While Green says it’s still too early to talk about what a Zimride mobile application would look like, he notes that the potential for mobile to unlock a new audience for ride sharing will be “absolutely huge.” A mobile app would open up the possibility for different types of trips for a more casual, dynamic user, says Green. For example, the bulk of current Zimride riders are consistent commuters and planners who book pretty far in advance online, but a mobile app could facilitate more on-the-spot, random, last-minute and dynamic trips.

Other new carpooling startups have embraced mobile even more quickly than Zimride. Two-year-old Carticipate bills itself as the first mobile ride-sharing app with a location-based platform. The app can match you and your carpooling needs by where you are at any given time. It might not have the trusted feeling of the college networks and corporations that Zimride relies upon, but it’s simple and intuitive.

Weeels is another ride- and taxi-sharing service that has mobile baked into its core. Conceived by David Mahfouda on a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 2006, the current Weeels mobile app has been under development since the fall of 2009. Carpooling service provider Avego also has already launched its iPhone app, which can dynamically find open seats in carpools.

It’s been the mobile platforms of iPhone and Android that have really enabled unobtrusive, location-based apps to be developed around car data and now ride sharing. Laura Schewel, the co-founder of Virtual Vehicle Company (VEVCo), which builds apps based on cell phone GPS data, told me that Google and Apple’s mobile operating systems enabled VEVCo to make an app that was inexpensive and could pull driver information without the consumers having to add in manual input. That’s the key: Don’t ask users to do any more than they have to.

However, the real heart of how Zimride has been able to bring in big name customers — 55 corporate and university partners and counting — is that they’ve created an ecosystem based on users trusting the networks they use for ride sharing. For example, three companies that work in an office park are comfortable pooling together their users for rides because they’re neighbors. Or college students know the other car poolers will be other students, so there’s a level of trust that the ecosystem provides.

That kind of trust could be harder to manage for mobile-focused startups, given the nature of an app that is looking to organize dynamic, casual trips. Wheels, Carticipate and Avego might have drop-dead simple mobile apps already available to install and use, but the filters and comfort levels don’t seems as reassuring.

Neither, I would guess, are the revenues. Zimride’s Green says the company is break even now, before it’s invested in expansion, and it makes money via subscriptions from its big name customers. It’s hard to see how the other companies will make money at the end of the day from consumers wanting to share their rides.

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Telcos and satellite TV providers were able to pick up some of those customers, posting combined gains of 495,000 subscribers. That still leaves 216,000 subscribers who cut the cord entirely. Pay TV operators gained some 378,000 subscribers during the same quarter last year.

SNL Kagan analyst Mariam Rondeli was careful not to read too much into those numbers when I talked to her on the phone today, saying that much of those losses seem to be attributable to customers who subscribed to pay TV early last year due to the broadcast digital transition. Now these customers see the prices for their introductory packages going up, and quite a few of them have decided not to stick around.

She also said that the continuing recession and its impact on the job and housing market seem to make people rethink their subscriptions. However, she doesn’t believe all is lost for cable and other forms of pay TV. “We do think the second quarter was unique,” she told me. SNL Kagan expects the industry to gain a total of 900,000 subscribers in the third and fourth quarter.

Rondeli also said that she doesn’t see over-the-top video as a driving factor behind the current losses, but she cautioned not to ignore online video. The overall pay TV market is saturated, with around 100 million households in the U.S. paying for TV services. That also means that over-the-top services have could impact future growth, even if the overall numbers of users accessing programing exclusively over the Internet are small. “It can make a difference even if you don’t have a huge pie,” she said.

Earlier today, the New York Times published a piece that proclaimed “no shortage of demand” for pay TV. Our own Ryan Lawler shot back, saying that “(t)he $100 cable bill is dead; the cable industry just doesn’t know it yet.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sfxeric.

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Cisco CEO John Chambers pointed out the tight integration with the network in his speech announcing the device, saying that unlike the consumer tablets, the Cisco Cius (pronounced see-us) is designed to work with video, collaboration and all of the cloud services in a seamless way that’s controlled by an enterprise. Cisco showed off the ability to make the device work with its Flip camera as well as with its new smart grid gadgets, and it sounds like it might also work with Cisco’s Telepresence, which uses a proprietary protocol. The device, expected out in the first quarter of 2011, tries to bring together Cisco’s love of video, collaboration and the network in a portable package appropriate for the enterprise or educational market.

During the demos, the most remarkable aspect was how interactive the Cisco tablet experience will be, compared with the hottest tablet out today, the Apple iPad. Cisco is building a device around collaboration, not consumption, which makes sense given how collaboration is a big focus point for Cisco and for getting work done.

Essentially this is the next step for Cisco’s voice-over-IP phone business. “Video is the new voice,” said Chambers — a sentiment I’m not sure everyone is ready to embrace. Regardless, the contrasts between the role of broadband in Cisco’s worldview and that of Apple’s are striking, and it’s worth asking yourself if you’d rather have a tablet built for interactive collaboration or web-connected entertainment.

The tablet itself sounds like it will use the ARM architecture inside, at least based on the anticipated 8-hour battery life,(Update: It actually uses Intel’s Atom) and the use of Android is a big coup for Google. Kevin and James questioned whether this device would be able to access the Android Market since Google has been reluctant to allow that in the past, although Cisco touts the Android developer community in its release.

The Cius weighs almost as much as an iPad (which is pretty heavy), has 720p HD, a 5-megapixel camera, and a bunch of radios for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G (4G is coming, although Cisco did not say if it would be WiMAX or LTE). Kevin also wondered if the 7-inch screen size might be too small for enterprise use, and if people really wanted to carry a Cius, a smartphone and a laptop. He also pointed about the “Super VGA” screen resolution will likely be underwhelming at the current screen size.

My hunch is that if Cisco wants to sell a lot of these tablets, it will either have to prove that it’s better in the consumer space than it is currently (and beef up the hardware on the tablet), or it will have to really sell enterprises, schools and other large organizations on the integration story and video phones as our collaborative future. As long as it’s selling to CIOs, Cisco’s tablet has a chance.

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In a presentation on Thursday, Gelsinger pointed out that compute and storage are rapidly getting better about dealing with more information, while networks  are trying to catch up. “Compute is doubling every two years. Storage doubles every 15 months, and networking is much much much slower, like every four years, so how do you deal with latency bandwidth and consistency?” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger’s answer is caching. Imagine a two-way content delivery network built on EMC appliances that tracks and replicates changes made to data at one node and then pushes them out to all the other nodes as quickly as possible. Gelsinger calls this freeing the information from physical storage, but it sounds more like making sure your information is in a bunch of different physical storage containers. He mentions EMC’s acquisition of intellectual property from Yotta Yotta as offering the breakthrough required to build this technology.

But at the end of the day, this is all a big if, not an actual product yet.  If EMC can link storage and virtualized machines together, the data center that “follows the sun” — basically moving compute loads around the world where it’s cheapest to run them – or automatic failover for cloud services become possible. However, it will be controlled by a proprietary hardware vendor, which certainly clouds its prospects a bit.

Intel's single chip cloud computer

Tilera, a startup building chips that contain anywhere from 16 to 100 cores, said today it’s raised $25 million in a third round of funding from investors including Broadcom. Chips made by Tilera, which we named as one of five multicore statups to watch two years ago, are aimed at boosting performance and energy efficiency for networking and cloud computing, which is likely why Broadcom invested. But as Tilera spends more time emphasizing the cloud and big players like Intel do the same, we have to ask: Do cloud computing and web-scale computing need their own chips?

Broadcom likely wants an edge should Tilera’s multiple RISC-based (rather than Intel’s x86) processors set fire to the cloud computing world as equipment companies attempt to develop power-efficient chips that can be adapted to specific workloads. For Broadcom, an investment in Tilera is a direct challenge to Intel’s dominance in the data center computing space, as well as a bet on faster networking chips.

Tilera has advantages in cloud computing because its chip architecture allows for a lot of lower-power processors to talk to one another using an interconnect technology that doesn’t cause bottlenecks. In plain English, Tilera has figured out a way to get a lot of cores to talk without having to pause to listen to one another, which slows things down as you add more cores. A Tilera executive told me last year that if just 10 percent of cloud computing or web-scale customers took a chance on the startup’s architecture, it could succeed.

But while Tilera, which started developing its chips in 2004, may have the lead when it comes to building massively multicore chips with a mesh-interconnect, Intel smells an opportunity as well and as such is building out what it calls a “single-chip cloud computer” with 48 cores for the cloud computing market. There are also systems vendors trying to solve similar problems for those needing energy-efficient web-scale computing, such as SeaMicro and Smooth-Stone.

A key problem in all of these endeavors is figuring out how to get the multiple chips or cores to function together in such a way that performance scales linearly with the addition of each new core rather than tapering off as the communications between the cores or chips becomes overloaded. Intel and Tilera are hoping to do this on the chip itself, while systems vendors are trying to do it with a better box.

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The Austin expansion and the ETF TEF funding is conditioned on a city incentive package worth $200,000. The city will vote in March on whether or not it will approve the incentives, likely before South by Southwest, which starts on March 12. If all goes well with the city approval, a Facebook spokeswoman says the company could open an Austin office in May for its online operations team. Meanwhile city documents and Facebook say that the  company is still exploring other locales.

Facebook, which employs 1,200 people and has 400 million registered users, is following in the tradition of several Silicon Valley companies by locating deep in the heart of Texas. Google actually opened an Austin office in 2008, but then backpedaled a few months later. Intel, Borland Software and AMD have all had public Austin expansion plans, sometimes followed by equally public contractions.

However, I’m irritated by the use of incentives to draw Facebook to Austin, even as I realize that it could help our local tech community. I feel like Austin is a strong enough contender to stand among the top cities for a Facebook’s expansion given our talent, lower cost of living and “hip” vibe, and I hate the arms race and entitlement among corporations that the practice of offering incentives perpetrates.

Anyhow, welcome to Austin, Facebook. As a tip, don’t try to build anything above the Edwards aquifer, and you’ll be fine.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Igor Bespamnatyov

27 years old, with longish hair (no helmet), wearing tan boots and a light-colored shirt with sleeves rolled back (no black turtleneck), Jobs looks like he’s having the time of his life riding the two-wheel Bimmer in San Francisco freelancer Moira Johnston’s feature “High Tech, High Risk, and High Life in Silicon Valley,” published in the magazine’s October 1982 issue.

However, notwithstanding his (excellent) taste in bikes, Steve’s stated ambition, when interviewed by Johnston over herb tea at a vegetarian restaurant, was modestly at the time to become “the Volkswagen” of the microcomputer sector rather than its BMW — which became a popular automotive analogy with Apple-watching commentators later on — although he emphasizes that “We’d rather call the Apple a personal than a home computer.”

The article notes that the Apple computer “has inspired a dedicated cult of hard-core enthusiasts who trade new uses for the computer in the columns of Apple magazines” and that Jobs had “become a potent role model for a new breed of bright kids who are writing and selling software programs and, with their arcane computer skills, gaining the prestige formerly tasted only by the high-school football team.”

Johnston also reports that besides the BMW two-wheeler, Jobs, already holding $100 million worth of Apple stock, also owned “the requisite Mercedes,” but that “success seems not to have spoiled the first folk hero of the computer age,” who still preferred according to an unnamed friend quoted, “to drive his motorcycle to my place, sit around and drink wine, and talk about what we’re going to do when we grow up.”

Of more than passing interest is that not unlike Apple’s performance through the current economic recession, the company seemed to be weathering a late ’82 downturn the microchip sector rather well, with revenues soaring 81 percent year-over-year and Apple occupying 22 buildings in Silicon Valley as well as having plants in Texas, Singapore, and Ireland.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Read here for a scan and transcript, with photos, of the entire National Geographic article.

A tip of the hat to Modern Mechanix for posting the article scan and to Peter Orosz of jalopnik.com for drawing my attention to this fascinating snippet of history.

Under terms of the deal, Google will provide 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock for each share of On2 common stock, as well as 15 cents a share in cash, bringing the total value of the deal to about $133 million. It will close after some six months of haggling since Google made an initial offer of $106.5 million in August 2009.

When the deal closes, Google will own all of On2′s video compression technology, which includes the VP6 and VP8 video codecs. At the time it was first announced, many believed that the deal could allow Google to circumvent On2 licensing fees or collect them from third parties like Adobe or Move Networks. The suggestion was also made that Google could use its control of the new VP8 to push it as the dominant codec for YouTube.

But YouTube has thrown its weight behind H.264 for encoding of its HD videos, as has much of the video industry. In fact, YouTube’s recently released HTML5 implementation is based on H.264 as opposed to the open-source Ogg Theora encoding format, which was formed out of On2′s VP3 codec. So it seems unlikely that Google plans to use its control of On2 to push others to adopt its codecs.

Google could adopt some of On2′s video encoding and transcoding technology into YouTube’s back end to speed the encoding of user-generated content that gets uploaded to the site. YouTube said last year that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, so having a more robust encoding solution might help the company to speed the amount of time that lags between when a video is uploaded and when it becomes available on the site.

Google could also leverage some of On2′s wireless technology in its quest to increase adoption of video on Android mobile phones. As Om pointed out last August: “[On2] owns technologies for embedded video for mobile platforms (Hantro) and On2 TrueMobile System, a mobile video system designed to send video across the networks — including 2.5G, Edge, 3G and 4G networks — using On2’s VP7 technology.”

Google is expected to close on the On2 acquisition “on or about Feb. 19,” so it probably won’t be long before we find out what the company has in mind for On2′s technology.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor is the brains behind the Nexus One phone and will also star as the processor inside some small yet powerful computers called smartbooks, but rivals such as Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Marvell are gunning for those same design wins. And from a feature perspective, it looks like Qualcomm’s competitors may bring more to the party. Its current 1 GHz Snapdragon (a 1.5 GHz version with 1080p will be in later handsets) delivers 720p video, and has a 3-D graphics engine that’s less impressive than those from Marvell or Nvidia.

Yes, Qualcomm has won big so far. Nvidia launched an application processor at the 2008 Mobile World Congress, which was one sexy hunk of silicon. Later, it became the foundation of the Tegra chipset for mobile devices. After seeing what that could do, I predicted it would revolutionize computing and graphics consumption on the phone. So far, it’s in the Zune, but hasn’t taken off like I expected.

Last year Texas Instruments talked up its OMAP 4 chipset, which seemed to exceed Tegra in terms of graphics performance (1080p, supports up to a 20-megapixel camera, etc), and actually had me giddy with excitement. This year at MWC it launched with TI talking up the chip’s ability to enable gesture recognition on handsets. Also today Marvell, which has really made a big push into application processors for mobile devices in the last year or so, launched its own 1 GHz chip capable of delivering 1080p HD video and hosting real-time, graphic-intensive applications.

Not to be outdone, ST Ericsson, another top wireless chipmaker, announced at the MWC show a dual-core smartphone chip that can deliver 1.2 Ghz on each core. That’s about what my laptop offered five years ago, and seems like far more performance than any phone needs, until you take into consideration that the phone form factor is just one of many mobile connected form factors and that ST Ericsson has also created a chip for mobile devices that allows for HDMI out of the phone.

We predicted such a port in our phone of the not-too-distant-future, but ST Ericsson has the silicon to make it happen. That means with an HDMI cable your phone becomes a DVD player for any content downloaded from the web. One hopes that online stores can get their act together when it comes to selling HD versions of video on mobile devices.

But the question still remains, in a world offering silicon that enables HDMI content to be stored and processed on a handset, or gesture recognition thanks to a high-end camera and a powerful processors, can Qualcomm compete? For the last two years I’ve waited for Qualcomm to be dethroned, but I’m still waiting. Maybe 2010 is the year.

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A new report by BroadPoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall about the cost of production of the iPad based on the going rate for component parts, manufacturing cost and built-in warranty repair costs reveals quite a wide profit margin on a per device basis. The entry-level $499 model apparently generates $208 in profit, while the top of the line $829 model more than doubles that, raking in $446 per unit.

Marshall estimates that the cost of making the 16GB Wi-Fi model of the iPad runs around $270.50, plus $20 for warranty costs for a total of $290.50. Most of that cost accounts for the 9.7-inch touchscreen display, which Marshall guesses costs around $100. Apple sees considerable savings on its own in-house A4 chips, which run around $15 per unit. With a cost of $290.50 and a selling price of $499, Apple stands to see a profit margin of 42.9 percent with each sale.

On other models that margin ranges from 48 to 55.1 percent, giving the iPad line as a whole an overall profit-generating power of about 50 percent, a number which assumes that the Wi-Fi models will sell considerably more than the 3G-capable devices, a reasonable assumption. Computerworld points out that while the number seems fairly high, it is in fact on par with Apple’s other hardware offerings:

High profit margins are standard for Apple, which earlier in the week boasted that its corporate margin for 2009′s final quarter was 40.1%. Some products, in fact, have estimated margins even higher than Marshall’s iPad numbers: The consensus for the iPhone 3GS is above 60%, for example.

iSuppli, a research firm which is well-known for its Apple product tear-downs and component analyses, has refrained from making any estimates about the iPad’s cost to build as of yet, though it does acknowledge that there’s reason to believe many costs will be similar to those found in the manufacture of the iPhone and iPod touch:

We really want to wait until we know a little more about what’s inside. We’d rather not just throw numbers at it yet. It does seem like a gigantic iPod Touch, which means that although some costs would just scale up from the iPod, like the display and the touch screen, a lot won’t.

Considering that the iPad is a brand new product just getting out of the gate, news that it already enjoys such a wide profit margin is a very promising sign of things to come for future Apple customers. Just like it eventually became profitable for Apple to sell the iPhone 3G at a subsidized $99 price point as parts became cheaper and manufacturing costs went down, so too is it conceivable that we will eventually see a significant dip in the price of the iPad. If the 1G iPad sticks around when Apple eventually introduces a 2G camera-equipped model, for instance, 1G pricing could drop to a point where it would decimate netbook sales.

There’s also the possibility that the iPad will eventually get the same subsidy treatment the iPhone currently enjoys, though Apple doesn’t appear to want to go that route with consumers just yet, preferring instead to keep the device unlocked and therefore theoretically available to a broader buyer-base. Subsidies attached to contracts could reduce the initial purchase price considerably, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see $199 as the cost of entry for the 16GB Wi-Fi/3G model.

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