No Sign The Solar Price Storm Has Ebbed

June 12, 2009

Over production continues to rile the solar cell business.

Prices entered a free fall earlier this year when declining demand and over production created an imbalance in supply and demand.

Slower than anticipated demand has since widened the imbalance, creating a black cloud over the business that worries investors and executives.

Solar cells go for about $1.50 a watt compared with up to $2 in April

Solar cells go for about $1.50 a watt compared with up to $2 in April

According to FBR Capital Markets analyst Mehdi Hosseini, many observers expected lower prices would by now stimulate consumer and utility interest in solar cells. They haven’t, and speculation is they won’t until early next year.

That means 2009 will be a wash out for the industry.

Hosseini recently found polysilicon spot market prices as low as $60 a kilogram compared with up to $95 in early April.

Consequently, six-inch solar wafers now sell as little as $3 a wafer, and cells go for about $1.50 a watt compared with $2 in early April.

With profits harder to come up, the business is going to be in limbo until at least late this year.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

BT Group Could Rekindle Net Neutrality Debate

June 12, 2009

BT Group, the European telecom giant and owner of British Telecommunication, has admitted to throttling back speeds of the BBC video content player, iPlayer.

BT admits to throttling back traffic for the BBC video player

BT admits to throttling back traffic for the BBC video player

Now it says it wants content providers to help shoulder the financial burden of delivering video and other high-bandwidth data streams to Internet consumers.

This is exactly the type of arm-twisting proponents of net neutrality reform hoped to avoid. Recently, the momentum behind net-neutrality legislation in the U.S. has begun to pick up.

Supporters cite President Obama’s recent statement that the Internet should be “open and free” as an indication he is behind such an initiative. Obama made the comment during a speech about Internet security.

Now it is likely these backers of an initiative will have new ammunition in the BT controversy, even thought BT does not provide Internet-access in the U.S.

An article on Silicon.com notes that a BT spokesperson on Thursday admitted the company “throttles video traffic to 896 Kbps for Option 1 customers between 5 p.m. and midnight.”

As video traffic increases, it is unsustainable for ISPs to pick up the bill, the spokesperson goes on to say.

In the U.S., both Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, and the new leader of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, are backers of net neutrality. In addition, Democrats run key committees in Congress.

As a result, don’t be surprised to see legislation coming from Washington and don’t be surprised to hear the BT flap waved about in the process.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Optimistic Signs From The Personal Computer Market

June 11, 2009

It is hard to envision even a small rebound in the personal computer market given that consumer spending appears as weak as its been in decades.

However, forecasters at IDC say the worst of the global PC decline might be behind us and that optimism is building about growth toward the end of the year.

IDC sees a 3.2 percent decline in the PC market this year, but 7.4 percent growth in 2010.

IDC sees a 3.2 percent decline in the PC market this year, but 7.4 percent growth in 2010.

IDC now expects PC shipments to fall just 3.2 percent in 2009. They were down 6.8 percent in the first quarter.

This would be a welcome improvement.

“New product introductions coming this fall, including low-cost, thin-and-light consumer portables, low-cost Intel Atom-based all-in-ones, and, of course, Windows 7, should provide a spark that helps to push market towards positive shipment growth over the next 12 months,” said Vice President Bob O’Donnell.

Yet don’t look for fireworks. Rehabilitation will be slow. IDC sees a 7.4 percent rise in the market next year with only 0.8 percent growth in the U.S. followed by a more respectable 13.6 percent increase in 2011.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Evidence Rises That Netbooks Cannibalize Notebook Sales

June 11, 2009

For months executives at high-tech companies, such as Intel, have claimed netbooks are not cannibalizing sales of more traditional, fully featured notebooks.

Evidence to the contrary is rising.

In a PC market forecast released Thursday, IDC claimed that these “mini notebooks” are having a dramatic impact on the market.

IDC says netbook sales in the first quarter helped quash the notebook business

IDC says netbook sales in the first quarter helped quash the notebook business

In the first quarter, shipments of 5.7 million netbooks helped contribute to a 3.1-million unit decline in the traditional notebook sales, the firm said.

Revenue suffered even more. Netbooks brought an additional $2.2 billion of sales to the PC market. But the drop in notebook revenue was $8.4 billion.

“Mini Notebook pricing is expected to rise with more robust models, and shipment growth is expected to slow with the release of low-cost, thin-and-light Intel CULV and AMD Congo-based (notebooks) this fall,” says IDC.

However, netbooks will rise to 17.3 percent of all portable PCs and that will drive shipment value down 17.7 percent this year.

Yes, I would call that cannibalization.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Texas Instruments, Sony, Samsung And Qualcomm Score With Palm Pre

June 11, 2009

Several of high-tech’s largest players are hoping the new Palm Pre will be a raving success.

Surprising design choices give Palm Pre a potential market advantage

Surprising design choices give Palm Pre a potential market advantage

These firms – Texas Instruments, Sony, Samsung, Qualcomm, Elpida and Cypress Semiconductor – are major suppliers of components to the new smart phone, according to a teardown of the product.

The dissection by iSuppli uncovered a number of surprising design choices that offer the Pre a potential advantage over Apple’s iPhone – as well as higher costs.

For instance, the Pre uses an advanced polysilicon LCD display from Sony that produces higher resolution and faster response times than conventional LCDs. But the screen comes with a higher price: $21, as estimated by iSuppli.

The phone also uses 2 gigabits of SDRAM memory capacity, twice as much as the iPhone 3G. Suppliers of the chips include Elpida, the market’s number two SDRAM manufacturer.

Also in the Palm Pre is a premium choice of flash memory from Samsung, though Palm could use other suppliers as well. The eMMC MoviNAND flash from Samsung offers higher performance. It also costs more: about $17 a phone.

ISuppli’s teardown found a baseband processor from Qualcomm, an applications processor from Texas Instruments and a touch-screen controller from Cypress Semiconductor.

All will be routing for the phone’s success.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Yahoo Gives Away Source Code Of Core Search, Cloud Computing Technology

June 10, 2009
Yahoos Cloud Computing Chief Shelton Shugar released the source code for the companys Hadoop implementation

Yahoo's Cloud Computing Chief Shelton Shugar announced the release of the company's Hadoop implementation source code

Ever heard of Hadoop? If yes, you’re probably one of those hard core developers in search and/or cloud computing and most likely attending today the Second Annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.

“Hadoop is a system that allows one to take very very large problems and cut it into pieces both the data and the processing and to perform the functions over thousands of machines in parallel, to get an answer quickly,” explains Yahoo Cloud Computing chief Shelton Shugar in an exclusive interview with TechPulse 360.

Hadoop underpins many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, which is also the world’s largest Hadoop application, processing data for billions of Web search queries every month, and Yahoo Mail.

According to Shugar, Hadoop helps Yahoo increase its ad revenues by increasing its speed of innovation and on increasing advertising click-through.

Yahoo runs Hadoop on more than 25,000 servers and analyzes tens of billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of new records per day.

At the Hadoop conference today, Yahoo announced the release of the source code for its Hadoop implementation “to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.”

Here’s a video excerpt of my conversation with Shugar about Hadoop, Yahoo’s largest open source project, and the company’s strategy in cloud computing services:

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Posted by TechPulse 360

Venture Capital Shifting To Clean Tech And Globalization

June 10, 2009

The recession is doing more than slowing the pace of investing at venture capital firms in the United States.

It is shifting their focus to clean -tech, where they see larger opportunities, and turning their attention abroad for creative companies and money to fill out their new funds.

Globalization is not a new trend, but the downturn is accelerating it

Globalization is not a new trend, but the downturn is accelerating it

These trends are not new. They have been playing out for nearly a decade as the high-tech industry, the traditional venture investing ground, has matured and growth slowed.

But the great downturn of 2008-09 is accelerating the changes as a Darwinian survival instinct grips an industry already suffering from a multi-year slowdown in public market IPOs.

For many VCs, the difficult economy has brought a cold splash of reality. Limited partners in the United States were already cautious about the venture business and are now almost certain to reduce their investments in venture funds over the next three or so years. That is driving many funds overseas for capital.

According to a survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, more than half of firms expect to have more limited partners from outside their home countries.

And while half say they will invest in fewer startups because of the worldwide downturn, roughly the same percent say they will increase investments in Asia. Forty-three percent see higher spending in India while just 17 percent plan to fund more companies in North America.

At the same time, nearly two thirds of VCs intend to increase their investments in clean-tech companies during the next five years. Many figure it will be where the real money is made.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Cisco Sees Brave New World, But Consumers May Not Be Ready

June 10, 2009

Cisco Systems is good at writing self-serving press releases.

But many of them are interesting in their own right. Wednesday’s is no exception.

The networker claims that in the next five years Internet traffic will increase by a factor of five. In other words, by 2013, net will carry an astonishing 56 exabytes of data a month, or the equivalent of 9 billion bytes of data for each of the 6 billion people on the planet today.

(An exabyte is a 1 with 18 zeros behind it.)

This is mind numbing. But the Cisco release wades even deeper into the digital morass. During the same period, mobile broadband traffic will double annually, or grow 66 times in total.

Cisco sees video becoming 90 percent of consumer Internet traffic in five years.

Cisco sees video becoming 90 percent of consumer Internet traffic in five years.

Fueling this growth of both mobile and Internet traffic is video. The release claims that 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2013 will be TV signals, video on demand, Internet video and peer-to-peer sharing.

Of course all this would be good news for Cisco, which supplies the routers and switches that carry Internet traffic.

But it implies dramatic changes in consumer behavior to go hand in hand with a substantive build out of the broadband network. This makes me skeptical. Will we really be such ardent subscribers to video in five years, and will our measly 3 Mbps home connections expand enough to support it?

I’m emotionally ready for this brave new world. I don’t think our service providers are.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Intel Loses Market Share To AMD

June 10, 2009

It is a surprise seeing Intel lose microprocessor market share to Advanced Micro Devices.

After a year of market share loses, AMD treads on Intel

After a year of market share loses, AMD treads on Intel

But that is exactly what happened in the first quarter, according to iSuppli. Intel’s share slipped a substantive 2.5 points to 79.1 percent from 81.6 in the fourth quarter while AMD gained about as much to hold a 12.8 percent share.

ISuppli says AMD had a strong performance in desktop, server and particularly in notebook. But it is hard to believe the company’s competitive position has been strengthened that much in the past several months.

More probably, the PC market paused to digest the gains Intel has made since coming out with an improved lineup of chips more than a year ago.

With better products in the market, Intel gained share in each of the previous four quarters, its market dominance rising from a 78 percent share to the fourth quarter’s 81.6 percent, iSuppli data show.
This is in part due to the release of the Atom processor, which became the computer brains in a first generation of netbooks. But it also is linked to the Core 2 Duos Intel has been fielding with better power management and performance.

The company has been manufacturing with 45-nm technology and the nano-sized circuits give it a cost advantage.

Anyway, the winning streak came to an end during the first three months of 2009 as the microprocessor market declined 20.6 percent to $6.9 billion in size. Don’t expect it to continue.

(Oh, by the way, do expect the market declines to continue. ISuppi expects full year microprocessor revenue to be down 15.8 percent to $28.6 billion.)

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Google Woos Enterprises With Cheaper, More Reliable Cloud Computing Services

June 9, 2009
Google Enterprise press event today at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco

Google Enterprise press event today at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco

Google convened the press to a San Francisco hotel earlier today to discuss an unusual topic for the mostly consumer focused company: the enterprise market.

Instead of Google’s enterprise president Dave Girouard, I could actually very well picture Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff or another enterprise software exec doing the same pitch.

Girouard confirmed Google’s long term commitment to the enterprise space. The Google Apps initiative (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Contacts…) started a little over 5-years ago – Google is 10-years old – and have so far attracted 1.75 million businesses – with dozens of them with more than 1000 employees – and totaling more than 15 million active users.

Girouard also confirmed that Google’s enterprise business is worth several hundreds of thousand dollars and is profitable.

Three companies that deployed Google Apps extensively were present at the meeting: Genentech, Avago — the first company with over $1.5 billion in revenue to use Google Apps suite – and Morgans Hotel group, the owner of the Clift Hotel in which the event was held.

According to Girouard, companies are adopting Google Apps because:

  1. It’s 3 to 20 times cheaper. The smaller the organisation, the bigger the gap between Microsoft’s and Google’s prices. Simply because Microsoft would offer bigger discounts to  large companies. Google just charge $50/month per employee no matter the size of the company;
  2. Google’s cloud service offiering is more reliable than if a company would deploy it internally. “Failure is not an option,” said Girouard;
  3. It’s constantly enhanced with new features. Much faster than for traditional enterprise apps.

More on Google’s enterprise announcement (Google Apps Sync for Outlook) on a related post.

And here’s a video excerpt of Girouard presentation today:

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Posted by TechPulse 360

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