Nirvanix, the San Diego-based company that brought network attached storage to the cloud, has raised another $5m in funding from its original investors - Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures.

The latest funding round brings the total raised by the intriguingly named company to over $23m and underscores the belief among the VC community that cloud-based services targeting business customers will continue to blossom despite, or perhaps because of, the recession. Continue reading "Hey, you, get off of my cloudNAS"

Is Apple limbering up for a courtroom punch-up with Palm over the Pre’s multi-touch screen?

Palm’s share price tumbled yesterday in the wake of remarks by Tim Cook, Apple chief operating officer, who said during Apple’s quarterly earnings call that the iPhone maker would use all its weapons to fight any rivals that “ripped off” its intellectual property (IP). Continue reading "Palm’s Pre catches Apple’s eye"

@CES, Las Vegas: Apple, which claims its MacBook Air is the thinnest portable PC on the market, faces new competition from an unexpected source - Taiwan-based Micro Star International.

MSI, best known for its PC motherboards and ‘Wind’ netbook PCs, used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to launch the ultra-thin X-Slim X320 notebook – a low-cost machine that looks remarkably similar to the MacBook Air but runs Microsoft Windows. Continue reading "MSI launches MacBook Air challenger"

Depending how you define them, Finland’s Nokia is by far the largest supplier of smartphones.

But Nokia position in the business smartphone market has been constrained in the past because, unlike BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, it lacked the tools to enable companies to directly connect their corporate email systems to Nokia devices.

Now that is changing.

Nokia and IBM announced an agreement that will enable Nokia smartphones including more than 80m Nokia S60 devices already deployed, to access IBM Lotus Notes corporate email starting from next month.

In September Nokia signed a similar deal with Microsoft that enables Nokia smartphones to be tied into corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers and Outlook email systems.

As a result, Nokia claims that close to 90 per cent of corporate inboxes can now be accessed from Nokia devices without the need for third-party middleware, or perhaps most crucially in the current economic environment, any additional investment.

Nokia abandoned development of its own corporate email product this year, choosing to look for partners instead while focusing on developing phones for business users to better challenge RIM, the wireless email market leader.

RIM’s success in the corporate market reflects in part, its close relationships with telecommunications network operators and its success in persuading corporate customers and others to deploy its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software which provides a secure and reliable link into enterprise email systems including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Nokia’s latest announcements underscore the company’s determination to accelerate adoption of its smartphone devices, particulary its ‘E’ Series smartphones, in the face of increasing competition from RIM and other smartphone vendors including Apple with the iPhone.

In the third quarter Nokia sold 1.1m of its new full mini-Qwerty keyboard E71 phones, outselling RIM’s Blackberry Bold which is aimed at a similar high end market segment by bout five-to-one, according to Nokia. Since then however, the Blackberry Bold has been rolled out in additional markets including the US where it is exclusively on offer from AT&T.

Nokia’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange tie-ups level the enterpise smartphone playing field. Let battle commence.

I am not a big video gamer, but one of the new features that will be introduced on November 19 by Microsoft’s Xbox team as part of a user interface redesign dubbed the ‘New Xbox Experience’ (NXE) could help bolster the consol’s claim to a place in the living room.

The software upgrade, which the Xbox team has been working on for the past nine months and which will be automatically downloaded like any other system update, will bring streaming Netflix movies to the Xbox 360 instantly transforming the device from ‘simply’ a games machine into a new distribution platform for the movies-by-mail pioneer.

That means Xbox Live members will have instant access to the Netflix catalogue of more that 12,000 movie and TV shows. Once selected, movies begin playing in about 30 seconds and Xbox Live members can browse and rate movies, fast-forward, pause and rewind using either an Xbox 360 controller or universal remote.

Other enhancements included in the NXE overhaul include a new and much more modern looking UI which replaces the rather tired looking blade interface, a cleaner, more intuitive Marketplace channel where users can buy games-related items and the ability to set up virtual parties involving up to eight participants who can play a game together or share content like photos.

I am much less enthusiastic about another new feature – the ability to create a personal avatar – but then I was never a big Second Life enthusiast either.

Third time lucky for Sony? The Japanese electronics group was an early convert to electronic ink and e-books, but sales of its first e-book reader, like most of the competition, were disappointing.

Undeterred, Sony pressed on, launching a second generation device - the PRS-500 - in the US in September 2006 ( a slightly thinner but otherwise similar model, the PRS-505, replaced the PRS-500 last October in the US and went on sale in the UK a month ago).

Like most of the e-book readers currently on the market, Sony’s models use e-ink technology which uses very little power but can be quite difficult to read in low light conditions.

Unfortunately for Sony, despite its elegant styling, the PRS-500/505 arrived about the same time as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which boasts a number of advantages including cellular wireless connectivity and a much more extensive selection of book titles.

Although Sony has not released any data on Reader sales, potential buyers may also have been deterred by Sony’s insistence on bundling the Reader with a Windows software package called Connect used to purchase e-books online in Sony’s proprietary BBeB (”BroadBand eBook”) format.

Now Sony is trying to address some of the PRS-505’s shortcomings, most of which were identified by my colleague, John Gapper in Why Sony lost the battle of the e-book, with a new 6-inch touch-screen based device dubbed the PRS-700 that will be priced at $400 when it goes on sale at the end of the month - $100 more than the current Reader.

Aside from the touchscreen and the ability to annotate documents using a stylus and pop-up virtual keyboard, the main difference between the PRS-505 and PRS-700 is the addition of integrated LED lighting around the edge of the screen which makes reading in low light conditions much easier.

The new 10-ounce model can hold about 350 books in its internal memory and also features flash memory card expansion slots but crucially is still missing the Kindle’s wireless capabilities. That means instead of being able to wirelessly download content directly to the device (the Kindle has a built-in Sprint EVDO data module), Sony PRS-700 users still have to load books and other e-documents via a PC.

Nevertheless, the new Sony Reader supports a broader range of e-book and document formats and comes with a new software package - eBook Library 2.5 - designed to make it easier to load Adobe PDF documents, Microsoft Word documents, BBeB files and other text file formats to the Reader.

Sony is also promising to expand the selection of e-book titles available online and has redesigned the store to make it easier to use. Sony’s online bookstore currently offers about 50,000 titles while the Kindle store offers more than 180,000, including many bestsellers costing $10 each – a tough act to follow.

As developers, including those who build mobile phone applications, know only too well, the reality of ‘write once, run anywhere’ has often been ‘write once, test everywhere (you intend to deploy your application).’

But with its expanded Blueprint mobile development platform, Yahoo! and Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s connected life division, are promising things will be different and that third party developers will be able to build mobile applications that will run across a wide range of mobile platforms and devices.

Here is how it is supposed to work. Instead of using a platform-specific SDK, for example for Symbian or Windows Mobile, developers download the free Blueprint mobile SDK and build their mobile website or standalone mobile application. The resulting Blueprint code can then be used to create standalone mobile applications for Java, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices using Yahoo!’s  Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Apps.

 Yahoo! is also in negotiations with Apple about making an iPhone version available to developers and Yahoo! executives say they expect to eventually be able to support all the major platforms including Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Provided it works, Yahoo! believes the resulting time and cost savings for developers will be compelling and insist that since it is an open SDK,  there is no downside to using the Blueprint SDK in place of a platform specific development kit.

Of course Yahoo! is also betting that Blueprint will help cement its own role as a leading mobile application developer, keep the company one step ahead of rivals like Google and further the company’s ambitions to help define the mobile internet.

In addition, since Blueprint includes the ability for developers to include advertising in their applications, Yahoo sees this as an opportunity to expand its ad revenue, though as Boerries points out,  Blueprint and Yahoo’s ad-serving software are loosely coupled, meaning it’s easy to enable Yahoo ads but not essential and developers are free to choose their ad provider of choice.

Mentioning DVD movies and copying in the same sentence is pretty well guaranteed to raise eyebrows, if not hackles, among Hollywood’s movie moguls. Launch a product that promises to make it simple and easy for DVD owners to copy their movies onto a PC disk drive and it is a fair bet that the lawyers  from the Motion Picture Association of America will sit up and take notice.

Well that is exactly what Real Networks did this week at the Demo conference in San Diego when it launched Real DVD, a $30 program that will be available before the end of the month. Rob Glasier, Real’s chief executive, who had a cameo part in the Demo presentation, insists RealDVD is totally legitimate.

Real  believes it has sidestepped the legal minefield that sank St Louis-based  321 Studios, developers of the popular program DVD X Copy. 321 Studios was forced to shut down in 2004 after a judge ruled that its software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, DVD pirates have been forced to rely on illicit DVD copy software.

Unlike many of these programs, RealDVD does not break the DVD copy-protection technology intended to the thwart such piracy. Instead Real Networks has licensed the official DVD copy-protection scheme and built it into RealDVD. As a result Real claims its program is simply a software DVD player.

RealDVD also includes a number of other restrictions which appear designed to appease the MPAA. Among them, RealDVD users can only make one copy of the original, and this copy is only playable only on the computer where it was made.

The MPAA has yet to comment on the new software, but its response is likely to be tempered by the outcome of another lawsuit.

In March last year, the DVD Copy Control Association, the alliance that licenses the encryption for DVDs, lost a lawsuit against Kaleidescape, a Silicon Valley start-up which sells a $10,000 music server that enables its owners to copy, store and playback up to 500 movies from the server’s hard drive.

The DVD association has appealed against the ruling, but Real Networks believes the decision has created a framework for a legal DVD copying product, provided it incorporates adequate restrictions to prevent piracy.