The O’Reilly Velocity conference is back in Silicon Valley. And the only conference for web performance and operations that I know of has sold out again this year!
But you still can watch it live by clicking on this link, courtesy of the organizer. Enjoy!
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The hard disk drive market is now down to 3 suppliers: Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba.
Seagate and Samsung announced a broad agreement this morning (April 19, 2011) that the two companies will “combine” their HDD businesses. Seagate will pay Samsung $1.38 billion, half cash and half newly-issued shares of Seagate stock, which will result in Samsung owning 9.6% of Seagate, earning Samsung a nomination for a position on Seagate’s board.
In addition, the companies entered into sourcing agreements, with Samsung supplying NAND to Seagate for SSDs and Hybrid HDDs, and Seagate supplying HDDs to Samsung for PCs, notebooks, and consumer electronics. The companies will jointly develop “enterprise storage solutions.”
The deal also involves patent cross licensing.
The companies state that this agreement broadens a strategic relationship between Seagate and Samsung that began with a joint development agreement announced in August 2010.
Seagate expressed an opinion that this event does not expect any material restructuring costs to result from this deal.
What this means to the HDD Market
The acquisition of Samsung’s HDD business by Seagate comes close on the heels of the pending merger of Hitachi’s HDD business with Western Digital. Based upon calendar Q4 2010 shipments combining Seagate and Samsung would give Seagate about 40% of the HDD market and combining Hitachi GST and Western Digital would result in Western Digital having about 48% of the HDD market. Total shipment share for the two companies should be close to 90% with the remaining balance owned by Toshiba, who finished their acquisition of Fujitsu’s HDD business in late 2009.
The price Seagate paid for Samsung’s HDD business far exceeds the value of the company’s HDD business alone. Samsung makes 2.5-inch HDDs for mobile applications and 3.5-inch HDDs for desktop applications and uses many of the drives it makes. Samsung also has an external storage business which presumably will be part of the deal. Seagate currently ships products to all three of these markets and so does not realize a significant gain in any market segment from the deal. The bulk of the payment is probably closely associated with the flash memory supply agreement between Samsung and Seagate. Seagate thus joins Apple in strategic flash memory supply contracts (in Seagate’s case to support the company’s developing enterprise SSDs as well as its hybrid HDDs which are due for a refresh soon.)
The release also states: “In connection with its strategic alliance with Samsung, Seagate expects also to strengthen its relationship with TDK Corporation/SAE Magnetics (H.K.) Ltd.” TDK/SAE is the only remaining independent HDD head supplier and Samsung was their customer. We believe that the statement implies that Seagate will continue to buy heads from TDK after the Samsung HDD business acquisition. This move will help to stabilize the remaining independent head supplier, who provides high capacity heads to Seagate and Western Digital as well as Samsung and Toshiba.
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At a press event today, Samsung Electronics gave a brief overview of some of the key technologies and driving forces that the Korean company is working on these days.
To kick off the lunch event, Vice President Jim Elliott described how mobile computing has reached a key inflection point within the electronics industry.
Mobile Computing to be 10X Desktop Computing
Mobile Computing to be 10X Desktop Computing
“We’re expecting more than 10 billion units of sales of these connected devices or mobile Internet devices over the next decade. This is an order of magnitude over the desktop Internet era which helped propelled the growth of the last decade,” said the Samsung executive.
These connected devices are GPSes, laptops, tablets, all integrated seamlessly to the cloud. “There is a tremendous amount of back-end infrastructure that is needed to drive all these connected devices seamlessly as people look more and more to the cloud to power this data transfert.”
Samsung sees Facebook driving the growth of the entire electronics industry
The Impact of Facebook on the Electronics Industry Keeps Growing
Interestingly, for Samsung, Facebook is now the new killer app that is driving the whole electronics industry. The social network is having a huge impact on connected device sales as more than 200 million people are accessing it a mobile device. And according to Facebook, people that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active than non-mobile users.
“In the past, a lot of times it was when a new operating system launched that really spurred PC sales, now it’s social networking and particularly Facebook is so impactful on people’s usage patterns and daily lives and this is having a huge impact on infrastructure and device sales,” adds Elliott.
For the Samsung executive, social networks are also the driver for Internet usage, even more popular than e-mail!
Web 3.0 traffic has a huge impact on Internet traffic load
“Think about the traffic, the load impact that this has on the Internet, on the backbone to move this around. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, about 31K petabytes per month needed to drive these pictures, videos… 1 petabyte is 13.3 years of HD video.”
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Why the iPad 2 is 30% thinner than the original iPad
Apple reduced the thickness and weight of the iPad 2 compared to the iPad 1 by trimming the dimensions of several key components, most notably the battery, IHS iSuppli teardown analysis has revealed.
The total thickness of the iPad 2 is 8.8 millimeters, down 34 percent from 13.4 millimeters in the iPad 1. The iPad 2 weighs about 600 grams, down 15 percent from 700 grams for the iPad 1.
“Apple has particularly focused on thickness as a point of differentiation for the iPad 2. Other new tablets coming to market, all of which are about as thick as the iPad 1, now look fat in comparison to the iPad 2. This is likely to cause a scramble as competitors rush to slim down to match Apple,” said Kevin Keller, principal analyst for the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service.
iPad 2 battery: twice thinner than original iPad
The biggest reduction in thickness came in the iPad 2’s battery subsystem. This section in the iPad 2 is 2.5 millimeters thick, a 59 percent reduction from 6.1 millimeters for the iPad 1.
“The iPad 2 battery design represents a major shift from the iPad 1,” Keller said. “Apple moved from two thicker cells to three thinner ones, flattening out the entire battery structure. The new design also allowed Apple to eliminate an injection-molded plastic support frame from the battery subsystem, further cutting down its thickness.”
This refinement to the iPad design spurred a 10 to 15 percent increase in its iPad 2 power density, which is a measure of battery life relative to the mass of the battery. It shrinks the iPad 2’s weight by 5 grams, while still delivering the same battery lifetime.
Thinner, more durable, flexible display
Another factor contributing to the thinner form factor was the elimination of a stamped sheet metal frame from the display. This slashed the size of the display subsystem to 2.5 millimeters, down 17 percent from 3 millimeters for the iPad 1.
On the touch screen overlay, Apple has adopted a new glass technology that allows it to reduce the thickness of the section while maintaining durability. The touch screen overlay on the iPad 2 is 0.6 millimeters thick, down 25 percent from 0.8 millimeters for the iPad 1.
“The concurrent release of the iPad 2 and the new Dragontrail Glass technology from Asahi Glass Co. of Japan has led to speculation that Asahi may be the supplier of this durable new glass,” Keller said.
Physical tests conducted by IHS reveal that the iPad 2 glass is more flexible than the glass used in the iPad 1, a characteristic of increased durability.
The iPad 2 also slightly trims the space between the rear of the display and the top of the batteries. This space now amounts to 1.3 millimeters in size, down 19 percent from 1.6 millimeters in the iPad 1.
Source: IHS iSuppli.
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On Monday March 7 Western Digital (WD) announced that the company had reached an agreement to purchase Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) for $4.3 billion in cash and common stock. The deal has already been approved by both companies’ boards and is expected to close in the third quarter assuming regulatory approval.
HGST’s parent Hitachi will retain a 10% stake in the combined company and HGST’s current CEO, Steve Milligan, will be president of the new business reporting to WD president and CEO John Coyne. The merger will impact the HDD industry including component and equipment suppliers and change the landscape for enterprise SSDs.
Biggest in HDDs
From a unit shipment perspective WD and HGST are the largest and third largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). Today Seagate remains the revenue leader, thanks to the company’s dominance of the enterprise SSD market. The pending merger will push WD’s revenues ahead of Seagate’s.
WD is already the unit shipment leader, having surpassed Seagate’s unit shipments over a year ago. Combined unit shipments for WD and HGST account for nearly 48% of the world HDD market.
Hitachi GST was formed by the merger of IBM and Hitachi’s HDD units in 2003. After many years of losses HGST turned profitable for most of the last two years. Although the division is profitable, Hitachi was rumored to have been looking to divest itself of its HDD unit for several years. In 2010 and even in 2009 rumors reported that Hitachi was shopping for a buyer for the division with WD mentioned as one of the suitors. WD was also rumored to have been interested in Fujitsu’s HDD business before that company was acquired by Toshiba.
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A worthy Google Voice competitor?
The ON VoiceFeed app is a new iPhone service specifically developed by Orange Vallée, the innovation hub of France Telecom, that enhances exchanges with family, friends, colleagues and any contact within the phone by creating customized groups and personalized greetings.
The app also delivers unique features for converting text to voice messages. Google Voice does the reverse, from voice to text.
Here are some of its key features:
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Nimble brings social to CRM
Today Nimble Contact, a Web social CRM platform, launched as a public beta at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference in Palm Springs, Calif.
Created by Jon Ferrara, the founder of GoldMine, a pioneering SFA/CRM product, Nimble Contact integrates LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, email contacts, calendar and conversations into one single user interface.
“The problem today is our contacts and our communications are in too many places,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “Between IM, text messaging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and email, we can’t keep track of it all. Trying to manage all of this in eight different tabs on your browser isn’t the solution. We created Nimble to solve our own needs and we’re bringing it to the world to help small businesses solve theirs.”
Nimble’s Key Features
DEMO conference executive producer Matt Marshall heads the "Orientation Meeting" on Saturday Feb 26th, for the 50 or so demonstrators attending
Here are brief descriptions of our top 10 favourite products to be unveiled this week at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, Calif. We’ll be posting more hands-on details and videos on these later on as we try them on-site.
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The BlackBerry Tablet OS Simulator
An updated version of the BlackBerry Tablet OS Simulator, which embeds the full BlackBerry Browser, is going live today.
Web developers can now start testing their web and Flash applications using the tablet’s Browser on the simulator to ensure usability.
3 things to know about the BlackBerry Browser running on the BlackBerry Tablet OS:
More information about the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator and how it enables developers to start testing their web applications can be found on the BlackBerry DevBlog here. And you can download the BlackBerry Tablet OS Simulator here.
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Facebook announced today it plans to move its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to a campus in Menlo Park, formerly occupied by Sun Microsystems.
According to Facebook CFO David Ebersman, the company has been looking for a new space since it outgrew its downtown Palo Alto offices in 2009.
“We feel it’s really important to have our employees in one location that maximizes their ability to interact with one another, that leads to better sharing of ideas, better energy throughout the company. And we are already reaching the point with the facilities we have in Palo Alto where we won’t be able to fit. And so what we were seeking was a place where we could put everybody [including co-founder Mark Zuckerberg] together in one place,” says Ebersman.
The new/old campus was built between 1993 and 1995 and served as the corporate headquarters for Sun Microsystems until its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The campus occupies 57 acres and contains 9 buildings totaling about 1 million square feet. Which can host more than 3,500 employees, according to Facebook’s director of global real-estate, John Tenanes.
As of the end of 2010, Facebook had 2,000 employees worldwide, with over 1,400 live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Facebook also purchased an adjacent 22-acre tract at 312 and 314 Constitution Drive that is connected to the campus by a tunnel, underneath the Bayfront Expressway, for possible future development as a subsequent expansion phase.
Employees will move to the new campus in waves, with the first group of 500 people moving in mid-June of this year. Facebook will still continue to occupy its offices in Palo Alto through 2011 and possibly into 2012. The lease of the current campus officially ends in 2013, while Facebook signed a 15-yr lease for Menlo Park, with an option to purchase it entirely in 5 years from now.
Below is an exclusive tour of the old Sun campus filmed today as it is being renovated and still occupied by some Oracle/Sun employees:
And more details on the planned move by Facebook’s director of global real-estate, John Tenanes:
Finally, the mayor of Menlo Park talks about how the city will benefit from Facebook’s move:
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