watkins

The lights over your head are about to get smart

Take a walk through the labs of Bridgelux (PDF) in Livermore, Calif., and you see a lot of LED lighting modules being made on a more affordable platform: disused factories that used to make silicon chips. But while you'll see lots of lights, you'll hear mostly about connectivity. Bridgelux CEO Bill Watkins envisions a new array of smart, connected sensors, cameras, and other devices integrated with LED lighting over our heads.

The challenge is formidable: Most lighting consumers, large and small, think of lighting as a cost to be contained, not an opportunity to be maximized. So job … Read more

Jimmie Johnson's Famous Crash at Watkins Glen

So far this week, we've been checking out Jimmie Johnson and his winning ways during this year's Sprint Cup season. Well, there have been times in Jimmie's career wasn't as much of a winner. In this relic of a video I've featured today, Johnson was lucky to make it out of this alive after losing control of his car and crashing into a wall.

Prior to his career as a Sprint Cup driver, Jimmy raced in NASCAR's Busch Series. During a race at Watkins Glen in New York during the 2000 season, Johnson loses … Read more

Ex-Seagate CEO Watkins back with chip start-up

A few months after being ousted as chief executive of Seagate, Bill Watkins is back with a new start-up that's cooking up ways to pack high-density flash memory chips into small devices.

Watkins is now a board member of Vertical Circuits, which is developing a "silver ooze" intended to make already small devices, like laptops and handheld gadgets, even thinner, The New York Times reports.

Vertical Circuits' main business is working on "3D stacking," which looks to decrease the space between memory chips by stacking them on top of each other, thereby creating smaller devices. … Read more

Seagate replaces Watkins as CEO

Updated with additional information about layoffs.

Disk-drive maker Seagate Technology announced Monday that Chairman Stephen Luczo is now also serving as CEO and president of the company.

That spells the end of the tenure of Bill Watkins, who has been with the company for 12 years and has served as CEO since 2004. Seagate said that Watkins will be advising Luczo to ensure a smooth transition and that the two executives will "confer over the next week" on whether Watkins will have any continuing role at Seagate.

The company also announced that it is laying off 800 people, … Read more

Why Netbooks are good for Seagate

LAS VEGAS--When Acer and Asus first started pushing Netbooks, it was all about flash memory. But now, a majority of the small, Atom-powered notebooks have hard drives. And Bill Watkins, chief executive of hard drive market leader Seagate, likes it that way.

When the two Taiwanese Netbook makers first talked with Seagate about the category, they told Watkins they didn't need storage for their tiny Atom-powered, Linux-based Netbooks since they'd be used only for surfing the Web and all data would be stored in the cloud.

Just two years later it's a totally different story. Besides more … Read more

Hardly a great time to talk H-1Bs. Still, it's time

What with pink slips being handed out all over this country, now is probably the worst time for any political leader to urge a rethinking of our H-1B policy to lift the 65,000 annual limits on foreign guest workers in specialty occupations. It's not the sort of political stance that will play well in Peoria - or in many other places in the U.S. these days.

But it must be said: Maintaining the status quo on H-1B is the best news that China, India, Russia or any other would-be economic superpower could ever want to hear. The … Read more

Confessions of a (tech) Deadhead

Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins doesn't Twitter, but he's not big on sartorial formality either--especially when it comes to ties. You know that cliche about marching to a different drummer? In this case, it's Watkins' own drummer and that's why he grooves on the Grateful Dead.

So much so that he's one of the Silicon Valley hotshots volunteering to help the University of Santa Cruz raise money for its planned archive of Grateful Dead memorabilia.

"We've got a warehouse full of posters and letters and things," Watkins says. "We want to … Read more