The company has confirmed the appointments of Scott Prevost to the position of VP of product management on search and Dennis DeCoste to the position of director of research, where he will manage such technical topics as data mining and machine learning.

Prevost will start immediately. DeCoste is a couple of weeks into his new job.

The two hires will focus on delivering changes to the e-commerce site’s homegrown search engine, by better matching items in its inventory based on a consumer’s search terms or interests.

The company is now working on the next-generation of search, according to the company’s research labs, which lists both “search” and “machine learning” as two of its top priorities. Recently, eBay rolled out the ability to sort by “Best Match,” and will soon be launching other versions on eBay.com. “Through great strides we’ve made in applying machine learning to our search engine, search results will continue to become more relevant with each use,” says a labs post.

Previously, Prevost was the principal development manager at Bing, where he led a team of developers who were responsible for a bringing a variety of Bing features to market, including complex stuff like adding “captions and summaries to search results, reference answers and query processing using natural language techniques,” according to Prevost’s LinkedIn profile. Before that, he served as the general manger and director of product for Powerset, which Microsoft acquired in 2008.

Before joining eBay, DeCoste was a research scientist at Facebook, where he worked to improve a number of products, including ad matching, search ranking, link recommendation and spam detection. Prior to that, he was a principal scientist at Microsoft and a director of research at Yahoo Research, according to his profile on LinkedIn.

We also reported exclusively today that eBay’s PayPal subsidiary has hired Sarah Brody, formerly at Apple, to lead Global Design.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

Among the topics we discussed were the rise and fall of social networking sites and whether that makes them fads, the implications of oversharing from a young age and the potential for social networks to become more productive and engaging.

It was a fun chat, and you can now listen to it and read the transcript online.

You can also read my recent trend story about multiple online identities that helped spark the conversation.

Or, if you prefer, you can think of them as very long magazine articles. Here’s the company’s description of the new program:

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today’s announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

Amazon being Amazon (AMZN), there’s nothing else of substance in its press release, but I have asked the company to answer some basic questions. From my email to Amazon PR:

1) Please provide an anticipated pricing range
2) Please explain how wholesale pricing will work
3) Is this program directed at conventional publishers, or does Amazon anticipate that most of the Singles will be self-published by the authors themselves?

UPDATE: Here’s Amazon’s response. Apologies for not getting these up sooner: Amazon sent them along shortly after I posted my story Tuesday morning, but somehow they were swallowed up in an email vortex–some sort of recurring problem I have with Apple Mail client and Google App email.

Anyway:

1) Prices will be less than a typical book.

2) With any particular publisher, pricing and terms will be consistent with our general terms with that publisher.

3) We expect to work directly with publishers and also for writers themselves to publish Kindle Singles.

“What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” researcher Mark Post told the Sunday Times. “We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.” If Post and his colleagues are able to do that, we may end up with an environmentally friendly meat that reduces the impact of food production. Said Post, “You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.”

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina, envisions a day when we use countertop bioreactors to make our meat–steaks and chops with nutritional profiles that we have predetermined. “It would look like a coffee maker,” Mironov said back in 2007. “This is my dream.”

Sadly for Mironov, he wasn’t able to find funding. NASA turned down his request for a grant, and the lone group that did express interest in his work, taking the you-are-what-you-eat philosophy full circle, was interested in meat cultured from its members’ own cells. Mironov declined to identify that particular…diners’ club, but said, “I don’t want to participate in high-tech human cannibalism.”

Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments. As these simulations become more intensive and widely used, however, computers at academic institutions and other research facilities can’t keep up with the demand for medical processing power.

Instead, scientists are tapping into a vast network that allows the research to be parceled out in tiny workloads that can be performed on anyone’s household computer when it’s not otherwise being used.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google (GOOG), YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“We’re very excited to have Dayne Sampson join the team, reporting to Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president, Global Foundation Services,” a Microsoft spokesperson commented about the hire. “Operations and foundation services are key to delivering the Microsoft Software plus Services vision, and Dayne’s extensive operations and industry experience will be a strong asset for GFS and the company.”

Sampson’s departure follows similar migrations by Sean Suchter, Yahoo’s VP of search technology; Qi Lu, one of its top search scientists; Larry Heck, former VP of search & advertising sciences at Yahoo Labs; and Jan Pedersen, who was once chief scientist and VP of Yahoo’s (YHOO) Search and Advertising Technology Group. As I said last week, If Yahoo employee defections to Microsoft continue apace, there may come a day when Redmond will no longer need to buy the struggling company’s search business. It will already have acquired it.

Oh, one last thing: time to update that LinkedIn profile, Dayne…