Dude, you're getting Dell's market share!

On its latest report Thursday night, Research firm iSupply said Dell is facing assaults on all fronts from PC vendors ready to take advantage of its mistakes.

Dell's computer shipments increased in the third quarter by just 1.5 percent compared to the same season a year ago, well behind other top-tier PC makers. The company shipped just 100,000 more systems than in summer 2006 and tumbled from a 16.3 percent market share of all PCs shipped worldwide to 14.6 percent.

Yesterday after the closing bell Dell reported its quarterly results which weren't welcomed well by investors, the stock gave up $3.88 a share to fall to $24.70 amid negative reaction to the company's cloudy late-Thursday forecast, in which Dell kept with its new policy of not giving earnings or revenue forecasts.

On a conference call, Chief Financial Officer Don Carty said that Dell's near-term results could be adversely impacted by the slower declines in computer-component costs and the shift in emphasis toward the U.S. consumer and international markets.


The company's lackluster performance is largely due to sluggish sales channels that haven't yet adapted to the company's renewed PC-centric strategy.

Other companies have been eager to pounce on this fact, according to the researchers. Both first-place HP and fourth-place Acer are pushing Dell out of its familiar position at the top of the charts as they both put most of their attention on the more popular notebook business and have been much more successful at controlling their sales channels. Each grew substantially over the last year, with HP climbing from 16.5 percent to 19.2 percent year-over-year and Acer soaring from 5.4 to 7.9 percent -- a 68 percent leap in market share that will only get stronger once Acer finishes acquiring Gateway within coming months.

Dell's computer shipments increased in the third quarter by just 1.5 percent compared to the same season a year ago, well behind other top-tier PC makers. The company shipped just 100,000 more systems than in summer 2006 and tumbled from a 16.3 percent market share of all PCs shipped worldwide to 14.6 percent.

Although I believe the company may still has some rough times ahead I think that as a long term investment Dell (DELL) is a good buy, and I think folks out there should grab it while it trades down, as the company is going through restructuring, and founder Micheal Dell is back at the CEO spot. Dell may soon become a turnaround story.

Digg style voting coming to Google?

Techcrunch is reporting that Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

OLPC Laptop in danger!

Hello folks, the Wall street Journal has posted a fascinating story about the development of the One Laptop Per child initiative and its many recent difficulties and clashing with Intel and Microsoft, its really a great story, that demonstrates how a computer which was designed for the poor developing nations got stomped by technology giants.

I think that OLPC should have expected both Microsoft and Intel to compete and aiming at their initiative and cooperate with them, because its really too bad to watch such a great and bright project for developing nations gets stomped by tech giants.

I really think that you can both make a profit and contribute something to the world's poor and needy, its just a matter of finding the right balance.

World Wide Web: Land of Free Stuff!

Hello guys, and Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Business week has made an interesting list of 101 free things on the internet, including: college education, shampoo, coffee samples, Vodka, Open source software, and much more intriguing stuff.

Its really nice to read how the web evolved from its prehistoric age 15 years ago, into what we're seeing today.

TV on your PC

Another rainy Sunday afternoon? the best thing you can is fire up your PC and watch a TV show or a movie, but wait how do you get the content?

Hello guys, I've just read a nice review of Joost, Hulu, and Miro over at Gizmodo.
and yeah all the three are totally free.

All of them of course are pushing TV content over into the computer, with the goal of making TV shows available on the web.
Persoanlly I like Joost but it has lots of unresolved issues that's just annoying making it a bit frustrating watching shows.

The Contenders:
Hulu: NBC Universal/News Corp.'s mutant is a sandbox-y YouTube for their properties. Joost: Streaming P2P service from Kazaa/Skype founders that wants oh so badly to be real TV. It's got deals with Viacom and other name players—News Corp.'s rumored to be at the table as well. Miro: Open-source Cory Doctorow-anointed Joost-slayer. You download, rather than stream. It uses RSS-based channels and BitTorrent for its P2P workings.

Bottom line: No matter what service you pick, you won't find everything you want, thanks in part to corporate hang-ups and in part to the primitiveness of these early stages. They're maddeningly incomplete, like a crappy library in a rural town.

Joost is probably your best bet in terms of quantity and quality, with Miro working better if you want a ton of new programming but don't care about corporate quality. And if you want Battlestar, well, the choice will be made for you.

Will eBooks ever be a best seller?

Hello guys, Well Amazon launched today its much rumored eBook reader called: Amazon Kindle.


Over all I must say I'm not really impressed with it. and books are pretty expensive at 9.99 a piece, plus you can get subscribed to different magazines and newspapers , the benefits of the unit is that you get a free of charge always on cell phone like connection which is basically subsidized by Amazon in order to get people to buy eBooks.

Greg Sandoval at Cnet asks whether eBooks will ever become a best seller?

The average commuter seems to be doing OK reading an old-fashioned newspaper on the way to work. Why, then, do Amazon.com and Sony think they need to replace traditional books with electronic readers?

On Monday, Amazon unveiled the Kindle, a $399 handheld device that can download digital books, newspapers, and magazines from the Internet. Like the name suggests, Kindle is Amazon's way of burning down the traditional paperback book business.

Just last month, Sony launched an upgraded version of its Sony Reader.
Sony and Amazon apparently think the public finally is ready to trade its paperbacks in for more computer screens, even though various attempts to do this have largely failed for a decade.

The Wall Street Journal quoted an executive from Rosetta Books last week who estimated that e-book sales range between $15 million and $25 million annually. That would be a tiny portion of the $25 billion in revenues the publishing industry generated last year.

So what tea leaves are these companies reading to convince them that consumers are finally ready to go digital with their books?

These electronic reading devices are expensive. There are always questions of durability and portability with something that's too bulky to fit in a pocket. And it's not clear many people are clamoring to spend that kind of money on an electronic reading device when they can basically do the same thing on a multipurpose device like Apple's iPhone at nearly the same price.

"Sony's Reader has been a tough sell at $300," said Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD. "The early adopters will be willing to pay a premium, but the mass market won't be ready until the price comes down--and it will. Amazon is probably not expecting to sell a zillion units of their reader at $399.

"At this stage, their intent is to try and teach the market and publishers about what the device can do," Baker added. "Remember, it took the (digital-music crowd) a while to find a business model."

There is no question that e-readers have improved. They are lighter than in the past, easier to read, and at least in the case of Amazon's Kindle, don't have to be connected to a PC to download a book.
The Kindle will hook up to the Web via a Sprint EVDO connection. That means owners can buy and download books to the Kindle wherever they can connect to the Web. That's far more convenient than being tethered to a PC.

Kindle comes with a 6-inch, 800x600 display--which uses technology from E Ink--to make it easy on the eyes. The company, which provides the same technology for the Sony Reader, fills its displays with small capsules containing thousands of microscopic black-and-white particles made out of the same materials as ink and paper.

Because of this, the screens reflect light in the same way as a book page. Instead of staring into a flashlight, which is what reading most backlit computer screens is like, E Ink is more like reading paper and ink than any screen technology developed so far, said E Ink's CEO Russ Wilcox. He declined to discuss the Kindle ahead of Monday's announcement.

"You can see the words from all angles," Wilcox said. "There's no backlight and most of the time the reader sees the page while the power is off. This allows the user to read for hours without draining the battery."

The other big selling point, of course, is weight. Carrying around an e-reader is easier on the spine than lugging around a bunch of books. The Kindle can hold a small library but weighs just 10.3 ounces--a little more than a half-pound. For those concerned about the environment, e-readers will obviously save a lot of trees and create less waste.

On the other hand, when was the last time a John Grisham novel ran out of battery power? E-readers offer a certain amount of convenience, but consumers will have to see clear advantages if they're going to make the shift.

I think that the market is not quite yet developed and is still at its very early stages.
There's a lot of wok to be done in order to get eBooks right.

Check out Amazon's video of the new Kindle.

Obama drops by Google

Barack Obama was visits Google this week, sat down for a Q&A with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Pretty interesting stuff.





Also check out John Dvorak's Marketwatch column about politicians and the tech world.

Let the music play!

Hello guys, I hope you're all having a great week weekend, I've got something to make your weekend a bit better. I just ran across a terrific website called: Songza, for listening to streaming music online with your song of choice, you simply tap whatever song or artist you like and boom, it just streams that song.

There are lots of internet radio services that stream music which provides far better experience, but the majority of these offer music by artists, similar song etc..
They don't allow you to listen to a specific song of your choice.
And that where this great service becomes useful, The beauty of the service is that it specifically great for tracking down songs, and live artists performance as it find all sorts of music even from YouTube videos, and much more.
It has a super easy intuitive user interface like we all love, and does a great job at streaming songs.

Songza is actually the brainchild of 23-year-old Aza Raskin — the president of Chicago-based software company Humanized, Inc., and the son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin. Over the course of a month, he and Humanized's Web/Systems Architect Scott Robbin worked weekends to bring the idea to life. The site launched a few weeks ago, on November 8, 2007

AMD+Abu Dhabi?

(Credit: Abu Dhabi government)

What does Abu Dhabi want out of Advanced Micro Devices? A way to make money that doesn't involve an oil well.

On Friday, Abu Dhabi's Mubdala Development announced it was buying an 8.1 percent stake in chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, which could cost it roughly between $550 million and $700 million. Mubdala is a separate organization but it's funded by the government. The emirate, part of the United Arab Emirates, is awash with money thanks to escalating oil prices so it needs to put the money somewhere. But there is also more going on in the deal.

Abu Dhabi, like nearby Dubai and Qatar, has been rapidly increasing its investments in the technology industry as a way to diversify its economic base. Oil is still gushing out of the ground in Abu Dhabi but leaders have acknowledged that fossil fuel supplies will inevitably dwindle. So rather than squander their money on cars and luxury goods, the government (and the investment trusts it owns) is effectively trying to create a version of the white collar economy that exists in North America, Europe, and Japan.

The amazing part is the speed with which the emirate is acting. Last year, it set up Masdar, a $250 million clean tech VC fund. It has already invested heavily in HelioVolt, which wants to make copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells, as well as Texas LED manufacturer AgiLight.

MIT is getting involved too. America's storied technology university has agreed to help Masdar build an alternative energy graduate school in Abu Dhabi. The school hopes to start admitting students in 2009.

AMD's Athlon 64 FX-70 series processor.

(Credit: Advanced Micro Devices)

The graduate school in turn will then encourage students and professors to incubate start-ups in the country. Abu Dhabi has a tiny population. Like Qatar, which has set up a university and incubator complex with help of institutions like Cornell University and Rolls Royce, Abu Dhabi will likely recruit students and professors from across North Africa and Central Asia as well as from the immigrant communities in the U.S. and Europe.

The large investment in AMD will give investment managers and others in the country a way to study the high tech industry up close. The country may not go out and build fabs after this one, but clearly there will be people in the country better educated on how things work in Silicon Valley. One of the major complaints among business people and even government officials in the Middle East is that many of the college graduates who come from these countries don't have much practical experience.

Will it work? It's hard to say. Dubai, which has created an Internet business park and opened its doors to chip makers, has only made a small dent in high tech. But like China, these countries aren't exactly democracies, so they can conduct long-range planning. And the money is going to continue to flow there for the next several decades.

Michael Kanellos, Cnet

High quality YouTube videos coming soon

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube's goal, he said, is to make the site's vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Why wouldn't they? Because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site up till now.

Chen told me that he expects that high-quality YouTube vids will be available to everyone within three months.

Chen also confirmed that in YouTube's internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent in. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much.

(Rafe Needleman Webware)

Google's Android OS early look SDK now available

Here's A first look at the Android OS we've been writing about last week, it looks pretty good, a lot iPhone like, and of course Google released an SDK, so if you're a developer you can write programs for Android and get ready for it.

Infineon teams with Intel for high-density (HD) SIM cards

After buddying up with IBM earlier this year on a 32-nanometer semiconductor, Infineon is now teaming with none other than Intel to produce high-density (HD) SIM cards. Announced today at the Cartes Trade Show in Paris, the agreement will spark a "strategic technology collaboration" which will see Infineon producing modular chip solutions while Intel offers up memory capacities from 4MB to 64MB.
More specifically, a 32-bit security microcontroller will be provided by Infineon, while the partnership's other half throws in its "leading-edge flash memory technologies, capabilities and manufacturing." Apparently, the HD SIM will play nice with "data-intensive mobile applications, services and over-the-air downloads" which are likely to become more pervasive in the coming years, and current market research shows that these very devices will account for "six- to eight-percent of the total SIM card market in 2010." As for availability, look for samples to land in Q2 of next year, but don't expect 'em to be manufactured en masse until the first half of 2009. [Via EETimes, Engadget]

Cheering the Tech Stock Crash?

Its been a crazy week down at Wall street particularly these past few days.
The selling that plagued the financial sector of the market for the last two months formally spread to the rest of the market on this past Thursday. That's when tech shares began selling off in earnest upon a lower-than-expected revenue forecast from industry giant Cisco Systems (CSCO) which fueled worries that corporate spending on technology products going into next year.


Saul Hansell has written a real nice post at the NY Times Bits Blog, about the recent day's stock market sell off, so I thought that rather then write another description and explanation of what has happened over the past two trading days, I will just let his post speak for itself.

There is a journalistic convention that drives me absolutely crazy: writing about rises in stock prices as good and declines as bad. Here are some of this afternoon’s headlines.

Nasdaq Loses 6.5% in a Rough Week-Wall Street Journal

Stocks Post Steep Losses, Capping Painful Week-New York Times

With Little Good News, Stocks Close Week Lower-Fox Business

This seems to me to be a blatant abandonment of journalistic objectivity. The story can equally well be told in the reverse. Every stock sale, of course, has a buyer and seller, and the buyer usually wishes to have paid less.

Read on.

YouTube releases multi file uploader

Howdy guys, I've just came across an interesting piece at ReadWrite Web, It seems YouTube announced the availability for Windows users of a desktop uploader. Users will now be able to do bulk file uploads. The company also raised its file size limit from 100 MB to 1 GB. Length will remain at 10 minutes though, so that just means more high quality video will be available on the site.

Google Video remains the option of choice for long form video uploaders but some YouTube users have long complained about the small file size requirements and resulting low quality. Vimeo, a tiny boutique competitor owned by IAC, opened to HD uploads at the end of last month.

A Mac version of the uploader is in the works, the company said. Hopefully the time limit will be changed as well - the YouTube brand is so strong there's no reason not to encourage users to store their full length videos there. Video archiving is important work and YouTube should be up to the task.

Mass production kicks off for XO laptops

Hello guys, Its been a while since we reported about the XO laptops, better known as the $100 laptop for developed nations, well its finally up for mass production.

Following a number of delays, the One Laptop per Child Foundation's much-awaited XO laptop for needy kids has finally gone into mass production. Early Tuesday (local time), Taiwan's Quanta Computer started producing the green-and-white computer in its new Changshu manufacturing center, two hours northwest of Shanghai.

The commencement of mass production means children in developing nations could have the rugged, open-source laptops in hand starting this month. The OLPC has already announced orders for kids in Uruguay and Mongolia. (Residents of the U.S. and Canada participating in the Give 1 Get 1 program--which donates an XO to a child in a developing nation for every machine sold online--are expected to start getting laptops in December.)

"Today represents an important milestone in the evolution of the One Laptop per Child project," MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the nonprofit One Laptop per Child, said in a statement Tuesday. "Against all the naysayers, and thanks to great partners such as Quanta, we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children."

Quanta has recently increased its manufacturing capacity, and says XO production will ramp up over time.

The XO laptop, while generally heralded by many for its good intentions and potential impact, has hit its share of snags on the road to adoption. In addition to production delays, which give competing low-cost machines time to gain traction, the price point, originally set for $100, has crept up closer to $200.

(Leslie Katz, Cnet)

Hello Android! (The Google Phone)

As expected Google (GOOG) today finally confirmed its long-awaited foray into the mobile phone business by announcing the Open Handset Alliance, a team of thirty three other leading technology and wireless companies who have agreed to share in Google's development of Android, a new open software platform aimed at bettering the user experience on today's mobile devices.

As part of the alliance, the companies strive to develop technologies that will significantly lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services. Android is said to be a first step in this direction, and represents software that has been under development for three years now, dating back to a Silicon Valley startup called Android Inc. that Google acquired in 2005. The platform is essentially an integrated mobile "software stack" that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and user applications.

Built on the open source Linux Kernel, Android was conceived from the ground-up to be "truly open" and allow developers to create mobile applications that take full advantage of all a handset has to offer. For example, an application could call upon any of the phone's core functionality such as making calls, sending text messages, or using the camera, allowing for richer and more cohesive experiences for users.

Meanwhile, users will be able to fully tailor their Android-based phone to their interests -- they can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They'll also be able to instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.

"Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single 'Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. "Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."

"We see Android as an important part of our strategy of furthering Google's goal of providing access to information to users wherever they are. We recognize that many among the multitude of mobile users around the world do not and may never have an Android-based phone," said Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android Inc. and now Director of Mobile Platforms for Google. "Our goals must be independent of device or even platform. For this reason, Android will complement, but not replace, our longstanding mobile strategy of developing useful and compelling mobile services and driving adoption of these products through partnerships with handset manufacturers and mobile operators around the world."

The Android software stack is expected to provide handset makers and wireless operators an open platform they can use to develop new and innovative applications. The new software will compete directly with smartphone software from other companies like Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK), Palm (Palm), and Research in Motion (RIMM). Unlike some of these mobile operating systems, Android will not be tied to a specific device. Instead, the software will be able to work on a broad array of devices from handset makes such as Motorola (MOT), HTC, Samsung, and LG just to name a few.

The idea is that through the developer's alliance, handset makers and cell phone operators will be able to develop more user-friendly services and devices that help bring more of the Internet's functionality onto mobile devices. And because of this open model, the companies involved also hope that by scaling the development, advanced functionality will be able to hit the market for less expensive mobile devices that will have more compelling and rich Internet services with more user-friendly interfaces.

The success of Google's initiative will depend heavily on the follow-up efforts of allied phone companies and handset makers.

For instance, Sprint (S) and T-Mobile USA (DT), the two U.S. carriers that have joined Google's alliance, see an opportunity to gain an edge on rivals. Sprint, the nation's No. 3 mobile operator, and T-Mobile, the fourth-largest carrier, trail market leaders AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ).

Sprint in particular needs to do a better job to differentiate itself. The carrier has lost more than 1 million of its most valuable customers over the past year, mostly to the top two players.

I believe that Android will revolutionize the cell phone market and bring amazing capabilities to the masses and to the mainstream, a thing that cannot be possible without the alliance and without choosing open source as the way to go for this project. I think this is a great step towards the right direction.

Have a look at this video explaining what the Android OS is all about.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Impressions

Hello guys, I finally had some time to play around with the latest release of Ubuntu 7.10 and write down my impressions. Overall I'm really impressed with it. In most cases it has exceeded my expectations.

Ubuntu is of course a wonderful simple great distribution of Linux made by Canonical, with a new release coming out every 6 months, with plenty of breakthrough features that probably surpass many other OS, and in the Linux space for sure its the best most simple one (Yup that's Linux for ordinary people!)

Ubuntu has originally started out as a software project in 2004. A small group of developers organized their talents and efforts to create a Linux-based distribution, including application software suitable for a desktop environment. Eventually, the effort came to be known as Ubuntu, with the following ideals:

• Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change, and improve their software for any purpose,without paying licensing fees.
• Every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice.
• Every computer user should be given every opportunity to use software, even if they work under a disability.

SO what new in 7.10?

The first thing you will notice after installing the new version is that Desktop effects, AKA Compiz Fusion, have made their way into the the system as default, and they're pretty amazing, making a far more practical and a fan experience especially for first time Ubuntu users.
The 3-D effects come in two levels: Normal, the default, which enables only some effects (such as compositing, shadows, and animated minimizing) in order to keep the used resources at a minimal level, and Extra, which allows for the most effects (such as window wobbling, animated workspace switching, and transparency).

Not only do these interface improvements look nice, but they can also help your productively, as you can manage multiple desktops and workspaces with numerous 3D effects. These have been wish list items for some time, and they have finally arrived. These effects require newer video cards for you to get the full benefit, but they degrade gracefully on older hardware lacking the required graphics horsepower.

I have decent machine but still the desktop effects basically sucks up my ram, so I'm still trying to work it out, and find a fix to that, who knows it may just be a bug that will get fixed soon by the community. Update: The official Ubuntu Forum is full of messages from users with Nvidia cards who are suffering from random freezes. This bug is not one that the Ubuntu developers missed, because it's a bug with a closed source driver. Regardless, this glitch does somewhat hurt the reputation of an otherwise solid release.

Another great thing is Desktop search, called: The Tracker which is a new desktop search engine. It is installed by default instead of the Beagle. The Tracker is an indexing search engine . There is a interface named ‘Tracker Search Tool’ which represents a navigation over the indexed content, displaying additional information about each indexed entry. ‘Open file’ dialog received a search field, which also performs a search over a Tracker index, and is available in a Gtk based applications like the gedit, the OpenOffice and the Gimp.

The old issue of an unexpected system failure to start a normal graphical session when disk space is full, has finally got a workaround. User will receive a warning message and a possibility to do some space cleanup at the startup.

Another great thing is that Ubuntu now supports Fast user switching, just like Mac OSX, It so you can now easily switch between user sessions without the inconvenience of entering your username or password numerous times, a time-saver on computers shared by multiple users.

Gutsy also adds a special Firefox plugins, Firefox now comes with an improved plugin finder wizard that allows users to search and install packaged plugins easily, bringing users a richer web-browsing experience with the integrated security support of the rest of the Ubuntu system, and it woks great.

7.10 of course fixes many issues and bugs which has been in previous versions, however I think that Canonical has compromised stability in the face of features, but hopefully these will be fixed over time.


Personally I really like Ubuntu, and I think it really is the "Linux for the rest of us" sort of OS, and Gutsy Gibbon leaps forward in that direction, making everything far easier and smoother for the average user, of course it does has it list of bugs, but the great thing about Ubuntu is that it keeps on updating regularly, and even automatically (so you chose to).
I highly recommend it for anyone who has been using Microsoft windows for decades and just tired of that legging old OS.
You can just download Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon here.