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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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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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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And San Francisco, Calif. comes second!
The report published today by CareerBliss, an online career community, is based on an analysis from more than 200,000 independent company reviews.
While San Jose, Calif. earns the title of the Happiest City to Work, Minneapolis, Minn., takes the title as the Unhappiest City to Work. Employees in Minneapolis rated very low on all eight factors that measure job satisfaction levels.
“Some may be surprised that a smaller city like El Paso, Texas actually outranks large metropolitan areas like New York and Chicago. Our data highlights how different industries and employers create work environments that greatly affect employee happiness, and the overall temperature of the workforce within a city,” said Heidi Golledge, Co-founder and CEO of CareerBliss.
CareerBliss picked the top fifty cities by evaluating eight factors that affect work happiness: growth opportunities, compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, senior management, job security and whether the employee would recommend the company to others.
Both San Jose and San Francisco, which rank number one and two respectively, have an average salary that exceeds most cities. For example, CareerBliss data indicates that the average annual salary in San Jose is $82,000 a year, whereas the average salary in Minneapolis, which ranked as the city with lowest worker happiness scores, is $62,000 a year.
The research shows that workers in cities such as Jacksonville, FL and Washington, DC are happier with job security, work-life balance, and growth opportunities.
The Top 10 Happiest Cities to Work are:
And the Top 10 Unhappiest:
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In 2010, venture capital firms raised $12 billion (down from $16B in 2009) and invested $22 billion (up from $18B). For PricewaterhouseCoopers Steve Bengston, who spoke this morning at SDForum’s Quarterly Venture Breakfast, this is simply not sustainable.
Good News: deals are up
According to the MoneyTree report which tracks venture capital investing, venture capitalists invested $21.8 billion in 3,277 deals in 2010, an increase of 19% in dollars and a 12% rise in deals over the prior year. More here.
“2010 was a kind of a funny year… 3 flat quarters and one outlier which is really more of function of about 3 huge cleantech deals, so it wouldn’t be too much off the mark to say that 2010 was a bunch of $5 billion quarters,” explains Bengston.
Bad News: weak IPO market, lack of funds, no jobs, shrinking VCs, China
“The problem with venture capital is not how much (deals) is coming in, but how much it’s coming out,” says Bengston talking about the lack of IPOs.
Also, 2010 saw the biggest delta between VC investing and VC fund raising ($12B), the lowest since 2004. It’s not scalable!
On jobs, Silicon Valley saw no net job creation in 15 years!
“Here’s a period arguably the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of civilisation and there is no more jobs today than there were 15 years ago,” adds Bengston.
VC industry is shrinking:
“There’s a prominent VC that did their own study that claims that 97% of VC profits come from 15 companies each year. Now let’s say it’s only 90% coming from 30 companies. But it still begs the question: how many VCs do you need to find the 30 really good companies each year. Today the answer is: about 2000; and you might think it’s more than you need.”
On China:
“David Rubinstein, the CEO of Carlyle, was quoted recently saying that China was the #1 economy in 15 of the last 18 centuries. So, just because they had a couple of bad centuries, you don’t want to rule them out. They have a history of success.”
Other highlights of 2010 venture investing:
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Last week, the first Gamification Summitconvened in San Francisco bringing together many different segments of the Silicon Valley technology market. The “Game Crawl” organized by TechCentralSF after the conference gave attendees a chance to mingle.
The most surprising part of the event was the large cross section of industries represented. There was the expected influx of game and startup executives but also NBC, Playboy Enterprises, a program insurance company, and healthcare companies. Gamification is seen by these executives as the new loyalty program and a way to keep users/consumers engaged.
Social engagement is no longer seen to be enough, adding game mechanics and metrics is the new thing in the next year for brands.
Powering these new take on loyalty programs are two startups that sponsored.
Badgeville described their business as a white label social rewards and analytics platform, a new twist on the traditional loyalty program. Now you can reward consumers not just for purchases but also desired behaviors like “sharing with social network” or “uploading content”.
Bunchball has been building its platform for the past 4 years and power programs for large brands like NBC, Comcast, USA Networks,SyFy, and Hasbro. The API’s make it easy to plug in a game, leaderboards, and integration with social networks.
By Chia Hwu.
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