Although the circumstances of his death — considered a suicide, due to persecution over his being gay, although that conclusion has recently been disputed — were tragic, there is no question that computing owes a great deal to Alan Turing.

Britain’s math whiz and famed codebreaker would have celebrated his 100 birthday today. His theories that helped crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma code in World War II might be enough, but Turing pushed the boundaries on machine intelligence and algorithms to levels that changed technology.

The development of the modern computer — including work on the stored program concept — was born from many of his key insights.

No surprise, the doodle today on Google — a company that knows a thing or two about algorithms — today is in tribute to him, a version of Turing’s hypothetical computing machine.

Here it is:

And, if you want to learn more about this tech legend, visit the Web site of Bletchley Park, the location of the secret British codebreaking activities during WWII. Turing worked there, along with 10,000 others — including 5,000 women.

Cisco appears to have continued its recovery following a painful restructuring. Sales are up and setting records, earnings beat the consensus of analysts, and Cisco’s outlook for the coming quarter is positive, too. Cisco’s even reached a point where it’s at least close to fitting into its old skinny jeans. What a difference a year makes. Last year it was all about gloom and doom and some irritable investors were calling for Chambers to lose his job.

Since then the company has undergone a painful but necessary restructuring, shed thousands of jobs, shut down marginal business units and refocused on its core businesses, and as yesterday’s quarterly earnings report proved, the results are not only starting to show, but starting to stick.

So is the work done? Definitely not. Yes, Cisco is showing some return to its strengths, but there’s still a long way to go. We talked about that, the troubles Cisco’s competitors are facing, his long-held view that companies like Cisco should get a tax holiday to repatriate their cash held outside the U.S. and many other things.

Also Chambers, remembering that I dedicated “How Ya Like Me Now” to Cisco last quarter as it turned the corner on its troubles, asked me what song I might use to characterize its results this quarter. Taking inspiration from the headline of my first story and from his cautiously optimistic tone, I settled on “It’s Getting Better All The Time,” the Beatles track, performed by Paul McCartney and embedded after the Q&A. Enjoy.

AllThingsD: John, I don’t know if you saw the headline I wrote earlier, but I said you fit into your skinny jeans again. Is that fair?

John Chambers: [Laughs] I think it’s fair. We were up about four or five inches there so I think we have an inch or two to go, but we’re getting close.

So let me ask about the quarter. It looks like a solid quarter where a lot of the troubles were starting to get behind you. In broad brush strokes, where were Cisco’s strengths? I know some of your competitors were having their own troubles, but where were you strong in particular?

The strengths were that we appear to be executing on the market transitions that are going on, and we appear to be reinventing ourselves, not just in terms of how we control our costs, but in terms of the productivity we’re getting out of our employees. So if you look at the major transitions going on in the industry from an economic point of view, to how customers buy, to where the high tech industry is going, which I would argue is all connected to intelligent networks, that all appears to be playing out as we had hoped. The other transitions that you think about, like data centers and the cloud, we saw 90 percent growth in an industry that is growing at best in the teens. Our ability to move in collaboration, where we grew 10 percent though I think we could do better — it remained solid for us. In video with set-top boxes up 23 percent to new video technologies growing well and seeing improvement in the margins. There are things we need to do to reinvent Cisco. I think I said this at your own conference a decade ago [Chambers spoke at D5 in 2007, but that is not where he made this comment. -Ed.] that voice will be free. It’s almost there. You could see the trend, and what it meant is that once voice would become a smaller part of the network load, that would be given away in order to make way for the video and the entertainment. The same trends are taking place all over again at multiple speeds and multiple gears, which if we’re right, they all play together. Everything from mobility to cloud to the intelligent network, to wireless to security, to video being pervasive, all of those are coming together at tremendous speed. And we’re pulling them all together pretty well for our customers. Now, this is just the beginning if we execute right, and we have plenty of hurdles in front of us, but this may be the voice-will-be-free trend times 10 in terms of the impact of the transitions going on. We appear to have managed them well; we did what we said we would do, turned in record earnings and record revenues, and earnings per share were up 48 percent. We’ve realigned ourselves and reinvented the company, which I think you have to do every five years. Sometimes it takes a crisis to reinvent. … It’s a journey and we’re just getting started.

What’s the number one hurdle that you want to get over this year, that’s in front of you right now and keeping you up at night?

I want to build deeply into our capabilities, a continued focus on gross margins and effectiveness, from product design to sales all integrated together. You probably know this, but we’re the only company who’s anywhere near this profitable with $45 billion in sales with open standards. It isn’t a mainframe business where everything is proprietary or like in Apple’s situation where it’s a wonderful company but it has an architecture. We do it entirely with open IP, so we can be challenged by a 10-person start-up or a by the biggest giants like Dell or IBM or Hewlett-Packard to come at us. With this type of margin but so low a barrier to entry, we’re doing relatively well. But we still have to reinvent ourselves at a faster pace. We have to do what I call the basic blocking and tackling to participate in the new capitalism that we’re heading into. That’s the attention to gross margins, getting the market transitions right, tying the products together so you can get the price premium on them. But what really keeps me up at night this last year was the realization that this has to be constant reinvention. Average is over. An average high-tech company is headed down. Those above-average companies are going to head down in 3 to 5 years. If as a company you can’t reinvent yourself every 3 to 5 years, you have a problem coming at you.

Does that then imply that Cisco had become complacent or even average? It was and is the biggest networking player, but did Cisco lose its way and try to do too much?

Well, I could give you a long list of things we have to do better. We’re a healthily paranoid company so we always have things we could do better. I do think we were fat. Four to five inches, not just one or two. We’re not back in our skinny jeans yet, as you put it, but we’re within an inch or so of getting there. We missed market transitions at the speed at which they occurred. We should have seen the drop-off in public spending coming at us sooner. Everyone else has still run off the turn, even though they saw what happened to us two to four quarters ago. We should have seen it sooner and reinvented ourselves before it hit us, and made the turn much more effectively, and I’m committed to doing that, and the leadership team is, too. It would have been easy to just cut a billion dollars in expenses, reorganize sales and how customers buy. We realized that gross margins can deteriorate not just because of what competitors do but what we do to ourselves, like what we did on switching. We should have been smarter there.

On the conference call you mentioned the possibility of getting back into the mergers and acquisitions game. Any hints on where you might go or whom you might buy?

I think it’s a fair question. Part of the reason we said that was to explain why we’re building up cash in the U.S. Part of it was for share buybacks because the price was attractive. A lot of people don’t realize that we use M&A deals to gain leadership. We were a routing company, we acquired three switching companies. We were an enterprise and commercial company, we acquired a service provider company in Stratacom. If you look at where it’s going to be, it’s probably in data center, collaboration and video, and combining those with security, bring your own device and mobility. A large part has to do with our government allowing us to bring money back to our country.

That’s always been a big issue of yours. You made some comments about it on the conference call as well. Care to elaborate?

I think that it’s going to happen in the next presidential administration whether the president is re-elected or someone else is. I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t been able to get our message out about this more effectively. Ironically, I was in Europe, the government leaders there look you right in the eye and ask what they need to do to bring jobs to their country and keep the ones they have. They are partnering with business. I think we’re following Europe in the wrong way and following more of what they did to get them in trouble in the first place.

There’s a bit of a disconnect, however, to anyone who sees on one hand a company that wants to bring cash back in a tax-advantageous manner in the name of creating jobs, while the same company just fired so many people in the restructuring. Can you connect those dots for the person who sees the apparent logical disconnect? If it’s about jobs, then why are you firing people in the first place? If you were having lunch with President Obama or any other political leader, they might be confused, so how do you explain it?

They’re related. The first thing you’ve got to do when you hit bumps in the market is find out how much of the damage was self-inflicted and how much was the result of the conditions of the market. It would be a cop-out to say it was all the general market. We had to look at what we were doing internally. Every government leader in the world who’s adding to government payrolls and adding government debt is going in the wrong direction. We have to use technology to deliver services better. You do see most government leaders saying they want to get their own houses in order. The second thing they do is look at ways to generate private sector jobs. I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park. He partnered with business, he was critical where appropriate, but in six years he generated 22 million jobs, grew GDP on average by 4 percent per year, and he was America’s champion on the Internet. I think that’s a more practical example. He grew private sector employment versus government employment by a ratio of 9 to 1, and created a positive climate for business, and when business got out of line he’d whack ’em. I think it would be a major mistake not to let companies repatriate their cash because whoever is in the Oval Office next year is going to want to get private sector jobs growing again, and there really aren’t very many levers left to pull. We’ve never had this slow a recovery after this deep a recession.
–

Getting Better – Paul McCartney

The document is a routine filing concerning the timing of the trial and the discovery process. In it, Oracle says that what documents it has received from HP confirms what Oracle has been arguing since this whole thing started: That HP and Intel plan to let the Itanium processor die once it has released two more generations, something HP and Intel have both denied. “HP and Intel have a contractual commitment that Itanium will continue through the next two generations of microprocessors …”

Worse, Oracle alleges that the only reason the chip is still available at all is that “HP is paying Intel to keep it going.” It goes on: “HP has secretly contracted with Intel to keep churning out Itaniums so that HP can maintain the appearance that a dead microprocessor is still alive. The whole thing is a remake of Weekend at Bernie’s.”

Why all the trouble over so obscure a chip? Oracle says it’s all about the support fees that Intel charges. HP makes a lot of money, Oracle says, charging for service and support of its HP UX operating system, which runs on the Itanium chip; it loses money when customers move to systems running more conventional x86-based chips. As Oracle puts it in the filing: “HP achieves a far lower “attach rate” (meaning it gets few service contracts) on the operating systems like Linux that are prevalent on servers running x86 microprocessors. Thus when customers migrate to new platforms, HP loses the service contract. This is a multi-billion dollar problem for HP.” It also helps HP remain competitive with IBM and Oracle’s Sun Microsystems business, Oracle argues in a redacted passage.

“These factors led HP to craft a top-secret plan to create a false perception that Itanium still had a future,” Oracle says in the filing. “HP understands that the future prospects of IT products drive customer purchasing decisions. A buyer who knew that Intel saw no future for Itanium, and was only continuing to invest in the line pursuant to a contractual obligation, would devalue the future prospects of Itanium servers and be less inclined to buy.”

“Oracle Sun has been a victim of this, and according to HP’s documents an intended victim. So why is Oracle the defendant in this case? We now understand it is because Oracle’s decision to stop making new versions of its software for the Itanium system was devastating to HP because it undermined the rationale for paying Intel [redacted] to sustain the illusion of a long-term future for Itanium. Oracle had told too much of the truth.”

HP, whose PR team is working equally late, just sent this emailed statement:

Oracle’s latest filing is nothing more than a desperate delay tactic designed to extend the paralyzing uncertainty in the marketplace created when Oracle announced in March 2011 — in a clear breach of contract — that it would no longer support HP’s Itanium platform. The fact remains that Oracle’s decision to cut off support for Itanium was an illicit business strategy it conjured to try to force Itanium customers into buying Sun servers, and destroy choice in the marketplace. This filing is just the latest in its ongoing campaign to shore up its failing Sun server business and starve thousands of existing Itanium customers who rely on their Itanium processors for mission-critical activities.

As Oracle well knows, HP and Intel have a contractual commitment to continue to sell mission-critical Itanium processers to our customers through the next two generations of microprocessors, thus ensuring the availability of Itanium through at least the end of the decade. HP is resolved to enforcing Oracle’s commitments to HP and our shared customers and will continue to take actions to protect its customers’ best interests. It is time for Oracle to quit pursuing baseless accusations and honor its commitments to HP and to our shared customers in a timely manner.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy had no comment, saying Intel is not a party to the lawsuit, and doesn’t comment on confidential agreements it may or may not have with other companies. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has said in the past the Intel has a long-term roadmap for Itanium that goes beyond the next two generations already disclosed.

Since this whole episode first erupted in March, and escalated into a lawsuit in May, I’ve called it a very public fight about a very obscure chip. Oracle, perhaps looking for something new to fight with HP about, said it would cease developing software created for systems using Intel’s Itanium chip, arguing that it looked like it was going to be retired in the near-ish future. HP, which is the only server vendor worth mentioning that sells Itanium-based systems, was horrified, as was Intel, if for no other reason than they spent a decade or two developing it in hopes it would be the superchip of the future.

Then the future arrived, and it didn’t quite turn out that way. Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices found a way to do 64-bit computing that the marketplace liked better, Intel ultimately embraced the same method for mainstream server chips, and Itanium went on to be a specialized niche product. However, those who use it are a vocal bunch. Some of them petitioned Oracle to change its mind. It hasn’t budged.

So now you know the background. The original filing is embedded below, via Scribd. The best parts are in the first several pages. Happy reading.

Oracle Itanium Filing: “Weekend At Bernie’ss

Fusion-io shares closed at $38.10 — up 9.17 percent — during the regular session, and continued to climb by an additional 1 percent in after-hours trading. The shares have increased by more than 100 percent since they debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at $19 early this summer.

The main news came in the form of a new product, and the publication of news that Fusion-io technology was used in a high-performance computing project at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

People tend to think of Fusion-io as building traditional storage, but its main mission is to get data closer to the processor in a server, so that that processor doesn’t have to sit around waiting. Processors are super speedy and super impatient. Think of the processor as the impatient Miranda Priestly — played by Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” — and how Anne Hathaway’s character, Andy Sachs, is never fast enough for Priestly about handing her something she needs right away. Microprocessors hate nothing more than waiting for a hard drive to serve up the data they need.

Fusion-io’s drives try to speed that process up — and make microprocessors happier — by using flash memory built into an insert card and installing it close to the processor in a system. The news, announced at the Supercomputing conference in Seattle today, is that Fusion-io debuted a 10 terabyte version of its high-end ioDrive Octal product. You can now pack four of these into a single server, and have 40 terabytes of data right up close to those impatient processors. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Supermicro build Fusion-io’s products into their own products.

The other news also had a supercomputing wrinkle to it. A machine that Lawrence Livermore called “Leviathan,” packed with Fusion-io cards and Intel processors, broke a record in processing a graph with more than 68 billion nodes. Well, it didn’t just break the record, it shattered it, as that number of nodes in a graph is four times the prior record. What that means, in English, is that the computer plotted a mathematical graph with more than 68 billion points of data.

Apparently — and I’m just learning this now — there’s a separate version of the Top 500 list called the Graph 500 which focuses on simulating 3-D problems.

It’s a lot to take in, but the main point is that Fusion-io seems to be showing that it has a going business. Critics of the company have argued that it relies too heavily upon its biggest data-center customers like Facebook and Apple, and that it will be vulnerable to slowing sales when those companies are through building their infrastructure. The problem with that argument is that there’s always another impatient processor throwing an impatient diva fit while waiting for data.

Also, I should note that today’s 9 percent move comes after Fusion shares fell about the same amount on word last week that the company is planning a $350 million secondary offering. When investors heard about that last week, they sent the shares plunging by more than 8 percent, territory it has since reclaimed. It has been a bumpy, volatile ride for Fusion-io, no doubt. In the five months since the debut, the stock has traded as low as $15, and almost as high as $40. That’s IPO investing for you.

It’s been more than 30 years since my favorite American bard, John Prine, sang that lyric, and it came to mind as I sat down today to meet with Brian David Johnson, who is, to my recollection, the first person I’ve ever known to carry the job title “futurist.” And yes, it sounds a little specious, until you find out he works as a futurist for the chipmaker Intel, which certainly has a long-term strategic interest in anticipating the demands of the future well before they happen.

Johnson was a guest today on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” program, which I co-hosted with the Journal’s affable Simon Constable. Johnson is in New York to speak at Comic Con about Intel’s Tomorrow Project, which aims to ask honestly what computing may be like 15 or 20 years from now — and the implications for our daily lives.

Think back to 1996 and you probably had some idea of what 2011 would be like. But did you really? You may have had a cellphone, but would you have imagined how much of your daily life would be punctuated by its use, beyond making phone calls? If you were to zap back in time and have a conversation with the 1996 you about life in 2011, you’d probably have to rely on science fiction to get the point across. “You know the communicator and tricorder from ‘Star Trek’? Yeah, we basically have those. We call them smartphones, and they’re kind of a big deal,” the 2011 you might say. “And they’re also the talking computers from ‘Star Trek.’ And you won’t believe who makes them.”

Science fiction makes it possible, Johnson says, to have a conversation about the future, by giving us the metaphors we need to figure out what we want and don’t want to happen. Hence “The Tomorrow Project Anthology,” a collection of short stories set in the future, imagining plausible situations emerging from science fact of today. One volume of the anthology was published earlier this year, and a new one is out now.

What happens, on some hypothetical day in the future, when passwords are easily and readily hackable and all our personal information is more or less available for all the world to see and take and use? That’s what the writer Cory Doctorow asks in his story, “The Knights of the Rainbow Table,” which appears in the new volume.

So these are some of the things that Simon and I talked about with Johnson in today’s closing segment on “Digits,” which you can see below. Enjoy.

*Lyrics from “Living in the Future,” by John Prine, from the 1980 album “Storm Windows.”

Oak Ridge National Lab's "Jaguar" computer

Despite the fact that the Chinese system was built largely with American-made or American-designed components, the news came as a bit of a blow to American pride, and even caught the attention of President Obama, who kvetched about it in January’s State of the Union address.

By June (the list is updated twice a year) the Chinese machine had fallen to second place, its crown seized by a supercomputer in Japan, relegating the top supercomputer in the U.S. to third place.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, will announce plans to build a system that has a good shot at reclaiming the top spot. The machine will be named “Titan,” and its primary computing engine will be the Tesla chip from Nvidia, the company best known for turning out chips that enhance the graphics of games on personal computers.

Nvidia has been making inroads in high-performance computing for some time. Earlier this year I wrote about how the Tesla chips were helping Lucasfilm make movies faster.

I talked with Steve Scott, the CTO of Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, who told me that the Titan machine will be 10 times more powerful than the current Jaguar machine, and that 85 percent of its computing power will come from Nvidia chips, while the remaining portion will come from conventional CPU chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

Why GPUs and not CPUs? It turns out that graphics chips are really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD found inside a PC or server.

It’s also an issue of power. For years, as chips and the transistors on them have shrunk, the amount of power required to send pulsing through them has dropped as well. Scott says that is no longer the case. “We’ve reached the point where processors have become power constrained. If you pack all the transistors that you can onto a chip and run it as fast as you can, the chip will melt. We’ve entered a time where performance is constrained by power, and its only going to get worse, so you need processors that are power efficient,” he says. “It’s a fundamental sea change in the underlying technology of high performance computing.”

GPUs, originally designed for gaming and professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists, are inherently designed to perform several repetitive tasks at once. In explaining this, I always think back to the old saying “many hands make light work,” though here it’s applied to computing. Two people who divide up the task of folding a pile of laundry get it done faster than one. And four people will get it done faster than two.

Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel of a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster. Essentially, lots of small computational jobs are carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and, fundamentally, CPUs chips aren’t as good at it as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one. Generally speaking, Scott says, GPUs are about eight times faster at floating point operations than CPUs.

For Nvidia it will be a return trip to the top spot. China’s supercomputing champ, the Tianhe-1A at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, which is now ranked No. 2 in the world, uses Nvidia GPUs. This certainly got the world’s attention concerning the potential for GPUs in high performance computing.

The plan at Oak Ridge calls for Titan to have 18,000 nodes, each with an AMD CPU chip coupled with an Nvidia Tesla GPU. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by the GPUs, Scott says. Its total computing capacity will top out at 20 petaflops. FLOPS are floating point operations per second. “Peta” refers to how many the system can do every second: In this case, the answer is 20 quadrillion. Just because I can — and because it’s one of the rare cases where I get to use a number that’s larger than the national debt — I’m going to write that number out: 20,000,000,000,000,000.

And what will it be used for? While many of the Department of Energy’s computers are used to simulate nuclear explosions that are no longer allowed thanks to the Test Ban Treaty, this one won’t be. The mission at Oak Ridge, Scott says, is to advance the boundaries of science. Scientists will use it to model climate change, and to predict the results of different methods of mitigating it. They’ll also use it to design engines, study biology and genetics, and explore the possibilities of using nuclear fusion for energy. If you have interesting scientific work to do that requires this kind of computing oomph, you can even write a proposal explaining how you’d use it.

In the first phase of Titan’s deployment, which is already under way, Oak Ridge will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 new Tesla chips. In a second phase, expected to start next year, Oak Ridge plans to deploy the 18,000-node Tesla-based system.

Down the road, the hope within supercomputing circles is that performance improves to the point where we’re no longer talking petaflops, but exaflops, or quintillions of floating point operations every second. The government is already working on that, and earlier this year President Obama asked Congress for $126 million in the federal budget to begin research to work on ways to get there by 2018. The biggest problem: How to supply enough electrical power while delivering the computing muscle. Today’s announcement by Oak Ridge is a big step in that direction, but there are still 981 more petaflops to conquer.

If you’ve ever wished you could clone yourself into two or more people to get more work done, you can be jealous of computers, which can do exactly that. Virtualization allows one physical computer to split itself up into many virtual computers by sharing the computer’s hardware. Chips are now so fast that it makes economic sense to do this, so you can squeeze more work out of each machine. Cloud companies — like, say, Amazon — love it, because it allows them to act a little like a very happy Manhattan real estate developer, and subdivide and rent out a single computer many times over.

Until now, Fusion-io flash memory technology has worked only in cases in which there was no virtualization going on. In big-iron machines that tend to be used for one intensive application at a time, add-in cards are put in servers in order to put data that the process is working on closer to the processor — thus preventing the processor from waiting around, impatiently tapping its foot, for the poky little hard drive that just can’t deliver the data fast enough.

Fusion-io will today announce — at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, put on by the virtualization outfit VMware — its ioCache bundle, which is built specifically for virtualized computing environments. Which is pretty much any cloud computing service you’ve ever heard of.

I talked with Fusion-io CEO David Flynn last week, and he told me that the addition of flash speeds gives the physical machine the ability to run as many as three to five times more virtual machines. The benefit, of course, is that you get more work done on a single machine. More work per machine means either higher productivity overall, or savings on the hardware budget — both of which help CIOs score points with the boss.

The ioCache product was created in cooperation with IO Turbine, a company that Fusion-io acquired for $95 million earlier this month.

The company has thus far seen its shares waggle all over the map since its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in June. Having debuted at $25 a share that day, its stock has traded as high as $36.98 and as low as $19.28. Today, Fusion-io shares closed up $1.05, or more than four percent, to $23.32.

This appears to be the announcement that CEO Paul Otellini alluded to during Intel’s quarterly earnings conference call last month. Intel has kept a pretty tight lid on the details, but I’ve talked to enough people who say this is one of those times when Intel will “open the kimono” on what will be going on inside its chip factories–or fabs–later this year. The big news will revolve around Intel’s disclosure of its 22-nanometer manufacturing process. It’s the sort of thing that gets people who know chips kind of excited and leaves others kind of cold. But in fact, everyone should be kind of excited about this.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Moore’s Law. This was the observation in 1965 by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (pictured at the Intel Museum in 2005) that the number of transistors that could be crammed onto a chip doubles–and the size of those chips tended to shrink–as manufacturing technology improved on a fairly regular basis: About every 18 to 24 months. That shrinking meant two things. Chipmakers could make a chip with the same computing power as the previous generation more cheaply, or they could make a more powerful one with more transistors for about the same cost.

It all comes down to how many transistors you can cram onto a chip, and how many useful chips you can get from a single silicon wafer. In both cases, more is better. Moore’s observation–which was first published 46 years ago this month–has held up remarkably well and has proven one of the most important engines of growth in the technology industry. All the computing oomph you take for granted in your notebook, your smart phone, in the cloud, and all around you happens in part because the chips inside the hardware have gotten smaller and yet ever more powerful every two years or so.

So back to today’s announcement. As I mentioned, it’s going to revolve around its 22-nanometer manufacturing process. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and its current factory processors turn out chips with transistors that are somewhat bigger–32 nanometers. Intel executives often refer to a process they call “tick-tock.” Today constitutes a tick, when in odd-numbered years, a new manufacturing process comes online and the previous generation chips are shifted to being built with the smaller transistors. A “tock” occurs in even-numbered years when Intel engineers come up with new chip designs that really show what the new factory processes are capable of. The implication is that it’s so regular you can almost set your watch by it. Intel’s long-term strategy can be summed up like so: Tick, tock, repeat.

On top of that there are likely to be disclosures about some of the advances in physics that Intel has had to make in order to get chips with transistors so small to work properly. When you’re dealing with things that small, the individual electrons flowing on the chip sometimes don’t behave as they should. For example, in 2007 Intel had to add the element Hafnium to its chip-making process in order to stop individual transistors from wasting electricity. (It was more complicated than that, but that in a nutshell was the problem.) Billions upon billions of transistors in billions of computers around the world wasting electricity is a bad thing, both financially–power is expensive–and environmentally.

What’s funny is that for years people have been saying that Intel–and indeed the entire chip industry–can’t continue on the Moore’s Law trajectory. At some point things get so small that you’re dealing with individual atoms and you can’t get any smaller than that. However, every time people have predicted its end, something happens to keep it going. A lot of companies have come up with some important advances that have kept it going. In the 1990s and early 2000s, IBM came up with some important advances that kept Moore’s Law on track. But more often that not it has been Intel that has kicked down the door when the experts said it was locked. Today it will probably kick down another.

This older video was created around the time that Intel unveiled its 45-nanometer process with Hafnium–kicking down one of those earlier doors. Perhaps there will be another today. Check in later as I cover the announcement.

Nokia faces some very significant challenges. The game has changed from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems, and competitive ecosystems are gaining momentum and share. The emergence of ecosystems represents the broad convergence of the mobility, computing and services industries. In short, our industry changed, it’s time for Nokia to change faster.

–Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

The transition from Symbian to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is one of the more challenging parts of Nokia’s new mobile alliance with Microsoft. Implementing a new strategy like this takes time, something that’s in short supply in the fast-moving mobile market. And with Nokia complicating its roll-out with joint product roadmaps and shared responsibilities, some observers are beginning to wonder if the company will suffer more smartphone market share losses before it enjoys any gains–if it enjoys any at all.

Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu says he expects Nokia to lose 2 points of market share sequentially in smartphones in the first quarter. And he thinks that trend will likely continue in the quarters that follow, and perhaps even accelerate.

That might seem an overly-pessimistic view of Nokia’s situation, but Ferragu has his reasons, top among them the belief that Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft won’t solve the company’s fundamental problem: the lack of innovation and agility fostered by an overlarge company hamstrung by bureaucracy.

“For a company unarguably overstaffed, with an over-engineered organisation, a lack of reactivity clearly acknowledged by management, a partnership with another heavy giant doesn’t sound like the right remedy,” Ferragu argues, noting that Nokia’s worst enemy going forward is time. “The partnership with Microsoft will first take time to implement. Even if the largest areas of the partnership seem to have been decided, a few more months to agree on the details seem a minimum. Moreover, comments made by management [recently] on how the partnership is likely to work are not reassuring: joint product roadmaps, interactions at all layers of both organizations, interlocked areas of responsibilities. All these elements point at likely slower decision making processes and higher risk on the quality of decision made.”

Not the best spot to be in when your leadership position has been eroded by the likes of Apple and HTC, which earlier this month surpassed Nokia in market cap.

“Tablet was the focus, but the changes we did also free it up to be more flexible for other contexts as well,” Honeycomb lead designer Matias Duarte told Mobilized. “It’s about really eliminating all the barriers to all the different kinds of form factors that people might want to interact with.”

Google plans to show off its work with Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, at an event on Wednesday. There, it will talk about the specific changes it has made, as well as the vision behind the shift.

Duarte, who joined Google from Palm last year, said there were really three major areas of focus. Clearly one was to change the way Android worked so that it was suited to devices larger than a phone. But beyond that, Duarte said, Honeycomb was about evolving Android to be better overall at mobile computing tasks. Finally, Duarte said, Honeycomb is designed to make the operating system more usable.

“All of those are works in progress,” he said. “Our work is far from done in any of those.”

One of the most notable changes in Honeycomb is the fact that it no longer has a reliance on physical hardware buttons. That paves the way for all kinds of devices, Duarte said.

“Some of them might look more like a laptop…some of them might not even have soft buttons,” Duarte said. “They might be purely gesturally driven.”

The first Honeycomb devices, however, will all be tablets, starting with the Motorola Xoom, which is headed to Verizon in February.

But, if he has done his job right, Duarte said that hardware makers will be able to create devices that Google never even contemplated. “Whatever they come up with, the most important thing is that we have given that flexibility.”

That could range to attaching Android to a refrigerator or creating products aimed at a specific demographic, such as young kids or the elderly. Heck, someone could even use Android to build a big table computer to take on Microsoft’s Surface. “I can’t see why not,” Duarte said. “I can imagine that.”

As for the potential tablets in particular, Duarte notes that those who initially brushed aside Apple’s iPad when it debuted a year ago underestimated the impact of what Apple did in bringing the multi-touch screen to a larger-size device.

“I think those skeptics were short-sighted,” Duarte said. “That’s the genius of what Apple achieved with that iPad.”

The tablet experience, he said, is largely about the touch interface, which changes people’s relationship with the content they are viewing. In moving the content into a closer and more comfortable position, people relate more and have more emotional experiences, he said.

“People have seen screens that size and have been taking screens that size to bed with them and to their coffee shops with them. They’ve been sitting with them hunched over and in all kinds of contorted positions” Duarte said. “But having that touch interface means that you can interact with the Internet or with a book or with a video player in a totally different posture, in a totally different way. It changes how you engage with the content, how long you engage with the content and even how emotionally close you are to it.”

With Honeycomb, Duarte said, he wanted to make sure that Google was opening Android up to enable those kinds of experiences, but also improving the underpinnings of the operating system to be a more powerful computing experience.

One of the changes, he said, is recognizing that people use tablets differently than they use their phone, even if they are running many of the same types of programs.

“It used to be that Android was something that you held in your hand and you would use in these relatively fine slices of time throughout the day, and then when you sit down at a table or a desk or you go home, that Android stays in your pocket or goes in a charger,” he said. “Now your experience with Android is alternating between these fine slices and these longer periods….So we need to think of Android as an experience that you have 24/7, throughout the entire day. What that means is that you are doing a lot more and you are doing a lot more for longer periods of time.”

That shift, he said, means that the operating system needs to do a better job of shifting between tasks and notifying users of what things are going on in the background. With Honeycomb, Duarte said, Google is improving its recent application switching feature that lets users easily see the places they have been working and point to them, while at the same time getting better notifications from background activities without being constantly interrupted.

Duarte characterized Honeycomb as the biggest change since the debut of Android, but it is also the latest in a series of updates that have come in rapid succession. In many cases, both device makers and wireless carriers have struggled to keep pace with Google, often failing to allow their devices to stay updated with Google’s latest and greatest, even if the phones themselves were capable of being upgraded.

But while others wonder whether Google is moving too quickly in evolving Android, Duarte said he wonders why the rest of the industry is moving so slowly, and promises even faster change to come.

“Using computers suck, to this day,” Duarte said. “It’s one of my daily frustrations that the rate of change in computing experiences is so slow.”

In particular, Duarte said that the basic interaction with programs and files hasn’t changed much. “It’s the same way I did [things] in high school on a Mac Plus.”

One piece of that shift, Durate said, is evolving our expectations of computing devices from a world in which computer users put in information and turn a crank to get a result to one that more resembles an ongoing dialogue.

“What I am looking for is that sense that you get when jazz musicians improvise together,” he said. “The computer should be doing things in concert with you, in support [of] you, not acting like a servant waiting for commands and then returning with results. That’s a little aspirational, I know.”

Honeycomb will get the company partway to that vision, but Duarte said much of that work will reveal itself over time. But make no mistake, he said–although they don’t appear to be the stuff of science fiction, computers are starting to become extensions of the human brain.

“People always think of cybernetics with computers as being this thing that happens far in the future, and you have Star Trek, Borg-like scary things” Duarte said. “But the way computers are used today through social networking, through email, through accessing information like Google–they are already becoming [those] cybernetic parts of our mind.”

The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

Nokia faces some very significant challenges. The game has changed from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems and competitive ecosystems are gaining momentum and share. The emergence of ecosystems represents the broad convergence of the mobility, computing and services industries. In short, our industry changed, it’s time for Nokia to change faster.

– Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

As Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said during the company’s Thursday earnings call, Nokia faces significant challenges in competitiveness and execution. And nowhere is that more clear than in its recent performance in the smartphone market. Nokia may be the world’s largest smartphone maker, but it’s also the world’s slowest growing. As Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu points out this morning, Nokia has been ceding ground precipitously on the smartphone front, with sequential smartphone growth that pales to that of its rivals.

In the November quarter, Nokia’s smartphone shipments grew 7 percent.

Meanwhile,

• Apple’s grew 15 percent
• Research In Motion’s grew 17 percent
• Motorola’s grew 29 percent
• HTC’s grew 34 percent

In the end, Nokia’s smartphone shipments grew at a slower pace than those of its feature phones. Which wouldn’t be so bad if growth in the feature phone weren’t slowing, but it is. Ferragu expects it to decline from 13 percent growth in 2010 to 5 percent growth in 2011.

If ever there was a time for “Nokia to change faster,” as Elop says, it is now. Otherwise…it has a future of continued weakness to look forward to. Says Ferragu, “For the next 12-18 month, there is only one thing we believe Nokia can do: brace. We believe it is difficult to anticipate how badly Nokia’s market position can deteriorate before a new strategy delivers improving fundamentals.”

This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

Indeed. What was it Bill Gates said about the iPad? “It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

Mmhmm.

The good news is that Gartner has revised its outlook upward. Companies and governments will spend $3.6 trillion on IT this year, which is more than the prior $3.4 trillion forecast, amounting to growth of 5.1 percent. Sounds great, right?

Yes, but it’s complicated, especially from the U.S. point of view. The weak dollar makes the figures look a little better than they are. In 2010, Gartner says, IT spending grew 2.2 percent, but more than half of that–1.6 percent–can be attributed to the devaluation of the dollar against other currencies. Companies and governments spending other currencies can get more dollars for their money, and so this tends to inflate the appearance of growth, Gartner’s Richard Gordon told me.

A weak dollar is generally good news for U.S. companies that do a lot of global business. U.S. products and services look more attractive to non-U.S. buyers. But in cases like this, U.S. companies end up paying more for items that get imported and for raw materials.

That’s not to say there isn’t actual growth. Gartner says spending is picking up fastest on telecom equipment, with computing hardware and enterprise software following close behind.

Spending on discretionary items like IT services and consulting is coming back the slowest. When the economic crisis hit in late 2008 and early 2009 these were the first items on the chopping block, and spending on them is only now beginning to make a comeback.

There are the incumbents like the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Motorola is gearing up to launch a Honeycomb-based Android tablet at CES. HP has said it is working on a Palm Tablet (which Fox News says is coming at CES), while RIM is readying its PlayBook for release around March.

And that’s just the big guys. Expect to hear a lot of smaller firms enter the tablet fray as well, including many at CES. Education-centered tablet maker Kno–which announced its product at last year’s D conference–has started shipping its large dual-screen and single-screen models, while Notion Ink has been further teasing its Adam tablet.

Plus, Microsoft, which has been on the outside looking in at the early slate growth, hopes to get back into the game next year as well.

Even with a big market, that leaves a lot of companies angling for a piece of the pie.

For its part, Fuze Box is touting the fact that a lot of these tablets (37 percent) will be used, at least in part, for business purposes.

But other uses will also abound. Half of users plan to use it for social networking, while even more will use it for computing tasks like sending email (75 percent), browsing the Web (78 percent), and reading books and other publications (53 percent).

As far as work uses, correspondence topped the list, followed by online meetings, marketing and training.

“Since before the iPad launched in April, we’ve persisted that tablets would soon become a widely used business tool,” Fuze Box CEO Jeff Cavins said in a statement. “With 2 in 5 tablet owners using their device for business by 2014, we have officially entered the post PC era and the potential is there to reinvent the business environment for collaboration with portable and tactile computing devices, complete with cameras, document sharing, cloud computing, and storage.”

Tucker is a 13-year veteran of Sun Microsystems whose last job was as Sun’s CTO of cloud computing. He was also VP of the AppExchange at Salesforce.com. He’s also known for “Lew’s Law,” which he describes as more of an informal observation about how far the cost of computing can realistically fall.

I caught up with him last week in New York City to talk about what Cisco, long the powerhouse of networking, plans to do in the cloud.

NewEnterprise: First off, what is Lew’s Law?

Lew Tucker: It’s just an observation, not a real law, that the price of computing will never be free, because it requires energy to compute. Computing is really about changing the state of physical bits, and that requires energy. It’s great that we’re driving the costs down. Moore’s Law is hammering the costs. But there is a lower limit. Right now the dominant cost is around managing software, operations and everything else. So we can take a lot of those costs out through automation.

NewEnterprise: When I think of Cisco I think of industrial-strength routers and switches. How do you get from there to cloud computing?

LT: Eight months ago I thought the same thing. I was with Sun for many years and then left to go to Salesforce.com to do software as a service. I became very enamored of the Salesforce model. I came back to Sun to build the Sun Cloud, which was to be a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services. I was an Amazon user myself and I loved how you could so easily spin up as many servers as you wanted without having to buy them, configure them and so on. Building a cloud is another thing entirely. When Cisco called me, I said to them, “You’re about routers and switches and I’m all about complex distributed computing systems.” And Cisco said they were really about networking and making distributed systems. I started digging into it and realized there was a really unique position at Cisco if you think of cloud computing as a fully automated system with different elements. Some of those are networking elements, and some of those are integrated boxes with computing and storage and networking all in one. Some are networking services.

NewEnterprise: When you think about how cloud computing works, you really can’t do anything without fast connections between one system or another, which is something that Cisco knows very well.

LT: The network has always been a shared piece of infrastructure. There are a lot of different applications running on different servers that are trying to reach either each other or their endpoints. So there’s an awful lot that’s going into the network to make that happen in a fair and efficient way.

NewEnterprise: So what hardware is Cisco building here?

LT: We build pre-integrated compute, storage and networking that we’re calling our Unified Computing Systems. You can buy a rack of these systems, and they’re driven by a set of APIs [application programming interfaces]. We’re not alone in that. Hewlett-Packard does something similar. Then the customers add in their own preferred storage environment, like EMC or NetApp, or they can build their own.

NewEnterprise: What kind of use cases are you seeing in companies? What are your customers asking for right now?

LT: Right now what they are asking about is collaboration services, the integration of video and voice and calendaring and messaging. We’ve seen consumer services like Facebook change what people expect at the office. We have a collaboration product called Quad that looks just like Facebook. WebEx is a Cisco service. We’re working on offering that as both a hosted form and one that runs inside the customer’s own environment.

NewEnterprise: So there are a lot of cloud providers out there already–Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which has its Azure platform. They’ve already deployed their services and have relationships with vendors. How do you see the market shaping up, and what is Cisco’s place in it?

LT: I think there’s going to be two or three large cloud providers, but then there will be many smaller ones who specialize in delivering specialized services. Take health care. In that industry, groups of companies are going to get together and offer a HIPAA-compliant cloud. You’ll also see something similar happen around financial services. Those are two industries that have very specific needs. The cloud will be dominated by a few large providers for sure, but there will also be many specialty cloud providers.

NewEnterprise: You’ve been on the job about six months. What have you learned so far?

LT: I’ve learned that there’s an amazing amount of technology within Cisco. It has the largest concentration of network engineers in the world. Part of my job is to go and align our products and roadmaps with this future world that we’re moving into and to uncover a lot of the new approaches to how we solve different networking problems. I’m an engineer, and I like nothing better than being in a room with a bunch of other engineers with a whiteboard as they all battle it out. I’ve also learned that building cloud infrastructure is a lot harder than everyone thought.

What could be better than listening to legendary Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak wax poetic about his first and favorite gadget–which turns out to be a transistor radio?

Well, doing it inside the newly renovated Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., certainly raises the geek factor to 10.

The museum has spent the last five years planning and installing “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing” and will open the doors to the public on January 10, 2011. That’s “011011,” Woz reminded the small crowd of journalists invited for an early tour of the new Silicon Valley facility.

The museum has more than doubled its public space to accommodate the new exhibit, which includes an impressive collection of the rare, revolutionary and ridiculous–mostly relating to computing from the 1950s onward.

The whole shebang was largely funded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose name features prominently in the signage.

Woz led a tour that highlighted some of the machines that meant most to him. He recounted hours spent at the IBM Model 026 punch card machine, and fawned over a Honeywell Kitchen Computer.

That device was originally sold by Neiman Marcus, complete with mod ’60s styling and bearing the “Mad Men”-esque slogan: “If only she could cook as well as the Honeywell computes.”

Woz said it was the machine that inspired him to believe computers could be attractive things for the home.

After a long meander through many, many more Woz-ly musings, the tour ended at the Homebrew Computer Club exhibit, complete with an Apple 1–signed by Woz–basically identical to the one that recently sold at Christie’s of London for $210,000. (Woz flew there and signed that one too.)

Once open, the expanded museum promises to be the perfect spot to take that über-geeky date, or just wander and reflect amidst hundreds of miles of wire and mountains of transistors.

No word on whether Woz will also be on permanent display.

He seemed to enjoy it, but you can judge for yourself by checking out our highlight video reel from the tour, complete with an interview about Woz’s first and favorite gadget, the coming robopocalypse and the iPhone as a future historical artifact.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101203/back-in-the-day-with-woz-a-sneak-peek-inside-the-new-and-improved-computer-history-museum/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/oracle-sets-database-speed-record-larry-ellison-disses-hp/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/oracle-sets-database-speed-record-larry-ellison-disses-hp/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:53:12 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=107 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is having a big day. On the day of the premiere of a high-profile Bloomberg TV documentary that promises to burnish his legend, he also got to brag that Oracle had retaken the current land speed record in database computing from IBM.

Of course he used the opportunity to engage in his favorite new hobby: Taunting rival Hewlett-Packard.

The announcement was straightforward. Oracle’s forthcoming SPARC T3-4 Supercluster has achieved a performance record of more than 30 million transactions per minute, as verified by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, an industry benchmarking organization. This bested the previous record holder, a model of IBM’s Power 780 Server, which delivered more than 10 million transactions per minute.

Farther down on the TPC’s list, in fifth position, is HP’s Integrity Superdome, clocking a performance of a little more than 4 million transactions per minute. Oracle is using the results in ads that portray Oracle as a cheetah, IBM as a respectable stallion and HP as a poky turtle. (Full disclosure: This ad ran in today’s print edition of The Wall Street Journal, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)

At this point in his remarks, Ellison beat the war drums against HP rather loudly: “We think the HP machines are vulnerable. We think they’re expensive. We think they’re vulnerable in the marketplace. We’re going to go after them. We’re going to go after them in the marketplace with better software, better hardware, and better people.”

I’ve asked HP for a response, and will update if I get one. [Update: And here it is, courtesy of company spokesman Michael Thacker: "HP is the number one provider of enterprise servers in the marketplace. We are focused on our customers, and the combination of our technology leadership, product performance, and pricing continues to meet the needs of those customers. The numbers prove it--we experienced 25 percent revenue growth year over year during our last quarter, and we are the only major UNIX vendor that reported server growth."]

[Another update: An HP spokesperson just sent the following additional statement: "Larry Ellison bought a money-losing business that had steady market share declines for years, and which still ranks at the bottom of the market. Customers aren’t fooled by outdated benchmarks, no matter what Oracle says. HP’s market share results prove it. Sun customers are running to HP in droves because they recognize we deliver superior technology, performance and pricing."]

One thing HP and IBM have going for them is that the Oracle system in question won’t be on the market until next June.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/oracle-sets-database-speed-record-larry-ellison-disses-hp/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101118/record-earnings-for-dell/ http://allthingsd.com/20101118/record-earnings-for-dell/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:17:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=52900

Looks like Dell has managed to avoid at least some of the market “air pockets” responsible for Cisco’s weaker-than-expected outlook last week. Posting third-quarter earnings after market close Thursday, the company reported earnings that blew the doors off the Street’s expectations, though sales fell a bit short of them.

The PC maker reported a profit of 45 cents a share on revenue of $15.4 billion. Analysts had expected it to report 32 cents per share on $15.7 billion in revenue–compared to 17 cents a share on revenue of $12.9 billion in the same period last year.

“Our strong results demonstrate that we are listening to customers and delivering what they want,” CEO Michael Dell said in a canned statement. “It validates that our strategy to offer choice and efficiency at every level of the IT enterprise computing stack is taking hold, and we are more focused than ever to being a true partner–not merely a provider–to our customers. Dell is growing in the right areas, and I’m very excited about our momentum.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101118/record-earnings-for-dell/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/kno-prices-its-student-tablets-at-599-and-899-to-ship-by-end-of-the-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/kno-prices-its-student-tablets-at-599-and-899-to-ship-by-end-of-the-year/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:00:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36969

Kno, the high-profile Silicon Valley start-up trying to jump-start a market for tablets focused on students, announced tonight that it will have a limited number available by the end of the year for sale at prices of $599 and $899.

The lower price is for its single-screen device, while the clamshell double-screen version is more expensive.

Kno would not say exactly how many it has ordered for its first tablet production run–the device is being built by China’s Foxconn–but co-founder and CEO Osman Rashid said in an interview earlier today with BoomTown that units would number “in the thousands.”

Rashid said the Kno tablet will initially be aimed at 10 college campuses across the U.S., although he also declined to name them.

“We are going to do online and offline marketing, in a very focused approach,” he said, noting that Kno would be working with some college bookstores too.

Marketing a new and complex product like the Kno will take a lot of effort and cash, especially since it is an increasingly competitive market for mobile and portable computing products that includes Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, Dell and many others.

Kno recently raised another $46 million in funding to add to a $10 million round, and sources said that the Santa Clara, Calif., company could be back out raising even more early next year.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

Kno’s Rashid said his company pushed the go button after getting good feedback from students in a beta test, half of whom used the single-screen device and the other half the two screens, along with its related education platform software.

“We found that 85 percent of those using the single screen wanted the dual-screen version and that those using two screens took three times more notes,” said Rashid. “Students said they love the fact that they can write in the textbook itself and it appears the way it needs to be, even in digital form.”

The first Kno will have an aluminum body, and the company will also offer a set of accessories, such as a cover and a stand.

And Kno will watch initial sales carefully. “As a start-up, we want to make sure we are meeting demand, but also that we roll it out in a careful approach,” said Rashid.

Indeed–and it will be interesting to see how that goes for the ambitious and innovative Kno.

Until the results are in, here is the official press release from Kno:

Kno Announces Pricing and Pre-Order Availability for Tablet Textbook; Pays for Itself in 3 Semesters

Delivers Significant Student Impact for Less than 1% the Cost of a 4-Year College Education

Santa Clara, CA–November 9, 2010–Kno, Inc., a powerful, groundbreaking tablet textbook designed specifically for students and the education market, today revealed the price of its 14.1 inch single and dual-screen tablets at $599 and $899, respectively. The company also announced that it is now accepting a limited number of pre-orders for an initial shipment that is expected to be on customers’ doorsteps by the end of the year.

“Kno’s extraordinary benefits represent only a tiny fraction of the overall cost of college, but its impact on the student’s career–and the energy it adds to the experience, the thrill of learning, and the ultimate grade–is dramatic,” said Osman Rashid, Co-Founder and CEO of Kno, Inc. “Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital textbook costs.”

Kno has been beta-testing the product with students and the response has been overwhelmingly positive for both the single and dual screen devices. Far more than just a digital textbook, Kno is creating a powerfully effective new learning environment that will make students at all levels more successful at processing, grasping and retaining both facts and concepts.

“My experience with Kno has been really incredible. My books have become more interactive and the ability to hand-write electronic notes on the book pages themselves has changed how I retain information,” said Melissa Lin, a sophomore majoring in Biology at UC Berkeley that has been beta-testing the Kno tablet. “I see a ton of difference with the Kno. I can carry everything with me including my books, my notebooks and a browser for research. And, with the lower cost of digital textbooks, it will pay for itself in three semesters which is really great.”

Digital textbooks, which typically cost between 30 and 50 percent less than physical textbooks, will be priced separately and will be sold through the Kno bookstore, which will be accessible on every Kno device. Starting today, students will be able to browse Kno’s bookstore at www.kno.com/store/books, which will include tens of thousands of the most popular textbooks and supplement materials. Kno has previously announced that it is working with major textbook publishers including Cengage, McGraw Hill and Pearson. The company recently added publishers including Macmillan, Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Holtzbrinck as well as BarCharts Publishing, Kaplan, Random House and a large number of the University Presses.

“According to the not-for-profit College Board’s 2010 report, the average college student spends approximately $1,100 a year on book and supplies,” said Babur Habib, CTO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “Kno can reduce that cost while bringing education into the 21st Century, providing students with a far superior learning experience than they have today.”

To learn more about Kno, please visit the Kno blog at http://blog.kno.com or visit us on Facebook www.facebook.com/GoodtoKNO, Twitter www.twitter.com/GoodtoKNO and YouTube www.youtube.com/GoodtoKNO.

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