Cisco buying Flip video maker Pure Digital? I can't go for that (no can do)
Submitted by Brad Reese on Wed, 03/11/09 - 7:00pm.When yours truly heard the speculation that Cisco might buy Flip Video maker Pure Digital, I began humming to myself that provocative tune by John Oates and Daryl Hall, "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)."
Why?
Although a Cisco purchase would be a spectacularly successful cash out for Pure Digital's venture capital investor - Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital (keep in mind that Moritz and Sequoia were also the original venture capital backers of Cisco), it would not be a wise acquisition for Cisco in my opinion. First, how do Cisco's valuable channel partners benefit with Cisco capital and management attention focused on products sold in mass retail outlets for between $130 and $230 and whose success has spawned a large group of copycat competitors?
Second, Cisco's expertise is in developing and supporting complex technology. I fear Cisco risks being "dumbed down" and losing its edge in selling and supporting complex technology, for example, a recent Infonetics enterprise router report shows Cisco gaining market share in SMB routers but losing ground in the high-end router segment to Juniper Networks.
Cisco channel partners have made Cisco the most profitable and successful networking vendor on earth. It's my opinion Cisco capital needs to be singularly invested and Cisco management attention totally focused on improving the success and profitability of Cisco channel partners. Anything less and Cisco risks losing what has made it so successful. Read more
Overall WLAN revenues shrivel in late 2008
Submitted by John Cox on Wed, 03/11/09 - 6:35pm.[This is repost of a news story elsewhere on our site]
The wireless LAN market shriveled at the end of 2008, according to new, if sketchy, data released by Infonetics.
The Boston-based market researcher says worldwide WLAN equipment revenues dropped 11% in Q4 compared to the previous quarter. For the year, revenues fell 4% to $2.4 billion worldwide.
Two vendors who apparently saw revenue increases were Motorola and D-Link, though Infonetics didn’t provide specifics. The research firm says Motorola is very close behind second-place Aruba. Read more
Microsoft gets extension in EU antitrust case
Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Wed, 03/11/09 - 6:34pm.European antitrust regulators are giving Microsoft more time to respond to an antitrust complaint over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft's response was due this week but is now due April 21. Read more
No frills, just features: Motorola's new semi-rugged MC55 mobile computer
Submitted by John Cox on Wed, 03/11/09 - 5:30pm.[This is repost of a news story posted elsewhere on this site]
I'm fascinated by the engineering challenges, actually the engineering achievements, in rugged and semi-rugged devices. I even talked to a bunch of engineers on how they do it and wrote a story about it, "When devices just can't break." Read more
Cisco picks partners for next-gen data center assault
Submitted by Cisco Subnet on Wed, 03/11/09 - 5:02pm.OK, so maybe it's not a largely solo effort after all...
Cisco is expected to introduce at least five high profile partners for its "Unified Computing" launch on Monday: Intel, Microsoft, EMC Smarts, BMC Software and VMware. SAP and Oracle are expected to demonstrate applications in a Unified Computing environment, Savvis is said by sources to be a beta, and more partnerships may follow soon afterward. Read more
IBM ups the ante with Power virtualization
Submitted by Jon Brodkin on Wed, 03/11/09 - 4:25pm.Virtualization is one of the hottest buzzwords in IT today, but all the big news seems to revolve around x86-based systems and the companies that are virtualizing them, such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
But the original virtualization company – IBM – is somewhat quietly making strides of its own. Read more
Crab meat set to blast off for International Space Station
Submitted by Layer 8 on Wed, 03/11/09 - 3:51pm.The International Space Station has garnered a lot of "firsts" in its history and soon it will get its first crab meat delivery courtesy of NASA.
The Miller's Select crab meat will fly up onboard NASA's shuttle mission STS119 which is expected to launch this week (though a liquid hydrogen Read more
Big day for Web search advances: Penn State, Google and Web Genome Project
Submitted by Alpha Doggs on Wed, 03/11/09 - 3:18pm.Researchers from Penn State and Queensland University of Technology have dug through Dogpile search logs and used neural network technology to figure out what gets people to click through to Web sites from search engines. Among their findings:
* Query length, browser used and number of records in a search can all in predicting future click through rates, whereas time of the first query and log in time don't
* More users click through early in the day Read more
Argonne National Lab names new director
Submitted by Alpha Doggs on Wed, 03/11/09 - 1:55pm.
Eric Isaacs, a University of Chicago physicist, has been named head of the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Isaacs is already a senior administrator at the lab. Read more
H-1B hiring now more difficult - this a good or bad thing?
Submitted by Jeff Caruso on Wed, 03/11/09 - 12:29pm.The tech industry has been notorious for hiring foreign workers under H-1B visas. With the country in recession, the U.S. government has now made the H-1B program more restrictive than ever.
Will the restrictions yield the desired effect, of fewer foreign workers taking jobs in the U.S.? Read the story and decide.
Free the iPhone! Readers back federal ban on iPhone/AT&T-like deals
Submitted by John Cox on Wed, 03/11/09 - 12:29pm.Readers of this blog are overwhelming in favor of banning the exclusive deals between handset makers and carriers that restrict smartphones and other devices to a single network.
I posted last week about pressure groups working to influence a sympathetic Obama administration to ban such deals, on the grounds they are anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
So far, 87 readers took the poll associated with the blog post. Read more
Cisco Wireless IP Phones: 7925 Product Announcement and Comparison
Submitted by Dennis Hartmann on Wed, 03/11/09 - 12:09pm.Cisco currently has three different wireless phones in their product offerings. The 7920 was Cisco first WLAN phone using 802.11b (11Mbps) technology that came to market around the time of Call Manager 4.0. The phone showed incredible potential, but was not without its share of potential pitfalls.
The 7920 had the following challenges:
• No extensible markup language (XML) support Read more
• Poor power management features
• Limited Call Manager feature support
• Limited wireless security standard support (WEP)
• Gray scale low resolution screen
Google to become newest blue chip stock?
Submitted by Google Subnet on Wed, 03/11/09 - 11:53am.Read more
That's the rumor, now that former Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) bigwigs Citigroup and General Motors are trading below $2 and may get booted from the index. With two potential open spots, the other likely new DJIA member is Cisco. And that means that even in this down economy, the smart money is on the Web and IT.
Google blocks overly successful iPhone app
Submitted by Google Subnet on Wed, 03/11/09 - 11:05am.Looks like Google's got a taste of its own medicine, and it doesn't like it one bit. It put a stop to Infinite SMS, a wildly popular, third-party 99-cent iPhone application that used Google's free Gmail Labs SMS service to provide free texts to users. Google put the block on after it decided it just couldn't foot the bill for all those texts anymore. Wow, an app maker profiting from a service provider's underlying infrastructure, and the service provider blocking the app. Read more
UPDATED: Raytheon creates first mobile adhoc battlefield net, with 20-year-old radio
Submitted by John Cox on Wed, 03/11/09 - 10:28am.[Please see the UPDATE at end of this post, a response by Raytheon to two comments on this news]
Raytheon says it's been able to rejigger an existing radio to create for the first time a mobile, ad hoc, battlefield network for voice, data and video traffic with soldiers, vehicles, and airborne units.
That's news because the Department of Defense's multi-billion dollar, problem-plagued Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS, called "jitters") has been unable to achieve that basic function after nearly a decade. Read more
New iPod Shuffle: Even smaller, and it talks back to you
Submitted by Keith Shaw on Wed, 03/11/09 - 10:19am.Forget about Apple rumors – this one is straight from the company. Apple today launched a new iPod Shuffle, at nearly half the size of the previous version, along with new VoiceOver technology that enables the device to speak out song titles, artists and playlist names. The 4GB version is available now for $79 and comes in silver or black.
The third generation of the Shuffle is smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and includes controls on its earphone cord, Apple says. The VoiceOver feature can also speak in 14 different languages, including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Apple says the device features up to 10 hours of battery life.
The new Shuffle comes with Apple Earphones with Remote, a USB cable, and requires a Macintosh system with a USB 2.0 port, OS X v10.411 or later, iTunes 8.1 or later, or a Windows PC with a USB port and support for Vista, XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later, and iTunes 8.1.
Plus, check out a slideshow on the evolution of the iPod: iPod...do you? A playful list of iPods
Google's 'interest-based' ads sure to stoke privacy fears
Submitted by Paul McNamara on Wed, 03/11/09 - 9:00am.Google announced this morning that it is going to more and more sophisticated tracking of its users online browsing patterns in the interest of displaying to them advertising that will presumably be of greater interest. And while the company made all the requisite assurances about privacy and transparency, that's not stopping industry observers from predicting a showdown over the practice.
From a Google blog post headlined "Making ads more interesting:"
We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest - say sports, gardening, cars, pets - with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.
Read more
Dow Jones Industrial Average: Cisco may have the right stuff
Submitted by Brad Reese on Wed, 03/11/09 - 8:39am.What NASA is to space exploration, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is to stock investing and according to a recent Reuters report, Cisco may have the right stuff to be a "blue chip" replacement for Citigroup and/or General Motors should either one get the boot by the Dow Average for having a low stock price.
Mark Cuban asks a great question about Twitter
Submitted by Paul McNamara on Wed, 03/11/09 - 8:13am.From a post to his blog made early this morning:
Twittering is undeniably of interest for any number of reasons, but the question I have, is where does Twitter Time come from? Keeping an eye on the stream of tweets that can come your way, or watching tweets to keep up with what people are discussing or just curiosity and the voyeurism that is part of tweeting can suck hours in the day. So what did we used to do that we have replaced with twittering?
Read more
Out-of-order Packets Trash Voice and Video
Submitted by Sevcik and Wetzel on Wed, 03/11/09 - 7:59am.
If you plan to combine multiple T1s or E1s to construct a higher bandwidth logical link, you should know that combining links can lead to out-of-order packets that can hurt voice and video stream quality. There are several ways to fix this problem, and the right solution depends on your situation. Read more
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