Summit Notebook

Dell: stay tuned for “Streak”

It’s hard to tell how much anticipation there is out there for Dell’s upcoming “Streak” micro-tablet. The No. 3 PC maker’s latest foray into a consumer arena that Apple’s iPad has essentially helped create is set to hit stores this summer in the United States.

Consumer business unit chief Steve Felice told the Reuters Global Technology Summit that Dell isn’t interested in becoming the No. 1 player in the smartphone and tablet mobile devices categories, where Apple and Google are waging a very high-profile war. But the former leader in personal computers fully intends to be a “top-tier player”.

“We look at this whole thing as an experience between the computer and the remote device. We still view these as complementary devices,” he said.

Like a bunch of other tablet computers in the pipeline — courtesy of everyone from Hewlett Packard to Acer – Dell’s is getting a fair share of Web attention, but this one is a little different though. At just 5-inches, the gizmo isn’t quite a smartphone, yet can’t quite call itself a tablet a la Apple’s 11-inch product.

It remains to be seen where consumers will actually want a smartphone-tablet size-hybrid. Much of that may depend on price of course, but Felice isn’t talking — yet.

(Photo courtesy of tech blog Engadget)

Cisco home TelePresence: online school heaven?

You can just hear the University of Phoenix licking its chops right now.

Cisco expects to have  its home TelePresence system — a living room version of what you have seen in those quirky Ellen Page commercials (see below) — by the holiday season at around $500 (plus some kind of monthly service fee), Cisco Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd said on Thursday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit. He and some other Cisco employees are about to start a round of internal testing.

The system will let two users have a conversation with video. Ok, yes, Skype does that every day over garden variety laptops. But TelePresence, as described by Lloyd, uses your high speed Internet link, and your own flat-screen TV, to deliver crisp video, and overcome that weird latency issue where you and your conversation partner both talk at the same time, and both stop to say “no…you go.”

The key benefit, he says, is that it works over your home TV and brings the myriad tools of the Internet to your conversation. So if you are talking about the family tree, you can bring up photo apps during the chat, or video or other useful information. And for school… its priceless.

When you get the latency too high — I say something, you say something, two seconds later you stop, and I stop and we both stop. We have all been there. You get the latency nailed down, and then you get applications integrated into that — because just talking to someone is interesting, but you probably want to have that integration into a marketplace when you can get service that can take advantage of that. So you want some small business services, some educational capabilities, you want to take some MBA classes from home, connected to a university that is offering some extension services — not on a website, but on a consumer TelePresence – it is going to happen.

So you will get education just transforming itself. A whole bunch of universities are going to love us.

So, would you buy this Web-videochat-on-steroids system?

VMWare’s orator: Tod Nielsen

Tod Nielsen certainly has the gift of the gab. VMWare’s chief operating officer, who was once videotaped by a reporter in the hope that he would turn out someday to be “famous” (and a royalty generator), waxed lyrical at the Reuters Global Technology Summit about everything from British CIOs and magic crystals to PCs .

Here’s a sampling of his colorfully phrased — though occasionally puzzling — views.

On VMWare’s Q1 performance:

“We should walk down Wall Street and get the tickertape parade.”

On how the company has to keep up relationships with every hardware vendor out there:

“Part of my job is to be Switzerland and be great friends with everybody.”

On how VMWare triggers spending on storage, networking, servers and so on when they win contracts:

Is Apple in Intel’s future?

Apple developed the processor for it’s recently launched iPad tablet PC in-house. Intel was left waiting on the sidelines but change may be in store. Future tablets from other device makers, and maybe even Apple, could prove to be a lucrative for the world’s largest chipmaker. And why not, Intel already makes the microprocessors that are used in more than three quarters of the world’s PCs. Tom Kilroy, Intel senior vice president and general manager of sales and marketing, says “wait til Computex” for a big announcement. So, what’s likely to come out of the industry trade show this June in Taipei? Any thoughts? Click below to hear what Kilroy had to say in San Francisco at the 2010 Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Intel on Tablet Opportunities from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

Intel, HP: TVs should get smarter

Intel, Sony and Google are expected to unveil on Thursday a “smart TV”: an Internet-ready, super content machine that — if the hype is to be believed — will let viewers watch Celebrity Apprentice, tweet, and respond to emails at the same time. On Wednesday, Intel’s sales and marketing chief — while keeping his cards close to the vest — couldn’t resist a little plug for the general concept of Internet TVs.

“The smart TV category is going to take off.  It just makes all the sense in the world,” Thomas Kilroy told the Reuters Global Technology Summit. “Why would you want to compromise when you’ve got a nice big screen, you’re watching TV and you want to access information and keep that program on instead of bringing in another device. ”

“It’s our belief that there’s going to be a fundmental shift that happens every 30 to 40 years or more…and it’s about to happen with televisions,” he added. “I actually remember the black and white days. I remember in my house when we went from black and white to color and my gosh, what an experience.”

It remains to be seen if Google TV — tech blogs have already dubbed the product Smart TV — will transform the media consumption landscape. But the idea is sure getting traction.

HP’s imaging and printing division chief later jumped in – unprompted — to outline the very same vision of having multiple screens on one Internet-connected TV, much like the holographic displays dreamed up in Tom Cruise’s “Minority Report”.

“We’re dumbing down the TV — it should be a content device,” HP’s Vyomesh Joshi argued.

from MediaFile:

HP: Think before you ‘dis’ print(ing)

All those reminders to "think before you print" and the use of the email for most official correspondence might make you believe the office printer is no longer so important. The reality, however, is that we print more than ever, according to Vyomesh Joshi, Executive VP of Hewlett-Packard's imaging and printing group, who sat down with the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco.

The truth is, even company executives don't realize might be surprised much printing and printing-related is going on, he says.

IT managers will have absolutely no idea how much they spend on imaging and printing... On average, 6 percent of their revenue is spent on imaging and printing.

There are 50 trillion pages printed every year. A lot of people think we're going to the paperless office... 1984 was the first article about the paperless office and the reality in 2010 is 10 times more paper is used than in 1984.

Which means workers everywhere still continue to struggle with paper jams.How many Paper Jams, you ask? According to Joshi:

Twenty-three percent of all the helpdesk calls are about printing.

(Photo: Reuters)

from MediaFile:

SanDisk on bullets and phone wars

Watch out for that smartphone! The iPhone, Android phones and the like are the weapons of the latest technology war, in the view of  flash memory maker SanDisk, which supplies the memory chips that hold pictures, video and apps to the phone makers.

"We sell them ammunition. There is a war going on and we sell the bullets," Eli Harari told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

And bullets are selling briskly, even in the developing world, where people without computers are buying $20 phones and then adding a gigabyte or two of memory to hold all their pictures, the CEO said.

Apple's iPhone is coming under more fire from Google's Android platform and world handset leader Nokia. "Android phones are exploding," he said.

"The Android operating system on various platforms is going to give the industry a fighting chance against Apple. It remains to be seen what Nokia is going to do. I would definitely not write them off, although they clearly have fallen behind," Harari said. (Picture by Reuters/Bob Galbraith)

from MediaFile:

Twitter’s Costolo: not quite footloose and fancy free

You'd think fast-racing Twitter would keep one eye firmly fixed on the rearview and side mirrors.

With the Internet landscape littered with also-rans -- from pets.com to AskJeeves.com to a Facebook-steamrolled MySpace -- you'd imagine the one thing overnight Internet microblogging phenomenon Twitter would fear the most would be to get displaced by an up-and-comer with the same alarming speed.

Not so. Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo insists no one at the company he has worked at for less than a year worries about two theoretical guys in a garage dreaming up the next social networking sensation.

"That's a fun question. The way I think about that is the only thing to prevent us from being successful is us," said the co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in the summer of 2007. "This stuff that's out of my control -- I've got no hair and I'm too stressed out as is," said the bespectacled, balding executive who joined Twitter in September.

"We all kind of make it our job to understand what the landscape looks like but we make it a point to reinforce to each other that we're the people that are going to make Twitter successful, not the success or failure of the competition."

That's not to say Costolo and his company are luxuriating in a carefree existence. With more than $100 million raised from the likes of T. Rowe Price, Benchmark Capital and other investment names -- granting the four-year old firm an eye-popping $1 billion valuation -- tons of hype and the attendant hopes, Costolo is well aware of the need to meet some of those lofty expectations.

"We've got things to prove before we get there," admitted Costolo, an amateur stage performer. "I constantly, constantly, constantly worry about what we need to do to be a self-sustaining business."

from MediaFile:

Want an in with Kleiner? Send a drawing

For Matt Murphy, partner with influential Silicon Valley Venture fund Kleiner Perkins and point person on the firm's iFund, old-school is still the way to go.

During an interview at the Reuters technology summit, the VC said picking the right startups to back was tough, given that he had received 8,000 business plans for iFund, which invests in iPhone and iPad applications.

The onslaught of business plans from app developers escalated to almost 500 per day when the fund expanded to $200 million in March.

When asked what gets his attention, Murphy said anything handwritten or hand-made leaves an impression.

"What stands out in this day and age of technology is when somebody sends me like handwritten things with hand sketched-out drawing, or a model or mock-up of something they are building," he said. "It is always entertaining to see something done in an old-school way that stands out."

"I can't say if any of those things I funded, but it did leave an impression on me."

(reporting by Poornima Gupta)

from MediaFile:

Speak, memory! The eternal search for notebooks with flash drives

Good news for us computer geeks! PCs are nearly ready to ditch hard drives for faster, less energy-intensive drives with flash memory, like in a camera or cell phone, according to memory maker Micron, which ought to know. That is exciting news for victims of crashed hard drives and people who always want something new.

"I think it'll be a story in 2011, and it'll be pretty good penetration in 2012. But, you know, maybe I'm wrong," said Mark Durcan, president and chief operating officer of Micron, during the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Sadly, he may well be right about the last part. The last Micron exec to speak about so-called solid state drives to an appreciatively nerdy Reuters summit was CEO Steve Appleton, who in November 2005 predicted that flash drives would replace hard drives within five years. Actually, he's still got time, but folks better hurry!

There are some notebooks with flash drives (like Apple's super-thin MacBook Air) and  Durcan says consumers love 'em. Hiccups with the technology from a year and a half or so are gone -- power efficiency now beats hard drives, and annoying problems which slowed solid state drives have been solved, he said, comparing now with when Appleton spoke, on the cusp of 2006.

"In 2006 it was the promise. It wasn't the reality. But it's real now." Still, he added, computer makers are wary of the volatile prices.

Hopefully by next year's Tech Summit that will all be worked out.