Back in the late 1990s, Microsoft introduced its Windows CE embedded operating system. While aimed primarily at PDAs and pre-netbook devices, it quickly spread to be included in additional devices, among them point-of-sale systems and medical equipment, and has become the core of many other Microsoft products as well. Google’s Android may have a similar impact, expanding beyond its mobile
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Next week, while most Americans are lounging about in honor of President’s Day, the people responsible for your mobile phones, netbooks and cellular networks will converge on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show. Check back on Monday for clues as to what type of devices you’ll be toting in your pockets and purses next year, but in the
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Amid an IPO drought and the economic downturn, one investor believes that the venture industry should take the amount of money it puts into startups each year and slash it by nearly half, to between $15 billion and $20 billion. That’s compared to the recent annual average of $26.51 billion invested over the last five years, or last year’s total
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The demand for broadband skidded sharply during the fourth quarter of 2008. We went through the latest quarterly financials of all the major broadband service providers and collated the net new subscriber additions –- and so far, things aren’t looking good. Of the 12 majors, five companies, including Cablevision, aren’t due to report their quarterly results until later this month
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The crisis in the financial market is coming home to roost for startups of all kinds. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article detailing the death or firesale of several startups in the last few weeks. It’s grim, but this is only the beginning for many venture-backed companies, as we reported back in October. Over the next few months,
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The collision of a decommissioned Russian military satellite with one of Iridium’s birds on Tuesday will likely have few affects beyond twice-daily outages of about 5-9 minutes until another satellite fills the hole in the satellite constellation. According to Tim Farrar, an analyst at TMF Associates who covers the commercial satellite industry, Iridium has a spare satellite orbiting the earth
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Symbian said today that 14 new companies, including Hewlett-Packard, MySpace, Qualcomm and SanDisk, have joined its foundation. This brings the number of companies that have signed up to use the mobile operating system’s platform to 78, putting it ahead of the 47 members of the Open Handset Alliance, which supports Google’s Android OS. More members are good, but Symbian still
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Savvis, long a provider of co-location and dedicated hosting services, today unveiled a new cloud compute offering aimed at large corporations. Unlike Amazon, whose array of services are focused on the broader market, Savvis will start off with an on-demand computing service called Savvis Cloud Compute.
This new offer is based on a legacy Savvis product called Virtual Intelligent Hosting,
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The Nuvifone
When Garmin announced in the lead-up to the Mobile World Congress an ongoing deal with Asus to build its long-anticipated Nuvifone GPS phone line, you could practically hear the wincing. Within hours, the move was alternately being called an admission of failure (Garmin originally planned to build the phone itself) and a desperate ploy to ride the goodwill engendered
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Analyst firm the Yankee Group put out a paper today calling for President Obama to focus on the nation’s broadband and technology, suggesting, among other things, that DTV delays be halted, that new multitenant housing and office buildings be required to have fiber installed during construction, and that femtocells be used to expand wireless coverage inside federal buildings. But the
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The House and Senate held a pre-Valentine’s Day love fest last night and produced a compromise stimulus package; the two houses must now approve the conference bill, after which it would be sent to the president. For details on the full $789 billion plan, you can check out the legislation. We’ve outlined what the $7.2 billion million devoted to broadband
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Your science fiction fantasy may be coming a reality, if IBM has anything to say about it. The company was recently granted a patent for bionic body armor, originally filed last March, that’s intended to bestow the wearer the power to dodge bullets. The device works by constantly emitting electromagnetic waves that bounce off any fast-moving projectiles, and it uses
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IBM is advancing its aggressive cloud computing strategy with a string of announcements this week. The most recent was IBM’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to allow access of its software to solution providers using Amazon’s cloud computing applications. The partnerships offers pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and
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