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Videoconferencing has truly become a part of our daily lives. Technologies such as Apple’s FaceTime or Google Hangouts are easy to set up and use, and are affordable at the consumer level — so much so that video calling is now part of the daily norm for a rapidly growing number of people. It’s this kind of simplicity that explains how and why video has found its way not only into everyday life but also areas like business and education.

Cost and cumbersome requirements are no longer barriers. Today, it seems as if every company I talk to already has, or is starting to, use videoconferencing — making the question not if, but what, video solution a company will implement. When making that choice, simplicity is and will continue to be the key for those companies.

Organizations are looking to implement solutions that are two things: Intuitive and obvious. Which is why, looking back to the fireside chat, I appreciate systems like the one from Avaya that can be launched with a single click from any device with a Web browser, or by simply dragging and dropping participants into a conference. Ease of use is paramount. Location has become irrelevant. Now we can include people on a discussion via their smartphones with minimal difficulty. That is the difference.

Of course there are still challenges, but ultimately the technology is finally here, and bridging numerous gaps in the collaboration needs for enterprises.

What’s still missing?

All too often, technology does not cater to the everyday user. Owner’s manuals are too complex; my guess is that most people simply do not use them. The result is that people hardly know how to use their own technology.

I bought a garage door recently. The manuals were difficult to follow, so I finally went online and found a nice video that taught me how to program it. Things like this show how video instruction can be extremely helpful and a great supplement to traditional methods.

Technology for the masses, and the classes

People need better education, and technology should help with that. This is an absolute passion of mine, and one that I have paid close attention to for many years. I always believed computers were going to be able to do great things for learning — and they have, but there’s more to come and still farther to go.

Today, schools with BYOD programs or solutions for providing devices to students are encouraging collaboration with students, teachers, and even professionals — right in the classroom. It’s a real-time, dynamic educational environment, enabled by technology. This instant exchange and feedback model is much more invigorating and conducive to true education and understanding of the world. What a change from the traditional, deskbound, blanket curriculum that forces every student into the same mold.

I have always also wondered: What if a computer could be a teacher? The ability to have one-on-one interaction with dynamically aware computers could completely revolutionize the way we learn. We may not be there yet. Computers still can’t actively engage and recognize emotions and facial expressions, which would be key. However, collaborative and video technologies in the classroom are allowing students to receive individualized attention and learn at their own pace while being actually engaged.

In the modern mobile world, dreams can quickly become realities, due to our ability to instantly connect with other people and their ideas. That spontaneity is due to the availability and growth of collaboration technologies in everyday life, in the classroom and in the workplace. That is where the future of video and mobile collaboration has arrived.

Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Jobs in 1976. After leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak was involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students. Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he “adopted” the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. Wozniak currently serves as chief scientist for Fusion-io.

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who once employed Jobs shortly before he and Steve Wozniak started Apple, doesn’t have any specific names to answer that question. But what he does have is a new book, out today, to aid in the search: “Finding the Next Steve Jobs — How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.”

And Bushnell should know about the importance of recognizing that talent — during Atari’s heyday, he turned down the opportunity to own one-third of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s nascent company. By 1980, he writes in the book, “I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.”

“Finding the Next Steve Jobs” is being released by Net Minds, a print/e-book hybrid publishing startup led by former Yahoo exec Tim Sanders. Bushnell said it uses Jobs as a metaphor for the creative iconoclasts who clash with corporate culture and can’t get hired. He sat down with AllThingsD to explain further.

AllThingsD: Just how close were you to Steve after his brief involvement with Atari?

Nolan Bushnell: We’d talk on the phone infrequently, but he’d come up to [my house in] Woodside about once a month, usually on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and we’d go up on the hill and talk. Occasionally, I’d go down to his place, but a lot of the time it was him coming up to my place.

Why are we even looking for the “next Steve Jobs?”

Steve took a failing computer company — and they probably would have never brought him back if they weren’t at the end of their rope — and turned it into the highest-market-cap company in the world. People were always aware that innovative solutions are good for your company. I think this just underscored it in a really powerful way. It wasn’t just through cutting costs or innovative marketing. Though Steve was a pretty good marketer.

But that was when he returned to Apple in 1997. Most of the time when people talk about the “next Steve Jobs,” they’re using that phrase to refer to entrepreneurs who are still early on in their careers. So, are those people really that hard up for work?

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they’re being edited out of importance. Right now, Google is doing some great things, but Hewlett-Packard is trying to commit suicide. Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.

Speaking of progress, what’s the most exciting thing for you in videogames?

I think the next big game opportunity is Google Glasses [sic]. If I told you all my ideas for it, I’d have to kill you. And the Oculus Rift. The game business reinvents itself every five years. The last five years have been the days of mobile gaming and shortform gaming, exemplified by Rovio with Angry Birds and Zynga with FarmVille. And that is over.

(Nolan’s daughter and PR agent, Alissa Bushnell, quickly jumped in at this point, asking him to clarify what he meant by “over.”)

Most games, by their nature, have a half-life of two years or less. It’s the outlier that has a half-life that’s longer than that. But that doesn’t mean that the marketplace is synchronized. So you have the early adopters coming into something, and they soon encourage the more timid to come in. It broadens the group. But players’ engagement is not lengthened.

But smartphones and tablets continue to be hugely popular, so how are their games “over”?

All the money’s out. Do I really want to do a mobile game that’s one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.

Does the potential for a new, game-changing entrepreneur exist independently of how these different companies or industries are changing?

I really believe that the future is happening whether we want it or not. The companies that force the future to happen faster will succeed in the next 20 years, and the ones that are stuck in today will lose market share. People say, “I want to be around in 20 years.” I say, “I have no idea. But if you’re not doing 10 different things, if you don’t have four skunkworks, then you’re not going to find the next thing.”

(Clarification: an earlier version of this story said Bushnell employed both Jobs and Wozniak. Although Wozniak was involved with and paid for his work on Atari’s game “Breakout,” he was paid by Jobs rather than Bushnell’s company).

“Something Ventured: Risk, Reward, and the Original Venture Capitalists” is a documentary that celebrates — pretty much without a lot of criticism — the very first venture capitalists who were behind the tech giants launching companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, Atari and Genentech.

Starting in January, “Something Ventured” is being aired on public television stations nationwide.

The film — which premiered at SXSW last year — focuses on the key VCs, including investor Arthur Rock, Kleiner Perkins’ Tom Perkins, Sequoia Capital’s Don Valentine and New Enterprise Associate’s Dick Kramlich. It’s full of great stories from them and others, such as remembering the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s proclivity to not worry too much about showering.

And there are some tasty quotes, too:

Perkins: “I don’t know how to write a business plan. I can only tell you how we read them. We start at the back, and if the numbers are big, we look at the front to see what kind of business it is.”

Rock: “Steve Jobs is a national treasure. He is so visionary, and so bright. I had to fire him, though.”

Valentine: “I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who will do it our way. I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who think there’s a dress code. I’m interested in entrepreneurs who have a vision of doing something consequential –preferably that becomes big.”

And from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, where Jobs once worked: “They (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) offered a third of Apple Computer for $50,000, and I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think so.’ I could have owned a third of Apple Computer for $50,000. Big mistake.”

Indeed.

Here’s the trailer.

And nestled within all that, Apple made news on the feature front as well, adding an entirely new storage option to both the iMac and the MacBook Pro: The Fusion Drive.

The Fusion Drive combines the best of both worlds: The high capacity, reliability and affordability of a traditional hard drive, with the snappy, instant-on speed of a solid-state storage drive, without breaking the budget.

If you’ve been paying attention to the features on Apple’s notebooks for the last few years, you couldn’t help but notice that solid-state storage has been creeping its way in where traditional hard drives have always held sway.

The trend, some argued, was inevitable. Flash memory is speedier and allows a computer to boot up faster, and it also tends to be more power efficient. But until recently, to have an SSD meant sacrificing overall capacity for speed. The MacBook Air maxes out at 512 GB while the hard-drive based MacBook Pro can accommodate a one terabyte drive.

The trouble with solid-state drives is that it costs too much to use enough of them to build a unit that stores as much as standard hard drives — say, a terabyte. Recently, the price per gigabyte for the flash memory used in a solid-state drive has fallen to about 89 cents, says Ryan Chien, a memory analyst at market research firm IHS. Traditional hard drives are still a lot less expensive, costing 5 cents to 10 cents per gigabyte. “And flash has come down the cost curve, but it isn’t going to catch up with hard drives anytime soon,” he says.

Flash also brings help with power consumption. A hard drive has to spin, and that takes about three times as much power as it does to move data in and out of a chip. And even at rest, a hard drive consumes a lot more power than a flash drive. That makes a huge difference in mobile machines, where power consumption and battery life are all-important considerations.

Another fact is that for most users, one terabyte is usually overkill.

Rather than stick with the standard industry trajectory under which hard drive capacity tends to double ever couple of years or so, hybrid drives have been offering a third way to keep storage capacity high, while boosting the overall speed, especially for frequently used data.

Enter the hybrid, which is what the Fusion Drive is. Basically, the Fusion Drive brings 128GB of flash with a 1TB or 3TB hard drive. The operating system and files you use the most often will be kept in the flash memory close at hand and lightning quick. Boot times will be a lot shorter than they used to be and certain key applications — like, say, iTunes and iWork — will be lightning fast as well.

Intel has a technology called SmartResponse that is similar. However, Chien doesn’t think Apple is using Intel’s approach with the Fusion Drive. “Intel is using a caching approach. Apple is using a tiering approach that’s less granular in terms of file manipulation and works on a bigger scale.” Also key: The combined drives act and appear to the user like one big drive.

The traditional storage industry had been facing sort of a bleak outlook and now has an interesting way to stay relevant in personal computers. Who really needs four terabytes today or will need eight a year or two from now? It’s better, Apple seems to be arguing, to have the drive you have, bolstered by some flash chips to give it some extra pep. Expect to see similar drives showing up in notebooks from other manufacturers soon.

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Why? The birthday boy is Steve Wozniak.

Fusion-io, where Woz is chief scientist, planned the party as a surprise for the Apple co-founder at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Guests secretly invited to the museum received pink boas, noisemakers, and a chance to test their skills on Tetris — a Woz favorite.

The word from the party is that, despite the social-media-happy crowd, it remained a surprise. One drunk tweet or text message supposedly popped up last night, but Woz’s wife deleted it from all of her husband’s many phones and gadgets.

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried and Mike Isaac are there, and sent us these photos:

The company won’t just be partying for Woz, but celebrating an important technology advance. And while the press release it has put out doesn’t exactly make it accessible to the layman, it comes down to this: Servers that run in the cloud are going all flash.

Up to now, more often than not you’d see flash memory added as a supplement to a standard server to speed things up. The example I always use is pretty straightforward: The main microprocessors in a server that are doing the heavy computing lifting of processing data are constantly — and by constantly I mean a few million times a second — waiting around for the rest of the system to catch up and hand off more data to it. Conventional hard drives and all the pipes in the system that connect them to the processor are too slow to keep the processor running at full capacity, and so having spent the money for all that computing horsepower, you never quite get all the potential out it. Multiply this condition across thousands of servers in a data center, each with several processors in the box, and you can see how this becomes an irritating economic problem.

Fusion-io’s stock in trade has from the start been about keeping those impatient processors busy. You put flash memory chips up close to the processor, let them grab a lot of data out of the hard drive and stuff their pockets full of it and then shovel it off by the armload to the processor. More computing work gets done, and in the long run, you get more computing oomph for your dollar, or spend less on computing hardware to get the same level of work done. Got all that?

It’s because of this that companies like Facebook and Apple have loaded the servers in their data centers with Fusion-io’s memory cards. But the flash has always existed in a combined environment. Facebook, for example, treated the flash as a cache, pretty much as I described it above.

But now, using this new technology that Fusion is announcing tonight, the boxes in Facebook’s data centers are going all flash. As David Flynn, Fusion’s CEO, put it to me last week when he came to New York: “Most recently, because flash has become higher capacity and has a lower cost point, Facebook has gone to an all-flash architecture. The systems are all flash and no longer blended with hard disks.”

Typically, data centers have these big hulking storage arrays that store all the live data that’s being used, and they perform essentially the same function that the hard drive does in your PC: They hold everything, waiting for the moment when they’re called upon to be used. Yes, I’m simplifying it greatly.

You should also know that storage arrays are what companies like EMC and NetApp specialize in, and they’re generally still based on hard drives. Start-ups like XtremIO — which EMC bought — and Violin Memory are working on ways to use flash to blow up the old-school storage array business, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Today’s new product is Fusion’s play to deal its own blow to the established business for storage arrays. It’s called the ION Data Accelerator, and it’s software that the company says can transform any industry standard server into a wicked-fast “data acceleration device.”

What does that mean? Well, Fusion says a media company deployed the Data Accelerator technology on its servers and saw a 25x improvement in the performance of its SQL database, and media transcoding — a pretty data-intensive process if ever there was one — improved 8x. A dozen early customers are putting it through its paces, and yes, naturally, Facebook is one of them.

If you want to try it, you can do so in one of two ways: You can get a server with Fusion’s ioMemory added to it from one of the company’s partners, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell or IBM, and buy the accelerator software directly. Fusion will provide you with the service and support you need to get it up and running. The other way to get it is to deal with a value-added reseller who can add it and integrate it into a white box server. Basically, the technology will be pretty accessible and not just available to the big data center companies.

It also marks a potentially big step in the evolution of the use of flash in the data center generally. As Flynn put it: “We first came out to the world saying that flash belonged in the server.” As fundamental shifts go, that was a pretty big shift by itself. “Now we’re saying that the server itself can, with flash in it, replace your storage array.”

It’s the second bit of news this week from Fusion-io. Earlier this week it said, without elaborating, that it is teaming up with storage concern NetApp. And, next week, it will report quarterly earnings. Fusion has had a pretty busy time since its IPO last year.

I want to own one. I want to use one.

– Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, about the Microsoft Surface tablet

One early customer is Rob Legato, the visual effects supervisor who won an Academy Award for his work on the Martin Scorsese-directed hit motion picture “Hugo.” Legato will be talking about ioFX with Fusion-io chief scientist and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at a conference in Las Vegas next week.

Fusion does some cool stuff with flash memory. Here’s the part where I roll out the old metaphor that has served me so well: In pretty much any computer, you can think of the processor as a fast-moving, highly efficient, type-A personality, constantly in a hurry, and always waiting impatiently for the rest of the system to give it more work to do. The slowpoke in the deal is the hard drive, which, though it’s already spinning at a super fast rate, just can’t get data to the processor fast enough. So the processor sits around, tapping its foot and looking at its watch, waiting for the other parts of the system that feed it data to work to keep up.

In high-performance computing, where there’s more data to be crunched than in most average computing situations, this is sort of a big deal. You want the processor to be as busy as possible — mainly because the systems are so expensive, and you want to get your money’s worth out of them — but also because jobs get done faster.

So Fusion-io’s stock in trade is a series of insert cards that bring flash memory right up next to the processor. The flash chips grab great big armloads of data and hold on to it, handing it off to the processor in a way that keeps it happy and busy and not impatiently waiting — at least not so much.

We’ve seen the technology brought to bear at places like Credit Suisse, which added Fusion’s flash cards to its trading systems. And its technology is also used in data centers belonging to Facebook and Apple.

On top of that, Fusion has relationships with all the big server vendors: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and SuperMicro all sell systems with Fusion-io on board.

Workstations are essentially heavily tricked-out PCs that are used primarily in two professions: Animation and special-effects work for movies and TV and computer-assisted design and modeling, used by folks who design buildings and cars and planes and pretty much anything else you can think of. They have the same problem that servers have — agitated processors constantly waiting for the rest of the system to catch up with them.

At this point, none of the workstation vendors are offering the card as an option, but if you’ve got a professional workstation — like, say, an Apple Mac Pro, which has three PCI Express slots — you might add one of these cards and speed up your work. In the meantime, the company is working with workstation vendors to get the ioFX insert cards certified. My guess is there will be more than a few visual artists who won’t bother to wait.

Fusion-io shares are up almost 11 percent — or $2.64 — to $27.30, as of 11 am ET; not so much on this news — workstations are kind of a low-volume market — but on an analyst report from Piper Jaffray suggesting that Cisco Systems may be close to a deal to add Fusion-io’s flash technology to its Unified Computing System platform.

The report goes on to suggest that Cisco could, over the next three or four quarters, become one of Fusion’s bigger customers, along with Facebook and Apple, and could account for more than 10 percent of Fusion’s business — which could, in turn, lead to a doubling of revenue this year. For the record, sales were $197.2 million in Fusion’s fiscal 2011. Do the math.

I didn’t get the sense that Mike was anti-Apple. I think he loves Apple’s products and I told this to Steve Jobs. I think Mike was looking at Apple to become one of the positive forces for having influence on improving things.

– Steve Wozniak, in an interview with CNET’s Greg Sandoval about Mike Daisey

In what can only be described as a strange collision of two distinct yet oddly similar universes of the geek canon, Steve Wozniak — Apple co-founder, friend of Steve Jobs, and chief scientist of chip memory concern Fusion-io — will have a conversation at Thursday’s DEMO conference with Leonard Nimoy, the actor famous for playing Spock in the “Star Trek” TV and film series.

Fusion just announced the pairing on its corporate blog. The company says the two will “share their thoughts on technology’s past, present and future.”

It’s probably no surprise that Wozniak was a fan of the original 1960s vintage TV show in his early adulthood. In a speech he delivered at a conference earlier this year he said that during his days working at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators, he’d come home from work “watch ‘Star Trek,’ eat a TV dinner, and do electronics projects.” So Woz will probably be thrilled to hang out with Nimoy, who’s always been a favorite among the “Star Trek” fan community.

It’s a little hard to guess precisely what all this will have to do with Fusion-io’s flash memory technology, which essentially speeds up conventional servers by adding an extra layer of memory to keep data close by the processor so it doesn’t stand around waiting for the hard drive to catch up. Nimoy is, however, an old hand at talking about how consumer technology that was science fiction on the TV show — mobile phones are essentially “Star Trek” communicators, for example — is now a reality. (See the video below for an example of that.) I’m sure it will be fun to see regardless.

One thing that will happen: A geek swarm on Foursquare. Woz is active on Foursquare, so expect lots of his followers to check in all at once and maybe trigger a swarm.

Apple is full of some incredible people, and Steve would not leave this company not feeling it has got a good push for right now to keep the ways of thinking that lead to the great products that Steve has employed. Short-term, I would expect Apple might come up with home run after home run after home run again.

— Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

Steve Jobs’s resignation as chief executive officer of Apple is the end of an extraordinary era, not just for Apple, but for the global technology industry in general. Jobs is a historic business figure whose impact was deeply felt far beyond the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, and who was widely emulated at other companies.

And now, for the first time since 1997, he won’t be the company’s chief executive.

To be very clear, Jobs, while seriously ill, is very much alive. Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day.

So, this is not an obituary. But his health is reported to be up and down, and even an active chairman isn’t the same as a CEO.

CEOs resign every day, so why is this departure so meaningful?

Most people are lucky if they can change the world in one important way, but Jobs, in multiple stages of his business career, changed global technology, media and lifestyles in multiple ways on multiple occasions.

He did it because he was willing to take big risks on new ideas, and not be satisfied with small innovations fed by market research. He also insisted on high quality and had the guts to leave out features others found essential and to kill technologies, like the floppy drive and the removable battery, he decided were no longer needed. And he has been a brilliant marketer, personally passionate about his products.

In his first act at Apple, the company he co-founded in 1976, he helped envision and catalyze the personal computer revolution. The Apple II computer he developed with Steve Wozniak wasn’t the only mass-market PC released in 1977, but it was the one that had the most enduring impact.

In 1984, he again upended computing by leading the development of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer to use a mouse and graphical user interface. It cemented the template for how every computer works today, even though Apple was handily bested in the PC sales wars by archrival Microsoft.

After being forced out of Apple in 1985, it’s well known that Jobs ran an unsuccessful computer firm called NeXT. But he also did a couple of game-changing things during that exile. First, NeXT developed an operating system that later morphed into the excellent Macintosh operating system, called OS X, and also the operating system that drives Apple’s mobile devices, called iOS.

In addition, he purchased Pixar, a small computer animation firm which he was able, over years, to turn into one of the world’s most successful movie studios and later sell to Disney for billions. It changed animation forever.

In his most recent act, he returned in 1997 to take over as CEO of Apple as part of that company’s purchase of NeXT. What he found was a diminished company which was reputedly only months from bankruptcy and saddled with mediocre products.

Fourteen years later, the company is a highly profitable behemoth, the most financially valuable and influential technology company in the world, whose every product is eagerly anticipated, snapped up quickly by consumers, and aped by competitors, even though they are often priced higher than rival devices.

While CEO of the revived Apple, he introduced the dominant digital music player, the iPod, and created the most successful digital media service, iTunes. He introduced the first super-smartphone, the iPhone, and the only truly successful tablet computer, the iPad, which is in the process of replacing the laptop, at least in part. And he built the world’s largest app store.

One almost forgets that he built a phenomenally successful chain of retail stores, too.

Apple’s devices and software services have dramatically changed the mobile phone industry, the music industry, the film and TV industries, the publishing industry and others.

Meanwhile, even while declaring that we are in the “post-PC era,” Jobs resuscitated his early baby, the Mac. While it may never become the world’s biggest selling computer, it is lusted after worldwide, and its sales have outgrown those of the overall PC industry for five years running. Plus, with models like the sleek, solid-state MacBook Air, he’s actually merging the tablet and the PC.

Now, rumors are rife that Apple is working on re-inventing another common device: the TV. The secretive company won’t say a word about that, but nobody should be surprised if it happens, just based on Jobs’s track record.

And that’s why the day Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple isn’t like the day a typical CEO resigns.

Here is a video of me taken recently, talking about Jobs’s career:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110824/jobs-leave-a-legacy-of-changed-industries/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fusion-io-opens-at-25-a-share-worth-nearly-2-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fusion-io-opens-at-25-a-share-worth-nearly-2-billion/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:46:09 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=84874 It’s not for just anyone or anything that I will put on a suit on a 90-plus degree day, and yes, you can consider the initial public offering of Fusion-io one of those things. Plus? I’ve never been to an IPO before.

This morning I ventured down to lower Manhattan to witness the Utah-based company do something its CEO David Flynn swore to me in December that he would not be doing in 2011. But? Things change. After pricing at $19 a share yesterday, the shares opened at $25.30.

Fusion did all the usual things you’d expect from a company wanting to make a splash with an IPO. A big banner with the Fusion-io logo adorned the outside of the NYSE building. And Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder who is a Fusion-io investor, director and chief scientist was on hand for the obligatory bell-ringing ceremony. After the bell, eager traders crowded around the Barclay Bank post to await the opening of trading, which took place a little after 10 AM New York time. Woz purchased the first 100 shares when trading opened.

At noon Eastern, Fusion shares are holding up, trading at $23.92. As trading debuts go, it’s certainly no LinkedIn, but then again, on the day LinkedIn opened the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,605.32, nearly 600 points higher than its open today. Regardless, even at that price, Fusion-io is being valued at nearly $2 billion, or more than 50 times its fiscal 2010 revenue.

Flynn’s next big task will be reporting quarterly earnings next month. Expectations for this company are high, so there’s a lot to worry about. Facebook and Apple combine for about 70 percent of sales but once they’re done building their data centers, they’ll more or less be done buying Fusion-io cards for their servers. And worse, 10 customers account for more than 90 percent of sales.

The good news is that the company has 1,500 different end-user customers. Plus, it has its partners — Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and SuperMicro — to resell its technology into their servers, and there’s lots of interest among financial institutions and other companies in speeding up the flow of data on their servers. It will be an interesting story to watch.

Just moments after the debut in trading, I caught up with CEO David Flynn for a quick chat in the video below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110609/fusion-io-opens-at-25-a-share-worth-nearly-2-billion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/startup-fusion-io-breaks-emcs-record-on-enterprise-flash/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/startup-fusion-io-breaks-emcs-record-on-enterprise-flash/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:59:42 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2242 When it wasn’t stuffing cars full of dancers wearing bodysuits, EMC, the enterprise storage company, was busy launching products and telling a room full of customers and analysts at an event in New York last week about how strong its business prospects are.

One of its bragging points was around shipping flash memory to enterprise customers. During his remarks–the theme was “record setting”–EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger grinned as he said the company had shipped 10 petabytes worth of flash memory in its storage products to customers in the past year–more than anyone else in the industry had.

If indeed that was a record, it isn’t standing for very long. Fusion-io, the Utah-based start-up that sells flash memory add-on devices for use in servers, said today that it has shipped 15 petabytes worth of flash memory to enterprise customers. It says that’s enough to play a continuous stream of HD-quality movies for 199 years straight.

Of course it has had help selling all that memory. Server vendors Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell are all selling Fusion-io technology as an option on their servers. There are plenty of customers buying, though few will admit to it. When we last heard from Fusion-io, it had announced that its technology is speeding up trading operations at Credit Suisse. Other customers include Myspace and Zappos.

Putting flash in a server isn’t for data storage in the traditional sense. It’s more about putting data close to the processor in a server. Most of the time–as much as 80 percent of the time–the processor chips inside servers that do the heavy number-crunching are sitting around tapping their feet, waiting to get data to work from other parts of the computer.

That equates to a lot of general waste in IT spending, CEO David Flynn told me. “If the processor is sitting idle 80 percent of the time, it may not sound so bad at first. But when you consider that you’re paying for the power and the cooling and floor space and services, it equates to a massive amount of wasted money.” How much? He thinks speeding data to the processor can eliminate $50 to $100 billion worth of waste in IT budgets. Fusion-io’s argument–and it’s one that numerous companies are buying–is that by putting data on flash chips in the server right next to the processor, you can eliminate a lot of that idle time. It’s the kind of argument that tends to resonate easily with CIOs.

As I’ve noted before, Fusion-io is coming off a busy year. Last year it hired Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist. In April it landed $45 million in a Series C round led by Meritech Capital Partners, with Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Triangle Peak Partners also investing. It also has strategic investments from Samsung and Dell Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/startup-fusion-io-breaks-emcs-record-on-enterprise-flash/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/flash-storage-startup-fusion-io-speeds-up-trading-at-credit-suisse/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/flash-storage-startup-fusion-io-speeds-up-trading-at-credit-suisse/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:59:19 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=197 Keep a close eye on Fusion-io. Its flash-memory based storage technology is quietly winning lots of business in data centers around the world. I say quietly, because very often the companies using it don’t like to broadcast that fact to the world.

One who is willing is Credit Suisse, though it won’t say much. The $50 billion Swiss bank says it is adding Fusion-io’s memory – dubbed ioMemory – into its Advanced Execution Services trading platform.

So what does ioMemory do? It uses flash memory – not terribly unlike what’s used in USB drive – to basically re-write the rules of how companies with large database storage needs can work. Add an ioMemory card to a typical server with a five-figure price tag, and it can suddenly behave a lot more like a much larger and more expensive storage area network. The company is also known for its chief scientist, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Credit Suisse says in this case the ioMemory will be used to speed up algorithmic trading, which is using powerful, super-fast computers to analyze and movements in the prices of stocks, bonds and other securities, and determining when to buy and sell, based on a pre-programmed set of rules and conditions. It’s a business where, as The Wall Street Journal’s Donna Kardos Yeslavich wrote in October, milliseconds count, so banks and other financial institutions are constantly on the lookout anything that can speed the process up. (Eventually we’ll be saying femtoseconds count?)

A key bottleneck is the matter of recording trades made. This means getting the data related to the trade out of a computer’s active memory – that would be the DRAM chips similar to the what occasionally have to upgrade your PC – and permanently stored. DRAM is volatile memory, meaning that if it loses power, it loses whatever it’s storing at that moment. Flash is non-volatile, meaning it stores data permanently, even losing power, until it’s deleted. That makes it great for permanent storage that’s also a lot faster than a hard drive. The faster trades get logged, the more trades get done, the more money gets made. “It’s a matter of quickly putting the trade data in a place where it won’t get lost,” Fusion-io’s CEO David Flynn told me. “You have to make sure that your system won’t forget what’s been done, while at the same time doesn’t look track of what it’s doing.”

Credit Suisse didn’t make anyone available for an interview. Banks rarely go into even this level of public detail about the technology they use. However I did talk to Fusion-io CEO David Flynn, who tells me that Credit Suisse has been a fan of the Fusion-io technology for some time. He also says several other financial institutions are using it. “Its easier for them to use it than it is for them to talk about it,” he said.

From the looks of the investments and partners that Fusion-io has landed during the last year, he’s not kidding. In April it landed $45 million in a series C round led by Meritech Capital Partners, with Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Triangle Peak Partners also invested. South Korean electronics giant Samsung, which happens to be the world’s largest manufacturer of flash memory made a strategic investment last year, as did Dell Ventures. Meanwhile Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell all offer Fusion-io technology as an option on its servers. Headcount has doubled in the last year from 150 to between 300 and 400, Flynn told me.

So with all this going on, is Fusion-io going to be a hot IPO or acquisition target in 2011? Don’t count on it, Flynn says. “Our VCs are willing to wait for the home-run,” he said. “And we’re not in the business of getting acquired. We have the luxury of being able to grow this company without someone with itchy fingers.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/flash-storage-startup-fusion-io-speeds-up-trading-at-credit-suisse/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101204/the-steam-punk-dream-computer-watch-the-babbage-difference-engine-in-action/ http://allthingsd.com/20101204/the-steam-punk-dream-computer-watch-the-babbage-difference-engine-in-action/#comments Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:00:39 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33437

After All Things Digital finished up a recent tour of the not-yet-reopened Computer History Museum, conducted by Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak, one of the curators offered a special treat for a few of the geekiest reporters in attendance.

That meant the cult-legendary Babbage Difference Engine, a Hummer-size calculator originally designed by Charles Babbage in 1847 and later built from the original plans by the Science Museum in London in 2008.

Every part, and there are over 8,000, was finished by hand, using only techniques available in Victorian England.

The bronze, cast-iron and steel engine uses a dizzying series of gears, cams and catches to calculate and print tables of numbers that you might be familiar with if you’ve used one of those little brown pocket reference books.

Plus, it’s the only computer that requires an oil pan.

When “turned on,” which means turning the hand crank, the whole thing clatters to life in a decidedly organized symphony of metallic motion.

There are only two Babbage Engines in existence, and the maintenance alone means they’re almost never brought to life.

But, just for our nerdtastic audience, here is a short video of the whole thing in action in Silicon Valley–something you’ll probably not see again if you wait a lifetime.

Geek on:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101204/the-steam-punk-dream-computer-watch-the-babbage-difference-engine-in-action/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101203/back-in-the-day-with-woz-a-sneak-peek-inside-the-new-and-improved-computer-history-museum/ http://allthingsd.com/20101203/back-in-the-day-with-woz-a-sneak-peek-inside-the-new-and-improved-computer-history-museum/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:51:56 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33419

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/20100319/my-life-on-the-d-list-meets-all-things-d/ http://allthingsd.com/20100319/my-life-on-the-d-list-meets-all-things-d/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:15:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25746

While in Washington, D.C., this week, BoomTown got to go to a dinner in honor of comic Kathy Griffin.

Griffin’s reality television show is called “My Life on the D List,” and we’re proud to share the same terrific letter.

She made much hay of her relationship with Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak on the show, so there’s yet another tech link.

And, in the video–in which she talks about her lobbying on Capitol Hill to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military–she also uses a very naughty term for tweeting on Twitter.

So, apropos of it being Friday, here’s the video of Griffin, who also told me she is a big fan of the Flip digital video camera:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100319/my-life-on-the-d-list-meets-all-things-d/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091231/the-year-in-wisecracks/ http://allthingsd.com/20091231/the-year-in-wisecracks/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:45:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=31302

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091231/the-year-in-wisecracks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091210/the-woz-says-hell-buy-apple-tablet-steve-jobs-doing-well/ http://allthingsd.com/20091210/the-woz-says-hell-buy-apple-tablet-steve-jobs-doing-well/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:42:06 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18955 Steve Wozniak may no longer be an active Apple (AAPL) employee, but he’s still a loyal shopper, saying Wednesday that he’ll buy the much-discussed Apple tablet once it’s released next year.

“If there is such a thing,” he said at a conference. “I buy everything Apple comes out with.”

He then added, “There is no such thing,” after which Fusion-io President David Flynn interjected, “You’re talking to a guy who has seven [navigation] systems in his car. So he will definitely be buying it.”

The men were there to announce that Fusion-io’s technology will be used for a new solid-state-disk storage technology offered by IBM’s (IBM) servers, called the High IOPS Adapter.

The company said that these technologies are a “new tier of memory,” faster and more cost-effective than disk drives, which will change the way data centers and computer architecture are designed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091210/the-woz-says-hell-buy-apple-tablet-steve-jobs-doing-well/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090814/if-woz-ran-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20090814/if-woz-ran-apple/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:59:31 +0000 Nitrozac and Snaggy http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14399

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090814/if-woz-ran-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090603/apple-co-founder-and-dancing-fool-steve-wozniak-talks/ http://allthingsd.com/20090603/apple-co-founder-and-dancing-fool-steve-wozniak-talks/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:56:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14181

Today, at the Silicom Summit at Stanford University, BoomTown was on a panel about consumer media, and right in the front row paying rapt attention was Steve Wozniak.

It was the same Woz–the famous nickname of the Apple (AAPL) co-founder–who was also staring back last week at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference and taking it all in.

Thus, I used Woz as an example from onstage today, in making my point how to practice a new kind of journalism using simpler tech tools–like the Flip digital video camera and this blog, as well as Twitter and more–and doing quick and informative reporting about, say, well-known tech figures I see all over Silicon Valley.

As in: See Woz, stick my trusty Flip in Woz’s face, ask Woz annoying questions and, presto, we’ve got a lovely post about what he’s been up to.

Such as this video interview, in which Woz talks about a wide range of things from Apple to Google (GOOG) to sassy Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz (he’s buying stock!) to Twitter to innovation to social networking and, yes, dancing.

Woz, a verifiable tech legend, loves to talk–but not about his ex-partner Steve Jobs’ health this time–and it’s good to listen.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090603/apple-co-founder-and-dancing-fool-steve-wozniak-talks/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/ http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:36:24 +0000 Oliver J. Chiang http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16055

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090401/woz-gets-hipchecked-off-the-dance-floor-big-big-sigh/ http://allthingsd.com/20090401/woz-gets-hipchecked-off-the-dance-floor-big-big-sigh/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:20:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=11521

Oh horror of horrors–Steve Wozniak got sent home last night on the ABC celebrity hoofer-fest, “Dancing with the Stars.”

Whatever will BoomTown do without the peculiar gyrations of the Apple (AAPL) co-founder to praise effusively and mock relentlessly at the very same time?

But with a truly terrible Tango and the lowest judges’ score (12 out of 30) of the remaining 11 contestants from his Monday night outing, Woz’s only chance was the voters at home.

That had worked the week before.

But, sadly, the tally this week was not enough to save him and his partner, Karina Smirnoff, or “The Girls Next Door” star Holly Madison and her partner Dmitry Chaplin. Both couples were dinged at the same time.

Said Woz about his experience, which included a hamstring injury and a foot fracture, as well as allegations of voting hijinks:

“I will dance wherever I am. I will take ballroom lessons. I’ll make it a part of my life. I hope there are a lot of other people like me that never danced their entire lives. [People] sitting at a computer terminal all day long, who are afraid to [dance]. You can actually go out there and dance and have fun.”

Well said.

And to show you what he means, here are the four videos of his clumsy but adorkable dancing efforts on “DWTS,” as well as some post-loss interviews in reverse order:

Good Morning America (with funny Footloose segment):

Jimmy Kimmel Live (with shoe-burning):

Elimination:

Week 4–Argentine Tango:

Week 3–Samba:

Week 2–Quickstep (dance-off):

Week 1–Cha-cha-cha:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090401/woz-gets-hipchecked-off-the-dance-floor-big-big-sigh/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090331/woz-to-dwtss-judges-im-still-standing-and-still-dancing-as-bad-as-he-can/ http://allthingsd.com/20090331/woz-to-dwtss-judges-im-still-standing-and-still-dancing-as-bad-as-he-can/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:38:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=11435

Apple (AAPL) Co-founder Steve Wozniak revved his damn-the-judges juggernaut into high gear this week with yet another low-scoring performance on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” and a full-bore mangle of the Argentine tango last night.

Interestingly, as the trio of judges dinged him for the fourth week in a row, they also tried to compliment Wozniak at the same time, telling him they loved his spirit.

Oh, these judges know that a Silicon Valley mob riding Segways could run them down at any minute if they got too mean (and there was actually a video of just that possibility on the television show).

“The judges have forsaken me,” said Woz, sounding more and more like a very appealing nerd cult leader. “But the geeks shall inherit the earth.”

One judge, Bruno Tonioli, still had the temerity to speak the truth about Woz’s tango: “This really stunk.”

Retorted the cute-as-a-button-who-can’t-dance Woz: “I have three words for you: I’m still standing.”

That he is. So you better get out there and vote early and often (you can vote up to 10 times).

Results come tonight, but here is the video from last night:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090331/woz-to-dwtss-judges-im-still-standing-and-still-dancing-as-bad-as-he-can/feed/ 1