For Black friday next week, Walmart will slash $100 off Sanyo's 50" Plasma TV price, that now retails for $698
A CNNMoney.com report revealed some of Walmart’s amazing “doorbusters” planned for next week’s Black Friday.
TVs/Blu-ray
Sanyo 50-inch plasma 720p HDTV for $598;
Emerson 32-inch LCD 720p HDTV for $248;
Emerson 42-inchPlasma 720p HDTV ($448)
Magnavox Blu-ray player for $78;
Computers
eMachine laptop with a 15.6-inch LCD display, 2GB memory and 160GB hard drive for $198;
Hewlett-Packard laptop with a 15.6-inch display, 3GB memory and 250GB hard drive for $298;
Electronics
iPod Touch 8GB for $195 with a $50 iTunes gift card;
Tom Tom GPS for $59;
Best Buy, Target and perhaps Fry’s are going to have a hard time to beat Walmart prices. I don’t have much hope for the other “smaller” retailers like Office Depot, OfficeMax and the likes.
Moreover, Wal-Mart will match the price of any local competitor’s printed ad for an identical product.
Western Digital is the price leader for 1TB disk drives!
If you think of it, that’s just 6 cents per gigabyte - 5 years ago it was almost 20 times that!
With a 1TB bare-bone (internal) disk drive at less than $60 at Fry’s Electronics, Western Digital (WD) is the absolute low price leader… for this week! The same drive cost $20 more a couple weeks ago.
The other notable price decrease since last week is a 2TB serial ATA/300 now at $160 ($10 less than Seagate) by Hitachi.
I also was impressed by the low price of the Kingston 64GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) that now only costs $100. I would recommend one in a heart beat: I revived my old MacBook with a 80GB Kingston SSD and is now doing most of the video post-production (importing, editing and exporting)!
An external 2TB disk drive from SimpleTech is only $10 more than its internal equivalent from Seagate
Disk drive prices simply defy gravity… and probably economics too!
Looking at Fry’s Electronics daily ads in the San Jose Mercury News, I couldn’t help but being amazed at how quickly disk drives prices are plunging on a weekly, if not daily basis.
Today, the best value for an internal drive, is the 1.5TB 3.5″ Samsung drive at only $80. If you prefer an external drive, SimpleTech’s 2TB Duo Pro Drive Quad (Firewire, eSATA and USB) is hard to beat at only $180. And an external 2TB Seagate desktop drive will cost you $180.
If that’s still too much, I’m sure you can still find SimpleTech’s 1TB external drive for under $90 or its internal cousin (from Hitachi) at $85!
For laptops, Hitachi is still the king of the hill with a 500GB notebook hard drive at just $80 (and just $10 more on Amazon). I also liked Seagate’s 1.5TB Expansion drive for $125, although it’s only $5 more at Amazon with free shipping.
Really no matter where you buy your drive, you’ll almost certain to get a bargain. Happy shopping!
This year, there will be only 56 DEMOfall demonstrators, down from 72 last year.
No doubt DEMOfall 2009 will be a much smaller event, which explains why the conference actually ends early, in the afternoon of the second day. A disappointment, for those – like me! – that got used to DEMO’s farewell dinner when the final DEMOgods awards are being distributed.
Ahead of DEMOfall’s debut next week, the conference organisers announced today that 56 never-seen-before products and/or concepts will be demonstrated at the show.
A big drop though compared to the 72 that were shown at last year’s event.
Nevertheless, TechPulse360 will be reporting live from the show floor at DEMOfall in San Diego, Calif., with video interviews and of course… demos!
The products and concepts launching at DEMOfall 09 include (no specifics here yet because we are respecting embargoes that we signed with those companies):
A desktop application that allows consumers to organize and manage their IM, email and social network accounts from one single location;
An organic shopping search engine that connects shoppers with online deals from their favorite merchants;
An application that enables search and browsing of real time conversations in social networks;
An agrisourcing platform that lets individuals, businesses and distributors buy, sell and find local food in their areas;
A mobile application that lets online dating users identify the validity of who they are interacting with online via name, number or email address;
An internal Twitter application for businesses that helps enterprises stay connected with customers, partners and the public;
A video-conferencing tool that offers live collaboration for up to four people using rich media content over standard business networks; A private file system for enterprises that lets users create, open, edit, and manage files in the cloud directly from their desktop file explorer;
A mobile mapping application for public places like convention centers and college campuses, that will allow users to navigate these indoor spaces via their phone;
A language translation program that helps websites establish multi-language content channels to grow their businesses globally;
A software tool that identifies the most influential thought leaders online for any given market segment or topic;
An online commerce platform for media companies to manage their online and offline subscribers.
On the heels of yesterday’s Intel briefing, AMD is touring Silicon Valley this week to talk about its own strategy and vision ahead of the Windows 7 launch, due on Oct. 22.
Although most of the information is still under wraps until AMD’s own Sept. 10 event, we caught up with worldwide marketing vice-president Leslie Sobon at AMD’s headquarters in Sunnyvale where she was keen to point out some of the work the chip designer did to optimise its upcoming notebook and desktop platforms to support Windows 7 high-end graphics capabilities aka DirectX 11.
“We’ll have the first DirectX 11 games enabled on our graphics cards. You’re not going to see that from Intel… or nVidia either… It’s all about the compute shader… The first pieces of what comes out for DirectX 11 is in the gaming side but it actually translates even into entertainment and video visual quality,” explains Sobon.
Consumers don’t care about the processor
During our conversation, Sobon also commented on the complexity consumers are facing when choosing a new computer.
“Mainstream consumers don’t care about the processor in their system. They care about whether or not they can watch Hulu HD or if the Flip camera video actually runs on their PC. They don’t care if it’s a Turion, or an Athlon or a Core i5… they didn’t care for many many years,” explained Sobon.
AMD will support GPU overclocking
On overclocking – which is a way to increase the speed/frequency/clock of individual PC components like the CPU or the memory -, the AMD executive confirmed the chip designer’s commitment to continue offering a wide range of options for PC enthusiasts to boost or “overclock” every part of their computers, including soon the graphics processor (GPU)!
“What aren’t we doing to help overclockers. We’ve got the chipset that enables it, AMD overdrive that lets you optimise at your heart’s content on the platform side, as well as on the CPU side… We have the overclocking record,” adds Sobon.
For more on AMD plans, we’ll have to wait Sept. 10th!
Objective Analysis believe SSDs will never reach prices of HDDs
In his presentation at the Flash Memory Summit today, Objective Analysis principal Jim Handy was quite optimistic on the future of the NAND flash memory market; for the near term.
Flash memory market business to remain viable until 2011
Handy pointed to current product shortages and price stability that will probably last until 2010-2011 due to growing demand combined with production and capital investments cutbacks; which is music to the ears for the 5 Flash memory makers left (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Toshiba) in the market which are still recovering from their deep losses in 2008.
Looking at SSDs, Handy believes this market is ripe for consolidation; which will go from the 171+ Flash-based drive makers of today to just a handful. “Remember that there were 282 companies that used to make disk drives before the market consolidates to about 5 today,” recalls DISK/TREND founder Jim Porter.
Handy also expects SSDs to stay weak in the PC market due to higher costs compare to hard-disk drives and the upcoming launch of Braidwood, the codename for Intel’s update of its Turbo Memory technology, a flash-based caching technology that should improve disk access performance which is scheduled to be featured on mainstream motherboards in 2010.
To add insult to injury, Handy doesn’t see a price crossover between SSDs and HDDs… actually this may never happen.
Hard-disk drives will hold back the performance benefits of Intel's upcoming high-end graphics chip Larrabee
With the first generation of Intel’s high-end graphics chip – code named Larrabee – only a few months away from shipping, Intel is trying to set some expectations in regards of its performance.
Speaking at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel’s desktop “performance guy” François Piednoël pointed that the performance and the user experience of a Larrabee-based PC will be “less interesting” with a hard-disk drive installed, highly recommending a solid-state drive (SDD) instead.
Hard-disk drives are what is holding PC performance back
Luckily, it so happened that the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker had recently shipped its next-generation 80GB SSD for about $220. At this price, Piednoël argues, consumers will begin to pay attention on this new category of devices.
“On a lot of benchmarks you will get more performance benefits to put an SSD into a laptop than having a discrete graphics card… This accelerate dramatically the user experience.”
A statement that I largely agree with having experienced a jump of performance after I installed a Kingston’s SSD on a MacBook used for video editing. The jump in performance was immediately noticeable and would have only been possible if I had upgraded the processor and/or the Nvidia discrete graphics.
With that in mind, Intel’s heavy investment in SSD technologies makes a lot more sense. “The CPU and the SSD are intimately linked. The faster the SSD is, the more you need processing power, and vice-versa.” CQFD.
Follows 2 video excerpts of Piednoël’s presentation at the Flash Memory Summit:
Verbatim continues its push in Flash memory with this tiny and tough USB drive
You’d be surprised what an old storage company like Verbatim – which started by selling data cassettes 40-years ago – can bring to the rapidly changing flash memory market.
For Mark Rogers, the company’s marketing manager for its 6-year old Flash business, it’s all about:
Lifetime warranty on all Flash products (both cards and USB drives); replacing any faulty devices, no questions ask. Kingston also offers a lifetime warranty on its Flash memory cards, but only 5-years for its USB drives; for Sandisk its 2-years and just 1-year for PNY;
A standard password protection feature (for Windows only, not Macs) available on most of Verbatim drives;
Enough performance to speed up Windows, thanks to the USB keys “ReadyBoost” compatibility;
And in conjunction with this week Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Verbatim introduced new USB keys – the TUFF-’N'-TINY line – that are among the smallest and sturdiest in the market.
Mobile phones are main driver of Flash memory cards sales
However, despite being the fourth top selling brand of USB flash drives in the U.S., Verbatim is yet to ship a solid-state drive (SSD) that would compete with the likes of Intel/Kingston, STEC, etc.
“But we’re in the process of launching an ExpressCard SSD [announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last January and already shipping in Europe] which is based on a removable form-factor. Verbatim is in the removable media business and we chose to start our entry in SSD in that manner ,” said Rogers.
More on our exclusive interview with Verbatim in the video below:
Intel's strategic investing arm managed to survive thanks to its financial returns
Started in 1991, Intel Capital is by far the longest surviving “corporate” venture capital organisation and the most active in Silicon Valley.
“We have the classic objective of balancing strategic needs for the company as well as financial returns. We existed this long because we have generated quite positive financial returns for the company… We invest off the balance sheet, we don’t have a fund type structure. But in any given year we invest hundreds of millions of dollars,” explains Intel Capital’s cleantech leader Steve Eichenlaub, speaking at the Intel Technology Summit yesterday in San Francisco.
Intel Capital is “round” agnostic – although prefers investing in B and C rounds – and its 100 or so investment professionals will usually poor around $300 million to $400 million a year, in all stages (seed to publicly traded) of a company’s evolution, worldwide.
Think of Intel Capital as a large venture capital organisation inside of a large publicly traded corporation. “In some ways we kind of do an entire venture capital fund every year!,” added Eichenlaub.
Intel Capital invests in these 7 technology markets, cleantech being the newest one
One of the “value-add” that Intel Capital brings to its portfolio companies is its vast network of relationships with large customers, through Tech Days, a one-day event hosted 60 to 70 times a year at a partner location, like Microsoft, BT, Huawei, BMW,Comcast…
Here’s a video excerpt of Eichenlaub’s overview of Intel Capital:
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 6 months ago
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