Archive for October, 2004
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
12:18 PM PT |
Okay chest pounding and self congratulation that is something which needs to be left to basketball players, ESPN anchors and Hollywood types. Reporters should never ever congratulate themselves about anything they have done in the past. But what the hell, I am going to be shameless about it. AMD, Microsoft and everyone else has finally come around to realizing something I have been saying for the longest time. Here is my Op-Ed, People’s PC and what I wrote:
Technology’s biggest opportunity that is staring them in the face. It is what I call a Massputer a computer that costs $300 for the computing hungry masses in emerging economies like India, China and Brazil. Users of this massputer should be able to do basic tasks like writing documents, Internet surfing, email and perhaps some business-related tasks like data entry. There are nearly four billion people who live in these emerging markets and assuming that only 10 per cent of them can afford $300 it is still a market of 400 million.
- Ballmer: We need a $100 PC : One way to stem piracy is to offer consumers in emerging countries a low-cost PC, Ballmer said. “There has to be…a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries. We have to engineer (PCs) to be lighter and cheaper,” he said.
- AMD plans to start shipping the low-cost PCs soon after the model’s Oct. 28 release, is calling the new machine the Personal Internet Communicator. It will cost $185 just for the computer, and $249 for both the computer and a 15-inch monitor.
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
10:34 AM PT |
Andy writes: I could spend all day at VoN and get nothing done while at the same time get so much accomplished. It’’s the kind of show where one meeting leads into another, some unexpected and others necessary… how many of these companies won’t be here next year… That got me thinking how much VoN 2004 reminded me of Streaming Media East 2000…And Martin has an interesting post, which tells me that I am not missing anything much except endless meetings and a constant feedback loop which will reinforce my “VoIP Hype” theory.
There’s just too many people at the conference with session border gateways, deep packet inspection probes, proxies, IP PBXs and IP Centrex. It gives me the shivvers. You should all harbour a great fear that the mistakes of the past are being repeated, driven by short-sighted network designs and corporate security paranoia.
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
9:49 AM PT |
Motorola’s V710 problems, as noted by Russell, and a whole scores of others are pretty real and are causing the company major headaches. The company fessed up to this in its conference call. Moto said that the alignment of the camera module is
off center causing a recall and replacement of the phones in the channel. An
announcement of this issue should come through in the next few days, Legg Mason analyst Timm Bechter says, and points out that the company has a history of botching up products. Verizon is pissed to say the least and is looking else where, and chances are it could be looking at Nokia. “As has often been the case for Motorola, designing appealing products has been its strongpoint, while delivering those products on time and without problems has been more of an issue. We remind investors of a similar issue with one of the triplets last season, where the antenna blocked a portion of the camera’s view, and of the Motorola T720, which never made it through full testing with Verizon Wireless due to late delivery and was instead launched below Verizon’s traditionally stringent testing procedures, with many problems.” I am hearing that Motorola Razor might be delayed because of quality issues. Timm doesn’t point out that the Moto UI just simply sucks! I wonder what Albert Lin of American Technology Research have to say about this?
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
7:42 AM PT |
Digital Light Processing technology is beginning to sizzle, and is going to gain further momentum. Clues of this could be found in the recent earnings report from Texas Instruments, the main proponent of this technology. In simple language, it is a worthy competitor to LCD technologies, and uses an optical semiconductor to recreate images. In the third quarter, the company reported better that expected revenues because of company’s Digital Light Processing (DLP) and wireless digital signal processor (DSP) products. DLPs are used in newer televisions, and according to the company, DLP based TVs have started to outsell plasma TVs in North America. (Christmas is coming, so this could be even better news, and in case any readers wants me to have one, well send it my way.) I think the company might have a bigger hit on its hands: the rise of cheap projectors in my view is going to increase DLP penetration. Who needs a big TV when you can get a tiny DLP projector that does the trick, and well doesn’t take too much room, and is cheaper. Engadget is pointing to one from Toshiba, which is clearly buyable! Business 2.0 has a full lowdown on how this technology is going to be a big winner for TI.
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
7:05 AM PT |
The New York Times: Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCon, has two more months to put together a case, and defend himself in his criminal trial for conspiracy, securities fraud and filing false statements to securities regulators. Times says the trial is going to run for about eight weeks. If found guilty, Bernie could go to jail for 25 years. Judge Barbara S. Jones of United States District Court in Manhattan rejected any appeals to move the trial to Mississippi. Good call judge.. Bernie still owns people in that state, lock stock and barrel. The trial will start on January 17, 2005, instead of Nov. 9. Ebbers’ crew begged that they need more time to go through “hundreds of boxes of new evidence gathered by federal prosecutors so it could prepare a defense.” Well this is what I call buying time, before doing time. Maybe he needs more time to convince the already unraveling MCI to pay his bills for reaming them!
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
6:57 AM PT |
Infinera, one of the few start-ups I like has raised another $52 million, bringing its total pot to $205 million. Wow! That’s bubble era investment in the post-bubble era. The company is going to use the money to get the products to the market. It also signed up UTStarcom and CTC (Itochu Techno-Science Corporation) as strategic investors, which helps them roll out products in current hot telecom markets in Japan, China, and India. I have written in the past that Micro-opticals, aka integrated optical components have the potential to make optical and broadband equipment and services cheaper. These are integrated optical chips, which combine functions of many discrete optical devices onto a single chip. Micro-optical components manipulate light signals just the way electronic chips handles electronic signals.
The current optical networks are like mainframe computers of the 1970s, handcrafted. “The near term use of photonic ICs (or micro-opticals) is in telecom, but down the road, anywhere the world benefits from transmitting massive amounts of bandwidth with a small, low cost device, (micro-opticals) could make a difference,” says Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and chief executive of Infinera, a Sunnyvale, California company that is credited with crafting the first micro-optical chip. Back in 1950s, many could not imagine the potential of the electronics ICs, and perhaps it is difficult to understand the true implication of micro-opticals. High speed computing and quantum computing will derive, in some way, from the foundation being laid today in photonic integrated circuits, adds Singh.
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
6:36 AM PT |
Business 2.0: Blake Ross is lounging at his parents’ Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to “take back the Web” from Microsoft (MSFT). You might think the shy 19-year-old is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla’s Firefox — a revolutionary new browser that’s catching on the way Mosaic did in 1993. In beta for the past four months, Firefox version 1.0 is set to be released in November. With that, Ross will issue the first truly formidable challenge to Internet Explorer that the world has seen in seven years. “We’re hoping for 10 million downloads in 10 days,” Ross says proudly. Continue Reading at Business 2.0 website.
Om Malik
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 |
6:17 AM PT |
How about Alaxala Networks? Light Reading reports on this new joint venture between NEC and Hitachi, which plans to build a router that will in theory atleast take on the Cisco-Juniper duoply in the router and switch business.
The idea was to produce more reliable routers and switches, a cry that soon-to-be Alaxala officials were hearing from customers, says Kazushige Arai, Alaxala’s general manager of business planning. “Service providers and large enterprises want to build more reliable networks that can be used all the time, as a lifeline service,” Arai says. “So, Hitachi and NEC decided to build a new platform to cover such requirements.” The company has 320 employees and $52 million in funding.
The US giants have been cranking in Japan, and rest of Asia, something which bothers local players like Huawei (which has teamed up with Avici.) Now Japanese want to get in on the action. It reminds me of the early days of PC, when Intel and Microsoft basically relegated Japanese giants to the second tier status. They see the same thing happening in the routers space. Routers, as you all know are the bedrock of our networked lives.
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Om Malik
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Tuesday, October 19, 2004 |
7:39 PM PT |
A diehard Apple fan, that I am, it pains me to write what I am going to write. The new Apple IBook with its brilliant $999 price, and all the cool features pales in comparison with Averatec 3250for the same price point. For a Windows XP PC, it is pretty radical and cool looking, has more hard drive capacity (60GB), more in-built RAM (512 Megabytes) and has all a DVD+ CD-Burner. IBook has 30 gigabyte hard drive, and 256 MB built-in memory. Two points for Averatec. Averatec has 3 USB 2.0 ports, while Apple has two. Another point for 3250. The IBook scores a bonus point because it has a Firewire port.
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Om Malik
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Tuesday, October 19, 2004 |
4:46 PM PT |
Business 2.0: Peer-to-peer technology, which file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus use to connect computers over the Internet, has proved to be a disruptive force in many industries. We all know how the music business has been rattled by it. The movie moguls are spooked. Now the telecom business might be about to feel the impact of P2P, thanks to innovative software called Peerio from a little Israeli startup, Popular Telephony. The software is a marked shift from the way phone networks — new and old — work today. Typical networks require special switches to make connections between phones. The more recent Internet-based networks like Vonage use cheaper software switches and gateways to the old phone systems for interconnecting phones. Popular Telephony has eliminated the need for any switches. Continue reading at Business 2.0 website
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