HP SkyRoom sets low ceiling on videochat
HP today came up with a videoconferencing product that could work out 1,000 times cheaper than the telepresence mega-productions itself and Cisco have been pushing.
Cisco’s TelePresence or HP’s Halo can cost more than $300,000 for a boardroom suite setup, but HP’s SkyRoom could link two boardrooms for less than $300.
Larry Ellison on the economy, the cloud, and sailing
It is perhaps with good reason that Larry Ellison does not speak in public that often. Whenever he does, the famously bombastic Oracle chief executive seems certain to trash his rivals, make bold predictions about Oracle’s future, and wander off topic.
Last night at a meeting of the Churchill Club, Mr Ellison said that Sun Microsystems was losing $100m a month as European regulators scrutinise Oracle’s proposed takeover of the struggling hardware maker.
On the economy, Mr Ellison said it would be at least another five years before the US begins to recover. He said it would not be a V shaped recovery with a sharp rebound, or a W shaped recovery with a double dip, or a U shaped recovery with a pause before an uptick, but an L shaped recovery — “down and not coming back up.”
techfile 09.07.09
Tech’s painful Dow hangover
If past experience is anything to go by, it may be time to short Cisco Systems.
Being admitted to the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the ultimate mark of corporate respectability – and it has added 5 per cent to Cisco’s shares today – but the history of techs in the Dow has not been a cheerful one.
For many years the brain trust at the DJIA turned a cold shoulder to tech. Only IBM was admitted to the club – and even Big Blue only made it through the door after it had been around for close to 70 years.
VCs flip Flip to Cisco in nick of time?
The Flip video camera became a best-seller in the US last Christmas as a cheap, dead simple device for capturing video and uploading it to a computer or the web.
Its maker Pure Digital was also capturing the market for a moment in time and has sold more than 2m units to date.
But Pure Digital’s sale today to Cisco may also be a perfectly timed exit for its VC backers – much bigger competitors are bearing down on the startup, looking to copy its success.
The strategic high ground of IT is… a blade server?
The tech headlines this week have certainly been eye-catching.
Cisco, which in this downturn is still making a 60 per cent gross profit margin and operating profits of more than 20 per cent of revenues, is risking upsetting long-time allies like HP to get into servers – a business in rapid retreat where profits have collapsed.
Now comes news that IBM is in advanced talks to buy Sun, reversing its steady march away from the hardware business into more consistent and profitable software and services. This amounts to a big change in course: after focussing on small software acquisitions, Big Blue looks like it’s about to become a consolidator in Unix servers.
Google’s different voices heading for unison
Google has been speaking in different tongues with its voice strategy, but there are signs that its ambitions in telephony are coming into focus.
Last night, it unveiled Google Voice - a rebranding of GrandCentral, bought in July 2007. The company usually takes a long time reworking its acquisitions, some of them never reappearing at all, so the nearly two years it has spent on GrandCentral seems par for the course.
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