Intel, which has been engaged in a battle royal with Advanced Micro Devices over whose chips go in high-end servers, is beginning to encounter a similar level of competition from a smaller rival at the other end of the scale.

VIA, based in Taiwan, is often forgotten as a player in the dominant "x86" market for PC microprocessors. It has never had more than 5 per cent market-share and is normally in the 1 to 2 per cent range, with Intel taking around 80 per cent and AMD the rest.

However, it seems to be a match for Intel in the niche segment largely ignored by AMD for low-powered computing.

Samsung has tried both VIA and Intel microprocessors in its Q1 ultra-mobile PC.  VIA is preferred in the 02 by  Silicon Valley’s OQO, which pioneered the category. A VIA processor is also powering the Everex CloudBook, which created a stir at the Consumer Electronics Show this month.

Intel is pushing a new category called Mobile Internet Devices or Mids and is expected to become more competitive when it introduces its low-power Silverthorne chip. More details of its capabilities are expected next month.

This week, VIA announced its next-generation Isaiah architecture, which it believes will keep it ahead of Intel, even after Silverthorne appears in the second quarter.

While Intel has switched from increasing speeds to decreasing power demands in its chip designs, VIA is going the other way.

Its strength has always been the extended battery life it permits through the low wattage of its microprocessors. With Isaiah, it says the power demands will be the same, but the Isaiah chip will perform two to four times better than its predecessor.

"Our chips are the best in the market for performance per watt, but the level of performance we can achieve with Isaiah means we can be more competitive in other segments," says Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, a VIA subsidiary that designed the chip.

The performance boost could even make VIA a competitor for the microprocessor slot in full-sized PCs, he says, a move that would certainly get the attention of both Intel and AMD.

SeeqPod, the music search engine that we wrote about in September, has finally incurred the wrath of the record companies.

The Bay Area start-up is considering its legal position after Warner Music Group filed a suit in a Los Angeles court alleging copyright infringement.

SeeqPod users type in the name of a song or artist and the search engine compiles a list of instances that can be played with the click of a mouse.

SeeqPod told us at the time that they did not host any of the music and therefore felt they were acting legally, which seemed a little hopeful and perhaps naive.

Warner’s complaint, a copy of which has been posted on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site, says that SeeqPod links to sites with illegal copies of copyrighted music and makes this “practically unlimited catalogue of unauthorised sound recordings available for on-demand streaming.”

“SeeqPod directly supplants legitimate contractual arrangements that exist for the authorised digital audio transmission and distribution of copyrighted music.”

While SeeqPod does not allow actual downloads of the music it finds, the major record companies are clearly inclined to clamp down on streaming services that do not have their approval.

In contrast, Warner, EMI, Sony BMG and Universal made a deal with CBS’s Last.FM on Wednesday that permits free streaming of their music.

The four majors earlier gave their backing to streaming from imeem, a social networking site. But that was only after Warner launched litigation last May against imeem similar to that it is now bringing against Seeqpod.

The message to the search-engine start-up therefore seems to be: Sign up or sign off.

One of the most striking things to emerge from Apple’s quarterly results on Tuesday was the fact that the iPod and iPhone maker is sitting on an $18bn cash hoard. Even more interesting is what Apple suggested it might do with it. Fortune picked up these comments by Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, during the company’s earnings call:

Our preference continues to be to maintain a strong balance sheet in order to preserve our flexibility to make strategic investments [and/or] acquisitions.

Apple hasn’t made a big acquisition since 1997, when it paid $400m for NeXT, the computer company founded by Steve Jobs during his years in exile. Since his return as CEO, Mr Jobs has preferred to keep most of Apple’s innovation in house.

Could this year be different? Mr Oppenheimer’s comments would seem to suggest so. But there are other reasons to believe that Apple could soon be on the prowl for potential deals. With the market now off nearly 13 per cent from its 2007 highs, there are deals to be had for a company with cash to throw around. Apple may also be facing a product gap this year, as the law of large numbers causes iPod sales growth to slow. Mac sales remain strong, but while the iPhone is of to a decent start with 4m units shipped so far, some analysts believe it may take until at least 2009 for the handset to emerge as a revenue driver for Apple. A savvy acquisition could help make up for any revenue growth gap in the near term.

There is another, perhaps more compelling use of all that cash, however: buybacks. With Apple’s stock price now off more than a third from its 2007 high, Apple may find the most compelling use of its cash is to invest in its own shares.

The entertainment industry thinks it has found a new opening in its fight against online piracy and is working hard to make it count.

Internet service providers are being pushed into the front lines of this battle - some willingly. In the US, AT&T was pretty open a couple of weeks ago about lining up behind NBC Universal to stamp out illegal content passing over its networks. In France, President Sarkozy gave the media industry hope when he came up with a plan that forces ISPs to cut off pirates on the third offense.

To John Kennedy, head of music industry trade body IFPI, this is the beginning of something much bigger. In the IFPI’s annual report today he calls for ISPs to take a central role in monitoring internet traffic - and for governments to follow France’s lead in making the internet a medium where "we protect our culture":

There must be obligations on the ISPs to warn, suspend and eventually disconnect infringing users and apply filtering measures… 2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it becomes reality.

It hardly needs saying that the implications of this are far-reaching. Should ISPs be forced to monitor what passes over their networks, make decisions about what is or isn’t legal, and act unilaterally on the results?

In the US, this is quickly turning into the next eruption of the net neutrality debate. The Federal Trade Commission has already said this month that it is going to investigate Comcast’s move to block file-sharing traffic on BitTorrent.

It is easy to understand why ISPs would use the piracy issue as an excuse to try to exert more control over the economics of their networks. But do they really want the policing responsibility that would go along with it?

The biggest film studios have access to libraries of tens of thousands of films and TV titles, but most of them never see the light of day. That is because only a handful of those titles account for the vast bulk of DVD sales. Retailers have little incentive to stock the thousands of less popular titles that make up the rest of studios’ libraries, since it would force them to carry costly and slow-moving inventory. 

HP estimates that there may be $1.5bn-$2bn of untapped opportunity lurking in this long tail of library content. But that could change under a new partnership between HP and Sony, set to be announced on Thursday. Under the partnership, HP will offer content from Sony, manufactured on demand for DVD retailers and wholesalers. The idea is to use HP’s digital technologies to change the economics of DVD distribution. 

While details about specific film titles and retail partners are scarce, the idea is that retailers would be able to use the HP technology to fill single orders of Sony library titles. Meanwhile, video wholesalers would be able to use the same technology to fill smaller orders of less popular films that otherwise would only be economical to press in bulk. 

Eliminating the need to carry inventory should allow retailers to expand the array of titles available in their stores, opening up the long tail of library content to consumers. With Sony now on board with its DVD-on-demand technology, HP will no doubt be looking to strike deals with other prominent studios soon.

  So it’s official, Meg Whitman is to leave after 10 remarkable years (sullied by some mishaps of late.) As Youssef Squali, an analyst at Jefferies, puts it: "She will be remembered as one of the best CEOs of the dotcom [period], who made it successfully through the bubble and the nuclear winter."

This also means a broader reshuffle. Rajiv Dutta may have been passed over for the top job (see note below) but he’s clearly been made John Donahoe’s number two with the new title of executive vice president and Donahoe’s old job of running the marketplace division. One-time contender Bill Cobb is out, and will retire from the company at the end of the year.

Meanwhile Donahoe has decided to reset the bar, with a prediction that eBay’s revenues will grow by only 12.5 per cent this year. That is shocking - revenues were up nearly 30 per cent in 2007. It suggests that much more is going on than a tinkering with eBay’s fee structure, a move that had already been in the air, and that the fundamental model on which eBay has functioned is now under scrutiny. After three years trying to revive the marketplaces business - with only modest success - Donahoe seems to have decided that something far more drastic is needed.

Update: extra details revealed on the analyst call this afternoon showed the slowdown isn’t quite as severe as it seemed. Leaving aside the effects of the falling dollar and acquisitions, revenues in 2007 grew only 21 per cent. But this is still a big adjustment to the eBay model. As eBay lowers its listing fees (and sees the volume of listings rise), much rides on a better search engine to sift out the best goods at the best prices from the sellers who give the best service. Promises from eBay in the past to improve the quality of search have been a disappointment.

If Meg Whitman does indeed decide to hang up her gavel (reported here in the Wall Street Journal, but yet to be confirmed), who will be left running a company that accounts for some 15 per cent of all global ecommerce?

The eBay chief has had various stabs at nurturing home-grown talent and has reached outside at various times to bring in extra firepower. As succession planning goes, it hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride. This is how it has played out:

Jeff Jordan. A former Disney executive who Whitman brought with her when she arrived, Jordan was clearly being groomed for big things. His jobs included running PayPal and the company’s North American operations. He was eventually a casualty of the big slowdown that hit eBay’s core business 3-4 years ago, forcing Whitman to retool her management team, and he was eventually passed over, leaving 18 months ago to "spend more time with his family."

Bill Cobb. When she gave former marketing executive Cobb charge of the North American business three years ago, Whitman signalled that she was setting up a succession race, which at the time also included Matt Bannick (another executive whose star has since faded.) However, Cobb oversaw the disastrous revamp of seller incentives that represents one of eBay’s biggest slips of recent years, as lower listing fees caused its site to be overrun with less valuable inventory, and his role now carries less responsibility than it once did.

Rajiv Dutta. A long-time chief financial officer and head of strategy, Dutta championed the acquisition of Skype and was given his first operational role heading the internet telephone service. Whitman finally admitted the flaws in that deal last year, writing the acquisition down by $1.4bn. Dutta has since moved on to head PayPal, but the false-start at Skype has not left him in a strong position to take the top job.

John Donahoe. Hired in 2005, the former head of Bain (where he also once worked under Whitman) looks like the man who will benefit from these slips. As head of the marketplace division, a position from which he effectively runs eBay’s core business, Donahoe spent last year fixing the mess left from the botched fees overhaul. He is now trying to carve out a broader strategy, using classifieds and other methods to supplement eBay’s traditional auction format for linking buyers and sellers (he described his plans to us in this piece last month.) Wall Street has seen enough of Donahoe to feel comfortable that he has now made the transition from consultant to full operating executive, so the time could be right.

The growing interest of traditional video game publishers in casual games looks like creating new hybrid formats and experimental business models.

Electronic Arts has announced its first completely free title, Battlefield Heroes, available for download this summer.

It looks like a dumbed-down cartoon-like version of its Battlefield 1942 PC game, but still seems far more sophisticated than a typical casual game such as Texas Hold ‘Em or Bejeweled.

There will also be elements of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) genre, dominated by World of Warcraft. EA says players will be able to build their characters in an ever-expanding online world, paying a few dollars in micro-transactions for extra weapons and equipment. In-game advertising is also planned.

The success of Microsoft’s Xbox Live service has revealed there is money to be made from smaller-scale games, available for download there for less than $10.

EA is reinventing and repurposing an existing fading franchise. If it is successful, expect to see more of EA’s original IP appearing in a casualised form, aimed at less-than-hard-core gamers.

For evidence of how seriously Microsoft is starting to take the market for virtualisation software, take a look at its acquisition today of Calista Technologies. This is a company that was launched as recently as 2006. It has raised only one round of venture capital (around $7m) and it has yet to ship any products.

Yet Calista got prominent billing today as Microsoft put some of the pieces in place for its attack on a market that represents both huge potential and a sizeable threat for its server and desktop businesses. No price for Calista was disclosed but when we spoke to Barry Eggers of Lightspeed Ventures, one of the company’s backers, he left no doubt that Microsoft is paying up in its efforts to catch up with VMWare (latest profile here):

We’re not in the business of selling good technologies early. Obviously it has to be a good deal for everybody all around.

Calista’s software is meant to make rich media work better on virtualised desktops - for instance, the graphics in Windows Vista could be made to work smoothly on a PC which does not run an instance of the software, but which is drawing it from a remote server.

Yet while Microsoft is racing to buy component technologies, it has yet to put the most important building block in pace. It still seems that a hypervisor for Windows - the key piece of software that lets multiple operating systems run on a single machine - will not be available in its server software until the second half of this year.

As happened with search technology, Microsoft has fallen well behind a competitor (in this case VMWare) that is moving fast to tighten its grip on a new market. Unlike search, though, Microsoft may be able to apply some of its most effective competitive weapons - "bundling" the software with its server products, using its control of desktop and server licensing - to make a dent.

You could forgive Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital if he sounded a little smug when I spoke to him earlier today about the eye-catching $1bn sale of MySQL. A longtime venture investor in open source companies, Harvey has had to put up with a few knocks along the way. As he put it:

When we first invested in Red Hat it was thought to be totally insane. When we funded MySQL it was only partly insane.

Benchmark’s purchase of a 26 per cent stake certainly looks pretty smart now. Harvey (whose earlier successes have included eBay) wouldn’t say how much he had invested, but MySQL took in around $39m in all.

It’s hard to shake off the lingering feeling, though, that open source as a pure-play strategy will never add up to much, and Sun’s purchase of MySQL seems to confirm this. Sure, it’s hugely disruptive to the software establishment, but it’s beginning to look like open source has more value when used as part of a traditional technology company’s armoury, rather than as a stand-alone business.

Sun hopes that owning MySQL will give it a chance to sell other (proprietary) software to users of the open source database. That is the same idea that prompted earlier open source acquisitions by Novell (of Linux distributor SuSe) and IBM (middleware company Gluecode.) Oracle didn’t even bother making an acquisition but simply declared that it would support Red Hat’s version of Linux, dealing a big blow to that company.

It seems only Red Hat really believes in trying to build a pure open source software "stack". At around $500m a year and growing at 30 per cent, Red Hat’s revenues are not to be sneezed at. But, tellingly, it is Sun, not Red Hat, that has bagged MySQL. Equally tellingly, MySQL’s investors discovered that the company was worth more as takeover-bait for Sun than as a stand alone business. "It was on the IPO track until Sun convinced us to take this track," says Harvey.

Maybe Sun has overpaid. But if Schwartz is right and MySQL is worth more dead than alive (as it were), then it suggests that the dominant software models will be hyrbid ones, not pure open source.