 60GB version. (Of course, if you're willing to take a chance on a refurbished Premium, you can do significantly better than $300). There's no word on whether the Xbox 360 Elite or the Arcade (no hard drive) will also get $50 snips or whether a flagship model with a built-in Blu-ray drive is really in the works.
Personally, I'd like to see Microsoft get rid of the useless Arcade and reduce the number of Xbox 360 choices down to two to avoid confusing consumers. Anybody else want to guess what Microsoft has up its sleeve next week and what Sony's next move will be?
