Archive for May, 2007

Dell laying off 10% of its workforce

Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Laptops

It’s no secret that Dell’s been struggling lately — after years as the alpha dog of the PC market they’ve recently slipped to number two behind arch-rival HP — and now today they’re officially tightening the corporate belt with announcement that they’re planning to layoff nearly ten percent of the company’s workforce. The BBC doesn’t get specific about where they’ll be trimming jobs, but anyone who’s been in Dell Hell better pray that the cuts don’t come from tech support and customer service.

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Raon set to release Everun UMPC

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs

Raon didn’t exactly knock it out of the park with its first foray into the UMPC market — largely due to its curious decision that integrated WiFi and Bluetooth weren’t all that important — but it’s now having another go at it, introducing its new-and-improved Everun UMPC. From the looks of it, the company is certainly off to the right start, with the Everun packing both WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 on the inside, along with integrated HSDPA or WiBro to round out your connectivity options. The device will also apparently come in a couple of different models, each boasting a 4.8-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen, a full QWERTY keypad, AMD LX900 or LX800 Geode processors, 30GB or 60GB hard drives (with a 6GB SSD drive an option on some models), and a promised 7 hours of battery life (or 11-12 hours with the optional expanded battery). Apparently, the device will also cost less than the company’s previous Vega UMPC (which was just over $1,000), although Raon isn’t specifying exactly how much less. We shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out though, as it’s reportedly set to be released in mid-July, though we’re guessing some importing will be in order for those of us in North America.

[Via UMPC Portal, thanks Kornel T]

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NVIDIA faces barrage of civil lawsuits

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops

Those price fixing allegations that AMD and NVIDIA were facing late last year may have vanished from the forefront of your memory, but you can rest assured that the legal teams connected to the two are still workin’ overtime to clean things up. Apparently, NVIDIA has been slapped with as many as 51 civil complaints over “price fixing and anti-competitive agreements, among other things,” and on its March 16th filing with the SEC, the firm states that “42 civil complaints as of March 14 were filed against it on the same allegations.” Notably, the outfit did state that the “lawsuits are putative class-actions,” and unsurprisingly felt that they were all lacking merit and would be fought vigorously. Tsk, Tsk.

[Via Gearlog]

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Vizio barreling into Wal-marts everywhere

Filed under: Displays, HDTV

Relative newcomer Vizio has certainly done a bang-up job at taking the television market by storm, throwing down a sub-$1000 plasma and the first sub-$2000 1080p LCD, upsetting Sony with its pricing schemes, and making good impressions just about everywhere. Now the number-four flat-panel seller is truly heading for the mass market, with an announcement that Wal-mart will sell four new models of Vizio LCDs. The 720p sets include at least one HDMI input and integrated ATSC/QAM tuners. The VW26L, VW32L, VW37L, and VW42L panels will range from 26 to 42 inches, with the smallest starting at $448. Considering the retail giant’s reach and inertia, it’s going to be a tough year for competitors on the low-end of the flat-panel market. We feel for you: now pick us up some chips and paper towels with that 42-incher, will ya?

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NTT DoCoMo’s forward-looking video overlooks the present

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS

We’ve seen prophets get their agendas past the marketing department a time or two before, but NTT DoCoMo’s latest peek into the “future” seemingly forgets to look at what’s actually available right now. The lengthy spot showcases how mobile phones will “one day” be even more tightly integrated into our everyday lives, and while the ideas of using mobile-based keychains and passwords, geo-locators, and video telephony are certainly novel, deeming them events of the future seems a bit ignorant. Additionally, it demonstrates the phone’s ability to assist with grocery shopping, take care of hailing a cab, act as a tutor, and prevent children from straying too far away — all of which have either already been implemented or are quite a ways along the development pipeline. Of course, the pen-sized handset with retractable holographic display certainly hasn’t hit mainstream channels just yet, but otherwise it seems we’re all way ahead of our time. The pseudo-futuristic video awaits you in the read link.

[Via PSFK]

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Steve Ballmer live from D 2007

Filed under: Features

Steve “Developers!” Ballmer is set to take the stage this morning at D, but since we don’t know exactly what time that’s going to happen you all are gonna have to hang tight until he does. We expect he’ll be discussing last night’s Surface announcement, but we’ll see what else he’s got planned for us. Stick close!

8:38AM PST: It’s on! Follow the rest of the question and answer session between Walt Mossberg (bold) and Ballmer after the break…

How are ya? Great. Thanks for coming. Pleasure. I thought I might start off by asking… let’s talk about the scale of Microsoft. If you go back 15 years ago I seem to recall you had 15k employees. How many do you have today?

78,000.

So tech companies are flat and nimble with ideas bubbling up from the bottom — how do you compete?

Two things we have to do: number one, foster all kinds of innovation. Bottom-up. Think weeks, literally anyone in the company can throw out an idea, that’s a phenomenal thing. Things from the top-down. We started a process to lay out a long term vision, here are some trends in tech we think are important, we can provide alignment without the central planning.

Isn’t bottom-up way harder with you’re 78000 people?

We’re actually a lot more nimble today than we were when we were 30. Small does not imply agile. The people we had weren’t as good, they weren’t pushing as hard. If you look at some of the things we’ve put in the market recently… those are the things we’ve done from the bottom-up. Silverlight… a lot of stuff comes bottom up. Direction… north star, let’s go. That’s top down.

Let’s talk about Vista, it took 5 years to come out. The hardware guys and software guys weren’t ready, that’s caused pain points… youv’e been quoted as saying you won’t take 5 years between operating systems.

We have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve got the will, the determination, we tried to do too much incubation… we had exponential increases in complexity of the product. We have a lot of innovation coming in Windows.

Continue reading Steve Ballmer live from D 2007

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BackRow SDK unleashed for Apple TV

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

As if the Apple TV hasn’t been hacked up enough in its infancy, Alan Quatermain is keeping the fun rolling with the unleashing of his BackRow software development kit. The completed SDK includes headers for the BackRow framework, iPhotoAccess framework, and QuartzComposer frameworks, which are reportedly all that’s necessary in order to build and run your appliance plug-ins and the BackRow Test application. Additionally, you’ll find a project template for Xcode, which “creates the Info.plist with the required elements, Appliance and ApplianceController classes, and links in the appropriate frameworks (Foundation and BackRow) for you.” Of course, the possibilities are far too numerous to cover in this space, so do yourself a favor and hit the read link if you’ve managed to hold back your trigger finger ’til now for a detailed account at what the SDK entails.

[Via iLounge]

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NEC employees caught up in kickback, fake order scandal

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

So apparently BenQ and Siemens aren’t the only companies whose employees don’t like to play by the rules, as tax investigators looking into NEC’s shady financials have found that select personnel were involved in schemes that racked up 2.2 billion yen ($18 million) in fake orders and earned them 500 million yen ($4.1 million) in kickbacks. The charges come on top of already shady reporting by the Japanese company, which had to restate its fiscal 2006 earnings three times already and still risks being delisted from NASDAQ save for intervention from the exchange’s Hearings Review Council. For its part, NEC offered the typical spiel about regretful actions and possible criminal charges — which actually seems to have done some good, as the company’s domestic shares rose slightly following the news.

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Microsoft to unveil ‘PlayTable’ gesture-based interface at D?

Filed under: Peripherals

If ZDnet staple Mary Jo Foley (or more specifically, her source) is right, we may be seeing Microsoft take the next big step in device interaction at tomorrow’s D: All Things Digital Conference, with the perennial Redmond watcher predicting an official unveiling of the company’s PlayTable / Project Milan multi-touch, gesture-based input technology. PlayTable, which combines elements we’ve seen in the iPhone, from NYU’s Jeff Han, in various prototype devices, and from Microsoft’s own, recently-demo’ed DigiDesk, is envisioned as a multi-purpose interface that can be employed in anything from a DAP (Zune) to a cellphone (WinMo handsets) to a gaming console (Xbox) — so it’s no coincidence that the project is being developed by the same Mobile and Entertainment division that’s also in charge of these categories. All in all, tomorrow promises to be a big day: not only is Palm making a potentially breakthrough announcement, and the faces of Apple and Microsoft scheduled to appear together on the same stage, but we may also get to witness computing history to boot ; man, if we had real jobs, we’d be calling in sick in a heartbeat.

[Via Scobleizer]

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D this week: Jobs & Gates, Gates, Hawkins announcing new Palm device

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Just a happy reminder for Apple nerds and Treo fans, this week is the D conference down in San Diego, meaning you’ll be able to look forward to some fun n’ interesting new bits including:

• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appearing together in a joint interview Wednesday evening (no, far as we can tell they aren’t expected to joint-announce anything)
• A second Gates-only appearance earlier on Wednesday
• Jeff Hawkins, who will appear and introduce “a new category of mobile device” tomorrow morning [thanks, Jimmy]

Other executives expected to appear on stage: Ballmer, Schmidt, George Lucas, Les Moonves, Hurley & Chen, and even John McCain. Should make for an interesting couple of days, stay tuned!

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