Wayin, the social networking startup launched by Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, just closed $14 million in Series B financing, bringing its total backing to $20 million. U.S. Venture Partners led the round and USVP partner Rick Lewis is joining the board of the Denver-based company. Read More »
My resolution: reinvent the display–again
By Mary Lou Jepsen
Dec. 30, 2011, 12:01am PT
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Mary Lou Jepsen, the queen of screens who designed the One Laptop Per Child project, is now the founder and CEO of PixelQI. In her view, the screens are not an after thought, they are key to the user experience. Read More »
How are people like Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley approaching 2012? We asked 12 of the best-known tech industry leaders to share their New Year’s resolutions with us. Read More »
Inexpensive rented data center capacity and cheap but powerful open-source toolsets have completely changed the game for tech entrepreneurs, says Silicon Valley legend Andy Bechtolsheim. In short, you would have to be nuts to build, rather than rent, a data center. Read More »
It is fashionable to obsesses about the web startup phenomenons and forget old fashioned Silicon Valley startups – ones that makes hardware, writes software and along the way clocks in hundreds of millions in sales and profits. And like everything good it takes time to build … Read More »
Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy has a new venture, but surprisingly enough, it’s not about building big hardware or enterprise software. It’s a new social startup called WayIn that’s focused on building a community of users that can vote and comment on pretty much anything. Read More »
WayIn is a new startup being developed by Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy. But so far, the tech industry veteran is going about WayIn’s launch in a slightly unexpected way: entirely over Twitter. On Wednesday, McNealy took to Twitter to answer questions about his new company. Read More »
The global economy continues to face uncertainty, but despite this, many technology companies have cash on hand and are opting to spend it on mergers and acquisitions. Here we examine some likely strategies from five different companies: IBM, Oracle, HP, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Read More »
Just a few hours after Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems was approved, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz sent out an internal memo to employees discussing the impact the change in control would have. Go Oracle! he told Sun employees. There’s more to the story, though. Read More »
The European Commission has finally officially approved Oracle’s proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Sun’s time in no-man’s-land saw it lose many customers and raised questions about key products and divisions that it has. The question now is, what has this cost the company? Read More »
According to the Chaos Theory, in a giant system that has lots of interconnections, even the smallest action can have a massive impact. It’s more simply described by the butterfly effect. This theory has taken its toll on the software business, thanks to the … Read More »
Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a … Read More »
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Earlier today, I stopped by at the Social Graph Symposium at Sun Microsystems’ Menlo Park campus. The event, which attracted some of the most well-known experts on social networks and social graphs, was organized to look at the various challenges and opportunities being presented by … Read More »
Notable Observation: “In the context of software, the word Enterprise has now officially come to mean software that sucks. Enterprise Software hit the nadir of suckitude at the launch of Enjoy SAP. This is like the American Dental Association launching Enjoy Root Canal. SAP is certainly an … Read More »
Oracle’s decision to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion is not only going to shake up the database business — it’s likely to energize the Java community, too. And of course, the deal puts the insurgent MySQL database in the hands of incumbent Oracle. Whatever the … Read More »
Updated: Late last night, The New York Times reported that IBM’s rumored $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems is off. The doubts about the deal were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal said that Sun’s board was divided on the wisdom … Read More »
ParaScale, a Cupertino, Calif.-based storage software company that debuted in June 2008, today announced the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, which allows companies to turn commodity Linux servers into an Amazon S3-styled storage cloud. … Read More »
Updated: Google called to let me know that despite its inclusion on a list released Thursday that named the search giant as a member of the Open Cloud Manifesto Group, when the formal list comes out on Monday, Google won’t be on it. Spokesman Jon Murchinson … Read More »
With IBM rumored to have made a $6.5 billion buyout offer for Sun Microsystems, it appears the company that coined the phrase “The Network is the Computer” is in play. But no one should allow IBM to walk away with Sun — which … Read More »
This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion in cash. The deal makes sense given Sun’s distressed share price, and because both companies appear to be pursuing cloud computing — the next big computing opportunity … Read More »
Sun Microsystems, as has been widely expected in the technology world, has finally announced its own cloud computing platform. Sun will offer raw compute power as well as storage through its Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service. The services, while being announced … Read More »
Cisco Systems today announced its new blade server, first reported by us in March 2008, along with a Unified Computing strategy that converges storage, compute and networking into a single layer (thanks to virtualization technologies) that is managed by a specialized piece of software. … Read More »
Before I left for India, I asked folks at Glassdoor.com, a Sausalito, Calif.-based company that that tracks employee satisfaction, to run a custom query for me. I wanted to find out which 10 publicly traded companies had the best pay packages for their engineers. Whenever … Read More »
Aster Data Systems, which makes software that allows companies to build massively scalable databases on commodity hardware, has raised an additional $5 million as part of its Series B round of funding from Institutional Venture Partners. Aster had originally closed $12 million back in … Read More »
Marten Mickos, who was chief executive officer of MySQL prior to its billion-dollar sale to Sun Microsystems, has decided to leave the company, the second high-profile MySQL executive to do so in as many days. On Thursday, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL co-founder and … Read More »
On Friday I wrote about the rise of specialty computing clouds and AMD’s efforts to build a supercomputer that will essentially be a graphics rendering cloud. Today, insideHPC points me to a post from Josh Simons over at Sun Microsystems about his trip to … Read More »
Yesterday AMD announced that it was building a specialty supercomputer to deliver gaming through a computing cloud. Aside from the coolness of being able to play your video games on an iPhone, pause them, and pick them up at home, the news bolsters the cloud … Read More »
In a call today outlining Sun Microsystem’s cloud computing efforts, David Douglas, SVP of Sun’s cloud computing business and Lew Tucker, Sun’s CTO, said the server and software vendor believes that there will be multiple clouds tailored to specific industries, and that more than one … Read More »
For the first time ever, a supercomputer using Nvidia chips has achieved a spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released late Friday. The Nvidia-containing machine is ranked 29 and is a cluster built by NEC and Sun that uses chips from … Read More »
Sun Microsystems to cut between 5000 to 6000 jobs to save between $600-to-$800 million. Read More »
Sun Microsystems plans to lay off about 350 employees in January. The computer systems maker said in a WARN letter that it would lay off 352 people between January 5 and January 25 across the U.S. citing a “need to reduce overall spending in its fiscal … Read More »
In 2004, Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Arastra, a Menlo Park, Calif-based maker of high-performance 10 GB switches for the data center market. Today the company announced it’s changing its name to Arista Networks and is hiring Jayshree Ullal, a 25-year veteran of the networking business, as … Read More »
I traveled down to Houston today to check out a data center geek’s version of paradise — the inside of the factory where HP builds their rack-mounted servers and high-value blade systems. I shot plenty of photos that show how a bunch of chips and boards … Read More »
VMware, which single-handedly created a market for virtualization, is currently faced with the threat of commoditization of its core product, increased competition and fiscal uncertainty. The question is, did EMC Corp. kill this golden goose? Continue Reading. Read More »
I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips … Read More »
GigaOM’s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won’t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and
From the company that spent $4.1 billion buying a tape company comes some cutting-edge storage news: Sun Microsystems said today that it will put solid-state Flash drives into a line of servers and other storage products, making access to stored data faster and more … Read More »
Desktop virtualization is far from a new topic, in fact it dates back to the inception of the client-server model. But there are still virtualization startups out there, among them Redwood City, Calif.-based MokaFive, which is gunning for a chance to go up against Microsoft, … Read More »
These days, thanks to a visually intensive style of computing, a good GPU can improve the user experience much better than a fast CPU. In the data center certain tasks are moving from commodity CPU boxes to GPUs, meaning that over the next year or two, … Read More »
During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at some big news involving Amazon and its web services. Today, the company officially announced: Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. … Read More »
As Ruby on Rails rose to prominence in the last few years, the platform has faced derision from some programmers over its inability to scale for enterprise applications. Ruby on Rails might be good for making interactive web pages, but it was no C or Java. … Read More »
I’ve been talking about the enormous amount of cash it takes to create any kind of chip company and expressing doubts about the number of startups we will see getting financial backing to create truly innovative ideas in semiconductors. Analyst Linley Gwennap apparently feels … Read More »
It’s been awhile since I’ve provided an update on our upcoming conference, Structure 08, which will be held at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Center on June 25. We’ve been busily adding speakers and further finessing the agenda to address some of today’s biggest technology … Read More »
I was ready to write off today because earlier I felt under the weather. Now, after lolling about in a daze and reading to my toddler, I’m feeling a bit better. The best part about lolling about was instead of focusing on news related to television … Read More »
Acquia, a North Andover, Mass.-based startup, is announcing a supported product using Drupal, the open-source content managment system that underlies many of the community aspects on the web, from sites such as Fast Company to The Onion. It’s a rite of passage for an open-source project … Read More »
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