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SiCortex, a company that makes energy-efficient high-end servers, is shutting down and seeking to sell its assets, according to reports.

Maynard, Mass.-based SiCortex was unable to close a follow-on round of financing because its venture capital investors did not have money available, according to a report at high-performance computing site Inside HPC. SiCortex has raised $42 million from Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, Prism VentureWorks, and Polaris Venture Partners.

Intellectual property manager Gerbsman Partners is trying to sell the assets of SiCortex, according to a blog post from Gerbsman. A memorandum posted on Thursday from … Read more

Eating tends to be a social thing. Dropping the pounds that result from such sociability, however, is mostly a solitary experience, requiring lonely denial in the kitchen and often lonelier miles on the footpath or bike trail. Small wonder, then, that most attempts to lose weight fail.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course, and an application I've been using on my iPhone suggests a way to open-source the weight-loss experience, making dropping pounds a social, fun experience.

CNET recently profiled several weight-loss applications for the computer, some of which have a social element to them.

It's a good list, but my favorite application by far in this category is Lose It!, a free app for the iPhone.

Lose It! makes it easy to track calories, monitor exercise, and track progress toward weight-loss goals. Because my iPhone is always with me, Lose It! follows me around, too, reminding me how much that bar of chocolate is going to cost me in terms of gym time, facilitating rational calorie intake/burn.

Where Lose It! fails, as do all of these weight-loss applications, is in making this process truly social.

Fixing this would give FitNow, the developer of Lose It!, a serious revenue model that would turn a seemingly universal human desire to look/feel better into a great way to make money.

Here are a few ideas for the FitNow team, several of which Bryce Roberts, a good friend and fellow Lose It! junkie (in fact, it was Bryce's example that got me using the application), offered up while we were mountain biking last week (so that we could gorge on high-calorie foods later in the day :-):… Read more

Paglo has been steadily building out its feature set as a Web 2.0-style solution to IT management. The latest improvements to hit the service include support for monitoring virtual machines, as well as patch management. Being able to monitor both physical and virtual machines from the same cohesive interface like this is really killer and the new patch management system is sure to ease some headaches during upgrades.

Paglo also seems firmly set on a price point of $1 per device monitored, per month. This seems like a good pricing strategy, but I would like to see Paglo adopt … Read more

The first version of an Energy Star rating for enterprise servers is poised for release on Monday, with about one quarter of available servers expected to meet the standard.

The specification, which has been under development for a few years, is designed to give buyers a starting point for evaluating the energy-efficiency of servers, according to Andrew Fanara, a program manager for Energy Star at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It includes a common "power and performance data sheet" that reports energy data in a common format. Compliant products will also have relatively efficient power supplies, which means they … Read more

Having mastered ways to automate manufacturing and dozens of other business processes, SAP is now acquiring expertise in managing carbon emissions.

The enterprise software giant said on Monday it has acquired 2-year-old, privately held Clear Standards, a Sterling, Va.-based software company with tools for tracking and reporting a corporation's environmental impact. No financial terms were disclosed.

Clear Standards' Web-based hosted applications are designed to help a company develop a strategy for managing carbon emissions and reducing its environmental impact. The software can create an inventory of a company's emissions and then give an environmental regulations manager, for … Read more

Free, on-demand streaming music is a rising tide: since the start of 2009, I've covered relatively new services like Spotify and Just Hear It, and there are plenty of established players like MySpace Music, Imeem, and Grooveshark.

Instead of trying to stop the tide, Sony Music has wisely embraced it: starting today, the company will introduce streaming music players on the Web sites of its most popular artists, including popsters like Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Jacko himself. It makes perfect business sense: instead of letting some third party like Imeem sell advertisements against high-demand music, Sony can sell … Read more

Note taking is an important aspect to many computer users' lives. A program needs to be quick, efficient, and only visible when needed. Notez claims to be all of those things and more for the modern note maker, but we found its features to be fairly standard.

This freeware embeds itself into your tray for quick access. The note's interface is that of a traditional yellow sticky note with a few buttons and a scrolling bar at the top. The note can quickly and easily be written in the body of the sticky. The buttons are a bit surprising: … Read more