|
|
Image of a silicon semiconductor. Credit: huangjiahui via Flickr.
Bottoms up!
Intel this afternoon gave investors a reason to hoist a beer mug or two, posting $8 billion in second-quarter revenue powered by sales of its Atom processor, used in fast-selling netbook computers, lightweight laptops that sell for as little as $200.
Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said the results "reflect improving conditions in the PC market segment with our strongest first- to second-quarter growth since 1988 and a clear expectation for a seasonally stronger second half."
Translation: Computer makers are expecting a surge of back-to-school shoppers and better holiday sales than in 2008, when consumers reined in nearly all discretionary spending.
The Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker, however, posted a $398-million quarterly net loss, or 7 cents a share, primarily because it paid a record $1.45-billion fine imposed by the European Commission on charges that the company restricted competition in the semiconductor market. It had a $1.6-billion net profit in the second quarter last year. Its $8 billion in revenue represented a 12% improvement over $7.1 billion in sales posted for the first quarter of this year but an erosion from $9.5 billion a year earlier.
Even so, Wall Street loved what it heard, pushing Intel's stock up $1.20, more than 7%, to $18.03 in after-hours trading following the earnings release. The stock earlier in the day had closed up 34 cents to $16.83.
Intel's results kick off the earnings season for the tech sector, with Google coming up Thursday and Apple and Yahoo next Tuesday, followed by EBay, Microsoft and Broadcom later in the week.
-- Alex Pham
 In an earlier post, we discussed how to amass followers on Twitter. Now let's talk about finding people you can follow. Actually, it's about finding people you'd want to follow (because we're pretty certain that you don't want to know what everyone is having for breakfast).
Twitter is about eavesdropping on random conversations and figuring out which parties to join. Not into celebrity blather? Don't follow @BritneySpears. Love cycling? Check out @LanceArmstrong. There are literally millions of conversations happening on Twitter. You don't need to be listening to every single one of them.
Once again, we tapped Andrew Nystrom, the Times' social media guru who Twitters @latimesnystrom. His advice follows.
1. Start with your friends. Twitter lets you import contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL e-mail accounts. It will show you which of your contacts have Twitter accounts.
2. Be picky. Resist the temptation to "select all" of your contacts to follow. Because this is the default option when you import your contacts, you need to uncheck the box to select all. Start with dozen or so people to begin with. This helps keep the signal-to-noise ratio low. The idea is to funnel as much useful, relevant information to your page. Start with a dozen people. Andrew has a good Twit Test: If you can't wait to open a personal e-mail from this person, follow him.
3. Pick a topic. If you're passionate about a particular topic, say video games, try sites such as WeFollow, which is a directory of Twitter accounts organized by topic and ranked by popularity.
Read on »
 iPhone screenshot from marcopako via Flickr.
Apple this morning said its iTunes store has served up more than 1.5 billion apps, those snack-sized pieces of software for the iPhone or iPod Touches that do all sorts of random things. Since launching the App Store exactly a year ago, more than 100,000 developers have been busy cranking out a mind-bending 65,000 apps on the site. Some are useful (GPS apps that help the navigationally challenged, for example). Others are amusing (witness the explosion of games, a select list of which appears here from What They Play). Some unleash our inner artist. A handful are offensive, including the controversial Baby Shaker app. And some are just inane. Remember the $1,000 app that did absolutely nothing? To celebrate this cornucopia of apps, we'd like to invite you to nominate your faves. Cast your votes in the comment box below, and at the end of the week, we'll publish the list of winners. Here are the categories:
- Most useful app
- Most useless app
- Best game
- Wackiest app
- Worst crApp ever
- Best news app
- Best time waster
- Best free app
- Best paid app
- App most likely to impress your friends at a party
-- Alex Pham and Michelle Maltais
 Just after Take-Two Interactive Software this afternoon said it would delay the release of BioShock 2 to its next fiscal year, investors punished the New York publisher's stock, pushing it down more than 12% in after-hours trading.
Take-Two shares plunged $1.12 to $7.86 after gaining 14 cents following its BioShock 2 bomb announcement.
BioShock is a marquee franchise for Take-Two, which also publishes Grand Theft Auto and 2K Sports games. Because Take-Two's fiscal 2010 begins Nov. 1, the announcement leaves open the possibility that BioShock 2 could still make a holiday release date.
The move is bad news for the company's current fiscal year, which ends October 31, but great news for its 2010 fiscal year, said Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design & Research in Carlsbad, Calif.
"I expect them to dominate fiscal 2010," Divnich said. "BioShock 2, Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption, Mafia II, additional Grand Theft Auto Downloadable Content (DLC), and the possible launch of Agent should make fiscal 2010 the year of Take-Two. As far as I am concerned, Take-Two is just moving numbers from one financial year to another."
Take-Two also said its sales of older releases, so-called catalog titles, as well as retail orders of new releases, have been soft. With the economy eating into game sales and the delay of BioShock 2, the company forecast lower-than-expected earnings for the remainder of this fiscal year.
-- Alex Pham and Ben Fritz
 Take that, Google Docs!
Microsoft today said it will make a free Web-based version of its popular Office suite for the 400 million people who have its Windows Live service. The product, which would include lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, would debut next year and compete with Google's free online Google Docs suite.
Like Saturn eating its young, Microsoft risks cannibalizing its most profitable business in doing so, says Reuters. The Redmond, Wash.-based business software division, which includes Office, made $9.3 billion in profit from $14.3 billion in sales during the first three quarters of its 2009 fiscal year.
The announcement is the latest tit-for-tat in an increasingly intense rivalry between Microsoft and Google. The Mountain View, Calif., search giant last week said it would develop an operating system designed to lure users away from personal computers, Microsoft's home turf, to using applications on the Internet, where Google has a dominant presence.
Dubbed Chrome OS, the software would be made available to the open-source community, which implies that it would, like Android, be free, unlike Microsoft's Windows operating system, which powers more than 90% of the world's computers.
Here's another way that Google and Microsoft compete. Both are in contention for the title of technology's 800-pound gorilla, a designation that entitles the winner to intense regulatory scrutiny, fear and distrust. As tech blogger Anil Dash pointed out, inheriting the mantle means being subjected to the axiom of "Hanlon's Razor" -- once a company dominates its market, mistakes from oversight or stupidity will be attributed to malice.
-- Alex Pham
Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.
Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer of Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud computing company. Credit: Alex Pham / Los Angeles Times. Google made waves in the tech world this week when it announced plans to release an operating system that would encourage wider use of something called cloud computing. Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that live far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers. To help explain this shift in the way we use computers, we turned to Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer for Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley startup that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of cloud computers. As it turns out, Bechtolsheim was also one of the first people to invest in Google back in 1998, when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with several other shrewd calls, turned the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire. We spoke to the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur recently about cloud computing, his investment philosophy and his latest venture, Arista Networks. An edited version of the conversation is below. Q: What do you make of the potential for cloud computing, both as a market and a technology? Bechtolsheim: It is a surprising evolution in the history of computing. Every application can now shift to the Web. You can access any application remotely. My startup does the networking plumbing for this.
IDC has estimated that by 2012 the market for cloud computing infrastructure will grow to $42 billion, up from $16 billion in 2008. It’s the fastest-growing slice of the spending on information technology. Right now, it’s small sliver of the overall pie. Most of the spending is for the applications. But it’s a growing slice of the pie. Q: What are some uses of cloud computing? Bechtolsheim: Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to ...
Read on »
 The chase is over. After Emulex rejected Broadcom's $912 million offer, its suitor today called off the hostile buyout effort.
Broadcom Chief Executive Scott McGregor, who only two weeks ago sweetened his bid 20% from $764 million, said his Irvine network equipment company will now pursue "other value-creating alternatives." The company said it would not renew its offer when the offer expires July 14.  The announcement ends a contentious process marked by lawsuits lobbed by both Orange County companies. Broadcom initially had sued to invalidate an Emulex poison pill designed to ward off hostile takeovers. Emulex, based in Costa Mesa, countered with a lawsuit charging that the antics of former Broadcom chief executive Henry Nicholas made the company untrustworthy.
Nicholas, who is no longer involved in Irvine company he founded, is awaiting criminal prosecution on two federal indictments, one on a stock backdating charge and another alleging he had supplied narcotics to acquaintances.
-- Alex Pham Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.
 Taking direct aim at Microsoft's dominance in personal computers, Google last night announced plans to launch an operating system that would compete with Windows and be available to consumers in the second half of 2010.
Dubbed Google Chrome OS, the operating system is designed to work with the company's Chrome Web browser, launched nine months ago and downloaded by 30 million users. Google said the software will be optimized for small, lightweight laptop computers called netbooks, a fast-selling category of inexpensive machines that sell for as little as $250 and are used primarily to surf the Web and check e-mail. In a blog post announcing the product, Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, and its engineering director, Linus Upson, said: Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work. Google did not say whether it would charge for the software, but references that it would work with the open-source community of developers suggest that the company may make it freely available. Microsoft, on the other hand, charges about $200 for each copy of its Windows Vista operating system. "The release of an operating system is just another part of Google's strategy to more rapidly and cheaply spread access to the Internet via a multitude of different devices -- desktops, netbooks, mobile phones, set top boxes, etc.," Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note this morning to investors.
Schachter said Google wants to eventually lure businesses away from Microsoft's Windows operating system towards so-called cloud computing, in which businesses can use lightweight computers to access applications and data that are managed via large data centers and served over the Web.
"Longer term, Google hopes a free operating system may encourage more small and medium-sized businesses to move towards an enterprise software solution in the 'cloud' and away from Microsoft," Schachter said. -- Alex Pham
Credit: id Software.
ZeniMax Media raised $105 million to acquire id Software, according to a document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Id Software, which created the Doom and Quake game franchises, stunned the game industry two weeks ago when it announced its acquisition by ZeniMax, which publishes the Elder Scrolls series of role-playing games developed by its Bethesda Softworks studio. The sale surprised many because id Software, based in Mesquite, Texas, had rebuffed numerous buyout offers over the years, preferring to maintain its independence. Because both companies were privately held, neither was obligated to divulge the price. The filing with the SEC suggests that the price may have been $105 million. That's what ZeniMax issued in the form of a "convertible note," so called because the holder of that bond can convert it into either cash or shares in the issuing company. It's unclear from the filing if ZeniMax used the entire amount to pay for id or whether the deal called for additional payment. ZeniMax and id Software declined to comment on the filing. ZeniMax, based in Rockville, Md., has deep pockets backing the company. In 2007 it snagged a $300-million investment from Providence Equity Partners, and its board of directors include retired baseball player Cal Ripken Jr., CBS Corp. President Leslie Moonves and Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who in May announced his entry into the video game business. Updated 6:42 pm to reflect the companies' denial for comment. -- Alex Pham and Ben Fritz Follow or random thoughts on games, entertainment and technology on Twitter @AlexPham and @BenFritz.
Chris Anderson Credit: Hyperion Books.
Musicians want to be heard. Actors need to be watched. Writers like to be read. And what better way to get an audience than to make these works free? But artists also need to eat. How to reconcile? Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" and Wired magazine's editor in chief, says the two are not mutually exclusive. He's also putting his money where his mouth is. The 47-year-old Berkeley writer is giving away his latest book, titled "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and published by Hyperion Books. More precisely, he's letting people read the entire book free till Aug. 10 on Scribd, a site that lets authors set their own price for digital copies of their works. The book's title aside, the giveaway is not as radical as it seems. In fact, it's perfectly rational, Anderson said in an interview. "The book is about making money from free," he said. "I felt it was important to walk the talk." For one thing, his book is free for only a month, after which readers will have to buy it (the hardback version retails for $17.99 on Amazon.com). Secondly, it can't be downloaded on Scribd; readers have to read the free version online. This fits with the "freemium" model -- give away the basic version to build your initial audience, then sell them premium features, such as the ability to download the book or having a physical copy. A host of well known online services follow this model, including ...
Read on »
|
@latimes Tech, always on...
TECHNOLOGY REVIEWS
Depending on the model, your device features either a hard drive or flash drive that allows you to read and write files to it just like an external drive.
|
RSS: Subscribe to this Blog
Hi. Im replying to comments and feedback...
As far as I know, the video API on the i...
Great that you are giving Augmented Real...