itsibts.com

Last month, SanDisk rejected a buyout offer from Samsung. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company has been caught in a brutal downward spiral of flash memory prices and is a laggard in the growing market for solid-state drives–where Samsung is currently the leader.

All this makes for a vulnerable takeover target. SanDisk’s chairman and CEO, Eli Harari, said last month that the $26-a-share bid from Samsung was “opportunistically timed at the trough of an industry-wide downturn.”

Toshiba is in talks to buy SanDisk’s chipmaking facilities, according to Japan-based reports.

Toshiba and SanDisk have two joint ventures that manufacture NAND flash memory. SanDisk has a 49.9 percent interest in each of the ventures and also funds R&D related to the ventures.

Toshiba has started negotiations to buy SanDisk’s portion of the facilities, according to Nikkei. The newspaper said this is in response to Samsung’s bid to buy SanDisk that was disclosed last month.

SanDisk is the largest supplier of retail flash drives in the U.S.

Currently, Toshiba and SanDisk jointly own flash memory manufacturing facilities in Mie Prefecture, Japan.

As SanDisk’s profits have been squeezed, its stock has plunged more than $60 per share during the past two years.

Many analysts and experts believed that Verizon had been emboldened by its Vonage patent battle and was looking to go after bigger players, such as cable providers. Companies such as Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable have been offering VoIP services for the past few years. And they’ve been very successful in converting millions of Verizon customers to their service.

The telecommunications giant has accused Cox of violating six of its patents related to Internet telephony. But a jury for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia decided against Verizon on all six patents.

“Despite the decision, we believe our patents were infringed,” Verizon said in a statement. “We will continue to innovate and protect our intellectual property.”

But with this latest court decision, it looks as if Verizon may have to rethink its legal strategy. The company recently reached a deal with Comcast in which both companies agreed not to sue each other for a period of five years for any patent infringement. But there had been speculation that Verizon might target Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

The company also told The Wall Street Journal that it hasn’t decided whether to appeal the decision.

Verizon settled a similar suit against digital-phone service provider Vonage last year, squeezing about $117.5 million from the troubled provider of voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. Against Cox, it had been seeking past damages of $404 million.

Verizon Communications suffered a major blow in its patent battles on Monday, when a federal court ruled that cable company Cox Communications had not infringed on its patents.

Update (10:18 p.m.): The answer, as many, many people guessed, is that this is Earthquake Lake, in western Montana. A massive 1959 earthquake caused a huge landslide that resulted in 28 deaths, and also suddenly created an artificial lake, swamping and killing the trees that you see in the picture.

Good luck folks.

JACKSON, Wyoming–When I began Road Trip 2009 four weeks ago, I wasn’t planning on doing a Picture of the Day challenge. It was actually an idea that came to me about two weeks in, and now that I’m doing it each day, it’s clear that a lot of people are finding it their favorite part of the project.

One new twist to the daily challenge: If you’ve won before, you’re not eligible for the daily prize. However, to motivate you to keep sending in your submissions, even if you have already won, if you’re the first person with the right answer (for any of these challenges) you’ll be entered into a drawing for an even better prize. So, the more times you’re the first person, the more entries you get.

So when I saw this incredible lake, nestled into a mountain valley, with all these dead trees in it, I knew right away it would eventually make for one of the daily pictures. And here we are.

It also means that while driving, I’m keeping my eyes peeled for good candidates for the daily challenge.

While driving on Road Trip 2009, CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman came upon this eerie lake filled with dead trees. Be the first one to tell him what this place is called and why it’s this way, and you’ll win a prize.

For the next two weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I’ll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Colorado. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to tell me what this is called, where it’s located, and why it’s like this. If you’re the first to send me the right answers to those questions (by e-mail, to daniel dot terdiman at cnet dot com), you’ll win a prize.

(Credit: Central Michigan University)

A new “smart” cane developed by students at Central Michigan University may be just the first step in helping blind people more easily get around by themselves.

A speaker on the bag’s strap alerts the user when an obstacle is in the way and tells the person where to walk. For people who can’t hear, a special glove vibrates different fingertips to provide direction on where to navigate.

“The project has immense potential,” said CMU senior Wil Martin, who worked on the student team. “This was a preliminary effort that I believe will pave the way for future projects and ultimately result in a device that will help the visually impaired move with the same ease and confidence as a sighted person. It can happen if the project continues. I am confident in this.”

“We are one of the first to research the use of RFID technology outdoors,” said Kumar Yelamarthi, a CMU assistant professor of engineering and the project’s leader. “This project started as a way for me to teach students to see and understand the ways that engineering can be used for the greater good. We wanted to do something that would help people and make our campus more accessible.”

A volunteer tests the Smart Cane.

Equipped with an ultrasonic sensor, the cane works in tandem with a navigational system inside a bag worn by the user. Together, they detect RFID tags mounted on small flags that stick out of the ground.

The students who designed the system set up a test with volunteers who used it to navigate around campus. CMU said the volunteers found the system to be effective, especially with navigation.

The Smart Cane uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to detect obstacles and alert the user on where and how to navigate while walking, according to a news item published July 29 from Central Michigan University (CMU).

Since the cane requires RFID flags along the path to navigate, its use in the real world is limited for now. But the students see this as just the first step of a much larger project.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether “Frankenskype” or “Skypenstein” is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

The auction giant’s solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: Build a new one.

There is, however, this little issue. “The new software will be expensive and might not work,” Bloomberg’s article summarized. “The company said it might have to shut down Skype if the dispute with the founders isn’t resolved.”

Here’s what has happened: Skype’s founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype’s technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn’t have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype’s code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back (is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But the catch is that the trial isn’t scheduled until next June, which could put a big roadblock in the way of eBay’s plans for a Skype IPO.

eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion, but it hasn’t proven to be the best fit for the company. Rumors circulated that it was looking to sell Skype, possibly to Google, but then opted to take the company public instead.

So that’s why eBay is working on a total rebuild of Skype’s software.

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something’s standing in the way: Skype’s founders are threatening to take back some of the technology in the midst of a licensing dispute.

One of Demo’s older success stories, it’s still hard to believe that TiVo, the first successful service for digital-video recording, is already 12 years old (it was founded in 1997, though service didn’t debut until 1999). From its humble beginnings on the Demo stage, the company has gone on to become the standard-bearer in the world of DVRs, even as others have tried to ride its coattails.

Some of them are now household names, and some have long since faded into little more than memories.

Pleo, from Ugobe. It looked likely to be a big hit but fell victim to the recession.

Founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, the company got its first significant round of funding, a $10 million B round from August Capital, and soon after, purchased Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal.

The company also hoped to become a photo newswire of sorts, and it had relationships with hundreds of professional photographers.

Over the last 13 years, Chris Shipley has been the primary gatekeeper of the twice-a-year Demo conferences, evaluating more than 20,000 applications from companies wishing to present in front of a roomful of reporters, venture capitalists, and analysts.

WebDiet

Six Apart

Blinkx

Marc Benioff brought his fledgling company, Salesforce.com, to the Demo stage in 2000. Unknown at the time, the company has since become a household name in customer relationship management, or CRM, services.

Over time, TiVo has become synonymous with DVR technology and, to some extent, has been one of the major thorns in the side of commercial advertisers, who have had to battle against viewers’ preference for skipping through commercials.

Ham-It

Palm

With its original Palm Pilot, Palm essentially created the market for personal digital assistants. And while the company lost some of its edge when Microsoft decided to get into the business with its Pocket PC technology, there is little doubt that the PDA market, and the subsequent smartphone market, owe a great deal of debt to Palm. The original Palm OS was used by millions of people around the world.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Peerflix

80legs
Anaplan
Answers
Armorize Technologies
Article One Partners
Burt
CallSpark
Cazoodle
Cortera
Digitrad Communications
DotSyntax
Emo Labs
Enthusem.com
ePulze
Faculte
Freeddom Tecnologia e Servicos
Fuze Box
Glam Media
Gogrok Technology
Hand Eye Technologies
Hashwork
Hevva
Hewlett-Packard
Indigo
Intelius
Kryon Systems
LeapFile
Liaise
Lunchster
Micello
MicroAssist
MoLo Rewards
MyOwnRealEstate.com
MyVocal Holdings
NativeTung
Piryx
Point of Wealth Systems
Rseven Mobile
RumbaFish Technologies
Scientific Media
Symform
Third Iris
TotalTrainer
Traackr
TravelTrac
TuneWiki
Tungle Corp
Twirl TV
VicMan Software
Waze
Webroot
Weels Corp
WhoDoYouKnowAt
YiqYaq
Zorap
Zuora

It sounded like a good idea when it was announced at DemoFall in 2008: WebDiet, a service designed to help people find healthy restaurant food, regardless of where they are.

Although Palm as a company has had its share of ups and downs, it has to be considered one of the most important players in the history of handheld computing. Today, it is trying to make one of its biggest comebacks ever with its Pre smartphone, one of the few devices that has the potential to take a bite out of the iPhone’s market share.

Today, Salesforce.com has more than 63,000 corporate customers, and in its most recent quarter, it earned $21 million on record revenues of $316 million.

For each Demo, Shipley and her team have selected a few dozen companies, giving each a chance to make a name for themselves during a 6-minute presentation in a tiny show floor booth by unveiling something never seen before–or perhaps a great new take on an existing product or service. All told, over the 24 shows, she has given the opportunity to more than 1,500 firms.

The idea was that users would send each other their own DVDs, and would search for and figure out where to send their DVDs through PeerFlix’s servers. The company hoped to take advantage of the collective library of movies of its users, and it thought that members would trust each other enough to send off their own personal property to strangers.

Announced at Demo 09 last spring, Ham-It was touted as a “mobile-centric single-stop shop to globally connect and match consumers with local providers of day-to-day consumer services with capability to collaborate and schedule.”

From the get-go, the idea seemed problematic, in part because it required a critical mass of users in order to maintain an attractive collection of films. By early 2008, PeerFlix died. According to my colleague Rafe Needleman, who liked the service at first, “instead of getting more reliable as its user base grew, the service got less and less reliable, most likely as users stopped participating in it.”

Today, TiVo has just more than 3 million subscribers and is boosting its presence among cable users. During the last quarter, cable provider RCN became the first to ever use both TiVo’s hardware and software offerings. The company offers three main DVR models, two of which have high-definition capabilities.

Filmloop

Also launched at DemoFall in 2005, PeerFlix aimed to be something of an open-source Netflix.

Ugobe
Ugobe, which presented at Demo in 2006, looked poised to become a leader in personal robotics. Furby inventor Caleb Chung was one of its founders. And ts Pleo animatronic dinosaur, both friendly and programmable, was the kind of toy that seemed certain to provide enthusiasts and children alike with hours of robot fun.

(Credit:
VentureBeat)

But the company probably came along at the wrong time. Ugobe found itself in the position of trying to sell a product that cost too much, just as the global recession was kicking in.

The good

Given that list and the fact that Marshall is waiting in the wings to usher in the next generation of Demo–to begin next spring–now seems to be a good time to follow in the footsteps of my colleague Josh Lowensohn, who a week ago took a “Where are they now” look at 10 alumni–five good and five not so good–of the TechCrunch50 shows, examining some of the stars and flops of Demo’s past.

Launched at Demo 2007, Blinkx has become the world’s-largest video search engine. It has more than 500 media partnerships and currently indexes more than 35 million hours of video content.

VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, who is taking over the organizational leadership of Demo after this week’s show.

Salesforce.com

As a parting gift to the many Demo alumni, Shipley recently announced the show’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, honors that went to some of its most successful presenters. Among the winners were Palm co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar, and others.

Founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who were recently awarded Demo Lifetime Achievement honors, left Palm to form Handspring, which produced its own line of PDAs using Palm OS. Eventually, Handspring was sold back to Palm, giving the latter a chance to regain its dominance with the Treo.

But things didn’t go as planned for the company. By early 2007, it had burned through millions of dollars of venture capital and had laid off most of its staff. In large part, that was because there were other companies providing similar services, and FilmLoop’s service simply never picked up a critical mass of users.

Launched at DemoFall in 2005, FilmLoop was intended to be an online service that presented a tray of moving images that slide from right to left across a user’s screen, showing each picture and then advancing to the next.

After debuting at Demo in 2004, Six Apart became a leading provider blogging tools. Its Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad services are used by many of the most popular bloggers in the world, including HuffingtonPost.com, Boing Boing, and Talking Points Memo.

Now, with DemoFall 2009 beginning Tuesday morning, Shipley is marking the last of 24 Demos she has overseen as she prepares the formal hand-off of the show to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

Starting Tuesday, these companies will be taking their 6-minute turns on stage at this year’s DemoFall. Stay tuned for full coverage of the show.

The Bad

In addition, these 14 companies are part of Demo’s AlphaPitch program, in which presenters get 90 seconds to make their case:

The idea was that people would enter–either via a Web interface or through an iPhone app–dietary criteria and then see healthy food options arrived at by combining those criteria with location-based data. WebDiet even planned on partnering with restaurant chains with online menus so that users had a wide range of choices right from the get-go.

Cardagin Networks
Diditz
Dubzer
Enroute Systems
Gelato Dating
Infochimps
Keen Systems
Melior Technologies
Nubli
Pinyadda
Ringful
Sarithi LocalMart
ShareGrove
TrafficTalk

The goal was to create a community in which users could invite anyone they wanted to join, and even add photos, to, their loop. There was no limit to the number of people that could be added to a loop, meaning that an entire community could participate.

The DemoFall 2009 roster

While Pleo got positive reviews and had a wide range of fans, it simply couldn’t gain a foothold in the market. Ultimately, Ugobe filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, and today, Pleo is sold, albeit with little marketing, by a company called Innvo Labs.

At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I’m still not. And it looks like potential customers never understood either, as the company appears to have all but disappeared.

TiVo

But good idea or not, a year later, and WebDiet is still in private beta, not a good sign this late in the game. It’s certainly possible that it will still launch publicly and make an impact on people’s eating habits, but at this point, it seems like the odds are against it.

Still, it does happen and just because most abductions are carried out by family members or acquaintances doesn’t mean that they’re not potentially tragic. But it does mean that “stranger danger” is not the biggest threat to our children. In fact, because so many children are exploited by acquaintances and family members, NCMEC has stopped using that term and now refers to it as a “misguided message,” because “children don’t get it, adults don’t practice it (and) it doesn’t go far enough in protecting children from potential danger.” Plus, when a child is in trouble, sometimes their protector can be a stranger such as a police officer, a mall security guard, or a passerby.

AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon offer add-on services that allow parents to track the location of their kids cell phone. AT&T FamilyMap and Verizon Chaperone cost $9.99 a month, while Sprint Family Locator is $5 a month. All of these services allow you to see real-time location on a map and get automatic location alerts.

Amber Alert GPS 2G costs $379 product plus $9.99 to $19.99 a month for the service. It measures 1.77 inches long by 1.68 inches wide by .78 inches deep and is designed to fit into a backpack or be worn around a child’s wrist. It can be programmed via the Web or a cell phone to send you text messages and e-mails with your child’s location and a link to a map. You can also use it to create a “safe zone” or virtual boundary. If your kid wanders out of that zone you and up to four other trusted adults get a text messages and e-mail alerts every 5 minutes until you cancel. It also gives you a “bread crumb” location trail so you can see where your kid has been.

AmberAltert GPS

Loopt is designed to help friends locate each other, but it could be used to locate a child.

Other companies in this space include Whereify Wireless, U.K.-based lok8u, and TrackMyKids.

These products can be useful for finding a child who was wandered off in a mall or perhaps on a trail, as long as the child knows to sound the alarm before they have gone too far. They could play a roll in help to thwart an abduction if the child activates the alarm before the abductor gets them into a car or remote location. But screaming often accomplishes the same goal, which is why NCMEC advises parents to instruct kids to “scream and make a scene if anyone tries to grab them or force them, in any way, to go with them.”

In addition to what’s offered by the phone carriers, there are some third-party services that can track and report location. These include Loopt, Glympse, and Google’s free Latitude service. None of these services is marketed as child locators. Latitude only gives an approximate location on a map and doesn’t attempt to pinpoint a street address. It would be better than nothing in an emergency but not nearly as precise as the dedicated child locator services. Glympse, which works with Android phones and soon iPhones and BlackBerrys, is a permission-based system that allows the phone user to send an e-mail or text message that gives someone the ability to track them for a specific period of time–never more than four consecutive hours. Once you get a “Gympse” you can see that person’s location on a map and, if on the move, you can see their path and their speed. It’s a great way to track teens who would have to agree to be tracked such as a condition for borrowing the car, but it’s not really well suited for tracking young children.

But before getting into the technology, here are some important statistics to put this problem into context.

With all these devices your kid, of course, needs to have the cell phone with him or her and turned on.

The device also has an SOS button that your kid can use to send a help message if they are in any kind of danger. A speed alert lets you know if the device is moving above a set speed. That way you can tell if your kid is in a car and, if so, how fast it’s moving. The mere fact that your kid is moving faster than a walk could be a reason for concern if they’re not supposed to be in a car or public transportation. Parents of teens can use it to make sure they’re not speeding. There is even a temperature alert to help protect against young children being left in hot (or cold) cars. The device’s battery is rated to last 12 hours between charges.

Another product is the WorldTracker Enduro. It measures 2.6 inches long by 1.4 inches wide by .79 inches deep and has a GPS receiver and a GSM SIM card to transmit its report to a Web site or send a notification to a parent by e-mail or text message. It too features real-time tracking and allows a parent to be alerted if a child leaves a virtual safe zone. It also tracks the speed and altitude of the device, but a feature that will alert a parent if a child exceeds a certain speed is “in the works,” according to a company spokesperson. The Enduro has a rechargeable lithium ion battery that, according to the company, tracks for up to a week on a single charge. It costs $295 plus $49.99 a month for service that includes unlimited tracking. You can also use your own T-mobile or AT&T SIM card and pay $20 a month for the service in addition to your cellular plan.

The potential loss of 115 children a year is a national tragedy, but to put it into perspective, there are 74 million children and teens in America; the odds of it happening are about 1 in 644,000, or about the same risk as being struck by lightning.

Dedicated GPS Devices
There are several products on the market that use GPS to track your child along with a cellular device to notify parents where they are. With all such devices, their ability to determine a location is dependent on getting a GPS and cellular signal. GPS may not work indoors, around tall buildings, in forests, or other locations without a clear view of the sky. Cellular, as we all know, is also depended on location. Also, these devices work only as long as their battery does.

Reasons for concern
Having said, this, there is still a logical reason for parents and guardians to consider equipping their children with a device that can help locate them in an emergency. For one thing, these devices can bring peace of mind. Parents worry about their kids for a lot of reasons beyond being taken by a stranger. Have they wandered off? Did they get into an accident? Could they be lost? And it’s not just little kids we worry about. Parents of teenagers are rightfully concerned when they’re kids are away from home, especially if they’re riding or driving in
cars. To be honest, my kids are now in their 20s and I still worry about them.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

(Disclosure: I serve as an unpaid member of NCMEC’s board of directors.)

Technologies
There are various technologies that can help protect children ranging from devices that send out a local alarm that can be heard from a couple of hundred feet away to very sophisticated dedicated GPS tracking devices.

It won’t locate your kid or transmit a signal, but the AmberWatch (about $23) is a wristwatch that puts out a 115-decibel signal that, according to its manufacturer, can be heard up to 100 yards away. The alarm is activated by the child by pushing both buttons on either side of the device. It’s actually a real watch with time, date, and stopwatch functions and comes in pink and blue. A search for child locator alarm systems will find plenty of similar products.

(Credit:
AmberAlert GPS)

Stranger abduction is rare
A 2002 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice found that, in one year, 797,500 children were reported missing. That’s a lot, but most of those weren’t abducted. Of those, 203,900 were family abductions, which means the abductor was related to the child, often a noncustodial parent. Some 58,200 were “nonfamily abductions,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean strangers were responsible. And 115 children, a tiny fraction of those reported missing, were victims of what the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) calls “stereotypical kidnapping,” which involves “someone child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently.”

Although this and other products use the term “Amber,” they are not associated nor endorsed by the Department of Justice’s AMBER Alert program. The Justice Department restricts the use of the Amber Alert logo but not the term “Amber.”

The recent recovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was located 18 years after being abducted by a stranger, once again has parents thinking about how to protect their own kids. That’s one of the reasons behind a growing number of child locator products that typically use GPS and a cellular device to help a parents and authorities pinpoint a missing child to within a few yards.

Cell phone services
All cell phones sold in North America have GPS tracking capability so that 911 operators can locate users in an emergency. That same technology can also be used to track the location of the phone either as a child locator or a friend tracker.

“It really is a replacement for Works,” Microsoft corporate vice president Takeshi Numoto said in an interview on Thursday. “It is not a mere renaming of Works. It is an Office product.”

Several years back, as part of a ThinkWeek paper seen by CNET News, Microsoft workers recommend that the company scrap Works in favor of an ad-supported product, saying Microsoft only got a couple dollars of revenue per PC when Works was included.

“It’s a way for us to reach customers who may have not experienced Office before, (for them) to get a taste of it,” Numoto said.

For years now, Microsoft has grappled with new ways of selling Office, which, along with Windows, is one of the company’s two main profit engines. Although Office boasts half a billion users, there are lots of folks that use pirated copies of the software or don’t have Office at all.

In a blog posting Thursday, Microsoft said the starter version of Office will have limited features and include only Excel and Word. The starter version will be part of the Office 2010 family, due out next year, and will only be available on new PCs.

Microsoft is trying several ideas to better compete with free rivals such as Google Docs. With Office 2010, Microsoft will also offer a free, ad-supported version of Office that runs in a Web browser. That product, which went into a technology preview last month, requires connection to the Internet at all times.

Microsoft has already seen the Web increase as a means for getting its software. Numoto said that in the last fiscal year some 23 million downloads of the Office trial, nearly double the number from a year earlier.

Microsoft is also trying out a new method for those that already have a PC to try out Office 2010, once it is available. Called “Click to Run,” it brings the notion of streaming to software. Instead of waiting for the whole product to download, users can click a button and start using the software as soon as some of the basics are downloaded. The rest of the product then gets downloaded over time.

Office Starter, as opposed to Works, will have full file compatibility with Office as well as features like the ‘Ribbon’ user interface.

Numoto would not go into financial details for Office Starter, but did say that it is a “royalty-bearing” product for Microsoft, as Works was. In the past, though, PC makers have had an opportunity to earn back money if customers upgrade from a trial version of Office to the full version. Numoto wouldn’t detail how that might work with Office Starter.

Still, he said, downloading a big file means a long wait. “We know we could do a lot better to streamline that experience,” he said.

An additional benefit of the Click to Run installation is that it is done through application virtualization. That allows the code, even though it is still being run locally, to run side-by-side with an existing version of Office. That would allow, for example, a user to run a trial version of Office 2010, without getting rid of their existing Office installation.

Aiming to turn more new PC buyers into Office users, Microsoft has announced plans for several new ways to obtain the software, including an ad-supported “Starter” edition that can come loaded on new PCs.

The product is a replacement for Microsoft Works, which was Microsoft’s low-cost option for PC makers that wanted to include basic productivity software. Microsoft had also quietly tinkered with a free, ad-supported version of Works in recent years.

“Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box,” Microsoft said, adding that it can be upgraded to one of several full versions of Office with a new upgrade card to be sold at retail stores.

All top-25 customer accounts renewed, and at 120 percent of the prior year’s value. Most customers are expanding their adoption of Red Hat, and more and more are upgrading to Advanced Platform.
Only three of its top-300 customers up for renewal didn’t renew in the quarter, and two of those have returned to Red Hat after the quarter closed.
Two deals were over $5 million, while 10 deals hit $1 million. Red Hat EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) closed its biggest deal ever in the quarter.
Of the top 30 deals, 23 included Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Advanced Platform, and five included a JBoss component. This suggests that Red Hat’s big customers are upgrading to Advanced Platform, according to Red Hat CFO Charlie Peters.
JBoss continues to grow much faster than the core RHEL business.
Deal length extended to 22 months from 19 months last quarter, reflecting One former Red Hat customer, a large financial services company (almost certainly Credit Suisse), dropped Novell’s SUSE Linux and returned to Red Hat with a big order in the quarter. Credit Suisse is one of the companies Novell pulled away from Red Hat by using Microsoft-subsidized coupons, but Peters indicated that the customer had returned because of Red Hat’s superior value. It appears that Red Hat is a better value than free.
Red Hat is taking share from its competitors rather than seeing an increase in net new server purchases.

For Red Hat’s sake, it should stick with this one. Through Catalyst and other means, Red Hat needs to place more emphasis on the world outside of Linux. The company believes that virtualization and cloud computing are big opportunities, and they are, but these are mostly ways to build upon RHEL, rather than ways to extend its reach into fast-growing, diverse markets.

Red Hat doesn’t need to get into video game consoles (e.g., Microsoft’s Xbox) or hardware (e.g., Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun) or a variety of businesses far afield from its core infrastructure business. After all, Red Hat clearly has a lot of room to grow its JBoss/middleware business, and arguably needn’t acquire its way to that growth.

Catalyst, however, is still in its infancy. It remains to be seen whether this program will stick, as Red Hat has moved away from ecosystem efforts like its Red Hat Exchange in the past.

Despite the mostly sunny skies, Red Hat’s slowing revenue growth remains a concern. The trend kicked off in 2005 and has continued apace since then despite a brief respite in 2007, as The 451 Group reports.

But first, the good news. Of Red Hat’s total revenue, roughly 85 percent, or $156.3 million, came from subscription revenue. That’s an increase of 15 percent compared with the year-ago period. Putting this into context, IDC projects Linux subscription revenue to top $1 billion by 2012. Red Hat should claim virtually all of this at its current pace of growth.

But it’s also normal that as it slows, companies like Red Hat will look for increased growth beyond their core businesses. Oracle is perhaps the most obvious example of this.

Peters said that the company is investing significantly more in JBoss than RHEL, proportionate to the revenue each brings. That’s good, but also obvious, given that Red Hat’s JBoss business is comparatively small to its RHEL business. It may be time to invest even more in JBoss.

Of course, as Red Hat gets bigger, and as the economy remains stagnant, it’s normal that Red Hat’s revenue growth will slow.

As part of its quarterly earnings call, Red Hat executives revealed a range of reasons to think its business is on track:

That’s a rise of 12 percent compared with the same period last year. Despite the company’s against-the-grain performance in a weak market, however, it may need to invest more in its middleware business to ensure future growth.

Customers seem content to pay Red Hat for free software that they could get more cheaply elsewhere. While recent IDC data hint at hard times to come for commercial Linux vendors, it hasn’t hit Red Hat. Not yet. The company is still a darling with CIOs.

Red Hat’s traditional Linux partners are absolutely the wrong group to be selling its middleware offerings, a fact that took Red Hat some time to digest. Now, however, Red Hat seems to be getting the picture and has launched its Catalyst Program to sell turnkey open-source solutions through a growing ecosystem of value-added resellers (VARs).

Red Hat is an execution machine and will undoubtedly be able to continue to grow its Linux business, and possibly to accelerate that growth again through enhanced investments in virtualization and cloud computing. But the real growth for the company is a bit higher up the stack in its middleware business.

At the recent Red Hat Summit, company CEO Jim Whitehurst quipped that “flat is the new up,” but he clearly wasn’t referring to Red Hat. On Wednesday Red Hat announced another strong quarter, with revenue of $183.6 million for the company’s second fiscal quarter of 2010.

But it does need to significantly change the way it views its channel partners.

And it may not for some time, with Red Hat reporting deferred revenue of $581 million, up 17 percent compared with the same period last year. The company is increasingly profitable, too. It reported net income of $28.9 million, or 15 cents a share, compared with $21.1 million, or 10 cents a share, for the year-ago quarter.

London, if it gets an algae-growing makeover.

Algae would grow from pumped-in carbon dioxide and sunlight and be harvested for use either as a liquid fuel to run in a combined heat-and-power unit or turned into biochar, or charcoal used as a soil conditioner that also sequesters carbon from the air.

(Credit:
Institution of Mechanical Engineers)

The future of green technology is algae-cultivating buildings, artificial trees, and lots of white roofs, according to the U.K.’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

As concern grows over climate change, a number of geoengineering ideas have been proposed, including placing mirrors in space to reflect sunlight or shooting sulfur particles into the stratosphere, which would also have a cooling effect.

The group on Thursday released a report that recommends governments fund research on geoengineering, or large-scale fixes for climate change. The report, a year in the making, is targeted at policymakers and is meant to inspire engineers to develop ways to cut greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

At the top of the list are artificial trees, which are mechanical devices that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air faster than trees and then sequester that gas underground.

Cultivating algae to make liquid fuel is one of the most active areas of research in biofuels. The institution recommends that algae be incorporated into buildings so algae can be grown at a large scale.

Engineers envision that long plastic tubes, called photobioreactors, be integrated into building designs or retrofitted onto existing skyscrapers.

The institution’s report refers to the research done by Columbia University Professor Klaus Lackner, who is researching the concept and materials to absorb large amounts of CO2. Also required are underground storage formations, such as depleted oil wells. At a cost of $20,000 per tree, the institution concludes that it’s the most practical approach.

However, in its analysis, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers found that most promising geoengineering techniques can be done on Earth. It argues that a handful of technologies be deployed at large scale, along with other strategies, to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Finally, the institution says that buildings should be retrofitted with reflective roofs to deflect the sun’s rays. In the past months, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has publicly touted this relatively low-tech approach, which was studied in-depth at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory last year.

Although proposing billions of white roofs doesn’t appear to be controversial, many other geoengineering ideas are. For example, scientists have warned about the environmental impact–or effectiveness–of “seeding” the ocean with iron to spur growth of plankton to sequester carbon.

In anticipation of a report on geoengineering from the U.K.’s Royal Society next week, watchdog ETC Group warned against unintended consequences from large-scale projects. “Even the most careful computer models won’t be able to predict what will happen if an experiment is scaled-up and moved out of doors,” the group said in a statement Friday.

How artificial trees, which capture carbon from the air, could be deployed alongside wind turbines.

(Credit:
Institution of Mechanical Engineers)