The launch of Apple’s new iPhone 3GS was the best sales day ever for AT&T’s retail stores, while the number of orders taken at its online store also hit an all-time high, according to an internal memo obtained by MacDailyNews, a blog devoted to all things Apple. While the memo doesn’t outline the precise number […]
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In the market for a new TV? These days, there are bargains galore, especially when it comes to those with plasma screens. The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing popularity of their LCD cousins has TV makers such as Pioneer and Vizio phasing out their entire plasma TV line-ups. Others may soon follow suit.
One can […]
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Cisco today outlined its plans for delivering IT services over the web (aka cloud services), and as part of a conference call, showed off a great slide that illustrates exactly how many companies this former networking gear maker wants to take on. If I were to boil it all down, I’d say the company’s cloud […]
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Cablevision today got further blessings from the Supreme Court, which decided not to hear an appeal in the networked DVR-related litigation. We have been following this story pretty closely, and frankly, it is good to see an end to litigation around this technology. Many studios and TV networks such as Paramount, Disney, CBS and […]
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Research In Motion bought Dash Navigation in May for an undisclosed price, but yesterday an investment adviser did the math and stated on his blog that the BlackBerry maker paid $8.3 million for the navigation company. Davis Freeberg combed through Research In Motion’s SEC filings and its first-quarter fiscal 2010 conference call in June, and […]
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Nokia plans to launch an ARM-based netbook that relies on the Google-pioneered Android mobile operating system in 2010, writes Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir in a research note issued this morning. In the same note, he predicts that the total number of netbooks sold worldwide will reach 25 million in 2009 vs. 10 […]
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Data center hardware infrastructure can be roughly categorized into servers, networking and storage. But two of those areas are merging before our eyes, as Cisco and HP battle for server and network integration. The business and technical implications of this consolidation affect other companies and customers — and the dust isn’t likely to settle anytime […]
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One sure way to hinder success of a device is a confusing name and an unclear purpose. That might explain the results of a recent NPD survey on netbooks, showing that many consumers are bewildered and disappointed with the gadgets.
Some highlights from the survey tell the story of a device that doesn’t behave as the […]
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Visitors to Google’s I/O conference earlier this year received a surprise gift: a new touchscreen Google phone made by HTC. The svelte gadget is the second major Google Android device on the market, and sometime in August, you’ll be able to buy one from T-Mobile USA. T-Mobile is going to sell it for $199 with […]
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The consumer love affair with Apple’s iPhone shows
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Android so far is only on a few phones, but some want to put the Google OS on bigger devices. Yet just as analysts are starting to believe in the suitability of Android to run netbooks, chipmaker Nvidia is backing off the OS for the newly emerged smartbook category.
Analysts at Gartner have gone on record […]
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Sony Walkman
Sony CEO Howard Stringer reaffirmed the consumer electronics giant’s decision to focus on networked gadgets while discussing its restructuring at a shareholders’ meeting held today, according to Reuters. Stringer said the company would lay off 16,000 workers and close eight of its 57 manufacturing sites as part of an attempt to reduce spending by […]
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FCC acting chairman Michael Copps said yesterday afternoon that the agency would investigate exclusivity deals between carriers and handset makers, and “take action” if they were found to cause harm to consumers. While the largest cellular carriers are protesting the probe, consumer advocates are thrilled. However with two of the four largest U.S. […]
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I’m starting to believe that the fight for the netbook operating system simply won’t go the full 10 rounds. In case you haven’t yet managed to score a ringside seat, let me offer you a blow-by-blow recap.

Round One – ASUS offers a custom Xandros Linux distro with the original Eee PC 701 in October 2007.
[…]
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IBM’s first true cloud computing products, announced today, consists of workload-specific clouds that can be run by an enterprise on special-purpose IBM gear, Big Blue building that same cloud on its special-purpose gear running inside a firewall, or running the workload on IBM’s hosted cloud. The offering seems like a crippled compromise between the scalability […]
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As folks increasingly store and access information online, the data centers powering cloud services need to be managed more like a single computing entity rather than a bunch of servers, according to a Google white paper (Google calls it a mini-book) released today.
The paper lays out the concept of warehouse-scale computers (which we have previously […]

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Since Dell keeps telling folks it wants to buy some companies, we’ve written out a list that Michael Dell should consult as he expands his eponymous empire. Second-hand sources quoted in the Wall Street Journal today said that the company was seeking deals in data storage and tech services. The article also noted that Dell […]

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Hewlett Packard  today announced a new line of servers, a data center mapping program and some consulting and financing services aimed at companies that build out mega data centers. Potential purchasers of the new HP machines include those building cloud computing offerings and enterprise customers trying to build their own clouds or high-performance computing clusters.
Problem […]

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Though they probably never saw it coming, mobile phone companies have a new secret weapon: social networking. Indeed, thanks to our growing usage of social networks like Facebook as communication tools, more and more people are signing up for mobile data plans, which are far more lucrative than increasingly commoditized voice services. Of course, […]

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The netbook craze continues. The little laptops took center stage at the recently completed Computex conference, with dozens of new devices and prototypes on display. But while one would think that the netbook explosion would have all of the involved parties singing happy songs around a campfire, that’s not the case. In fact, there appears […]

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Vyatta , a Belmont, Calif.-based company that makes open source routing platform has raised $10 million in Series C funding led by Citrix Systems. Previous investors Comcast Interactive Capital, Panorama Capital and ArrowPath Venture Partners also invested in this round of funding. The company had previously raised a total of $18.5 million in funding.
The investment […]

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Apple’s highly anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference keynote kicked off in San Francisco today and — true to form — the company made a slew of product announcements. Here’s a brief roundup of the big Apple news so far:

The New iPhone 3G S: The new 3G S iPhone (available June 19) comes with a 3-megapixel autofocus […]

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Salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based SaaS company, is planning to offer a native Palm Pre app later this year, according to Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff. I stopped by Salesforce’s office earlier today to chat about Marc’s keynote address at our upcoming Structure 09 conference. Salesforce already offers a native application for the BlackBerry and iPhone […]

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I probably should have learned my lesson from my laptop battery crapping out and my iPhone dropping calls on the overloaded AT&T network at Moscone in San Francisco today. But at its developers’ conference, Apple offered some tasty new products that this consumer wants to get her grubby hands on.

Here are the top five things […]

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After writing extensively about how cell phone providers want to boost their business by offering wireless access for emerging devices, such as electric meters or e-readers, I decided to check with the nation’s four largest carriers to see what they consider to be some of the most interesting devices that run on their networks. I […]

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Intel today said it plans to acquire Wind River Systems for $884 million — a deal that gives the world’s largest chipmaker control of development software and operating systems for devices that range from cell phones to routers. Intel last year made a big to-do about getting into the embedded market that supplies chips for […]

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Cisco today said it would add a rack-mounted server as a second form factor for its Unified Communications System. That’s Cisco’s fancy name for its blade server — soon to be available as a pizza box — packed with processors, memory and virtualized I/O. It will release the rack-mounted servers during the fourth quarter of […]

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Yesterday Intel Corp., and today Microsoft, gave us more proof that their branding skills are as limited as my ability to strike out a major league baseball player.
Intel wants to name its new thin, light and low-power consuming notebooks CULV, aka Consumer Ultra Low Voltage. Many of these devices will be nearly as thin as […]

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Like Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson fighting over a girl, storage giant EMC and rival NetApp are vying to own Data Domain. Today NetApp upped its original bid for the de-duplication company to $30 per share, matching a counteroffer EMC made Monday. The revised NetApp bid increases the price it’s willing to pay from $25 […]

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The $1.5 billion offer for de-duplication leader Data Domain from NetApp, which has its own de-duplication technology, was an indicator of just how far ahead of the game Data Domain is. And now rival EMC, sensing blood, is outbidding NetApp with its own cash offer. So what is it that makes Data Domain so hot?

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The buzz around the much-awaited Palm Pre has started. The make-or-break device that will define the destiny of the iconic handheld maker will hit the market later this week. For Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, it is a highly anticipated device that will hopefully bring out big-spending smartphone buyers. I have been less than sanguine […]

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Dell is looking to make acquisitions, according to one of its executives, who made the comment a day after the computer maker reported dismal earnings for its latest fiscal quarter, IDG News said today. Steve Felice, president of Dell’s small and medium business unit, said during a conference call with reporters that the computer […]

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SiCortex, a company that makes a green supercomputer using proprietary chips and some “Back to the Future” styling, is seeking to sell its assets by the end of June. (Check out what’s for sale here.) According to a story at HPCwire, SiCortex was seeking a third round of financing (it finalized a $37 million round […]

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Intel believes the cannibalization of notebooks by netbooks to be at around 20 percent, Reuters reported today. Christian Morales, the European sales chief for Intel, estimated that netbooks currently comprise about 16 percent of worldwide notebook sales, though he put that figure slightly higher for western Europe, and said it could be as high as […]

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Last year was arguably “The Year of the Netbook.” Unfortunately for AMD and NVIDIA, they were left on the sidelines as the netbook market picked up steam in 2008. The vast majority of these devices run on Intel’s Atom chip using the company’s integrated GMA 950 for the graphics component. With the imminent release of […]

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Pogoplug, the little gadget that turns any USB-enabled drive into a personal storage locker accessible over the Internet, impressed me as much as it did Kevin over at our sister site jkOnTheRun. But I really wanted to learn how exactly it worked. So I reached out to Pogoplug maker Cloud Engines’ chief technology officer, Brad […]

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Next week Dell plans to announce a server based on the Nano chip from VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese x86 vendor known for its low-power chips for netbooks and other portable computers, according to the New York Times. Putting VIA chips in servers reduces both the cost and power consumption of servers — something important for […]

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Last last night, I ended up updating my MacBook to Mac OS X 10.5.7, the latest version of the software. It’s caused two problems: The first is that it’s killed the audio output on the computer; in the preferences pane, the only option I have is “digital output.” The second problem has been an overall […]

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Earlier this week my colleague Kevin Tofel asked what would happen if Cloud Engines, the company behind Pogoplug, went out of business. To address such concerns, Cloud Engines has done two things: it promised to put its software in open source in case of bankruptcy and raised fresh venture funding from Ryan McIntyre at The […]

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T-Mobile USA is looking to introduce Android-based devices from three different manufacturers, Cole Brodman, chief technology officer of the company, said in a conversation with me earlier today. Android is a mobile OS developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based technology giant, Google. “We are looking to launch multiple Android-based devices in the second half of this […]

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I’ve long been skeptical of netbooks, but clearly, I need to reassess my elitist attitude toward them. I wasn’t a fan partially because I don’t like using them and partially because I didn’t believe that consumers would really go for a machine that seems to call for so many compromises. Most early versions didn’t use […]

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Amazon will reportedly introduce a new Kindle later this week, one with a big screen. And because it’s got a big screen and because it counts The New York Times among its launch partners, many of my fellow bloggers have decided that it will be the product that digitally delivers newspapers and in the process, saves the industry.

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Guest post by Martyn Davies, News Editor at VoIP User,  Principal Consultant at Dialogic, Podcaster at Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast, and contributor to the Voice of VOIPSA blog. @martyndavies on twitter. The INQ¹ is the third generation o…

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Given that the wireless networking technology Ultrawideband (UWB) is on its deathbed and WirelessHD and WHDI are yet to gain any real momentum, it seems that the winner of wireless HD video sweepstakes is going to be 802.11n which can stream data at 100 Mbps. In a recent survey, Scottsdale, Ariz.,-based research group In-Stat comes […]

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The folks at Google must to be pretty pleased with themselves — G-1, a moderately useful phone using their Android mobile operating system, has sold a million handsets since it launched last October. Of course Apple, by comparison, sold a million handsets around the planet during the launch weekend while Verizon sold that number of […]

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Last week, I blogged about the au Box, an Internet-video friendly uber set-top box developed by Motorola . My blog post was based on a story in the Information Week. The publication reported that the multi-featured set-top box that can play back DVDs and CDs would use Google’s Android OS. I had heard something similar […]

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MacBook Air, the skinniest of all the Apple machines, has been my computer of choice since the day I bought it. Rarely have I regretted owning the featherweight laptop, but when those regrets do crop up, they’re typically around the lack of storage space — for at times, the 128 GB SSD isn’t enough. My […]

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Last fall, I asked the question: Where will Android go next? For while Google’s mobile-oriented, lightweight operating system has been linked with netbooks and various other devices, we thought Android would be ideal for Internet video-focused set-top boxes. Motorola apparently thought so, too, and was said to be working on an Android-based set-top box. Today, […]

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While I had sworn off spending willy-nilly on new gizmos in 2009, it looks like the $99-dollar PogoPlug is going to test my self-control. Why? It turns any USB-enabled drive into a personal storage locker accessible over the Internet. The little device hooks up to a local storage device via USB and can be connected […]

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Someone has to go first. Plantronics’ teaser campaign promises Bluetooth and vague delights. But what I really want is a great Bluetooth headset, a digital signal processor with Skype’s SILK codec inside, and a superwideband highest-fidelity micropho…

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