May 19th, 2012
Here in Silicon Valley, we’ve gotten used to the idea that it doesn’t take a big investment—or even a garage—to start a software company anymore. A couple of friends can write an iPhone app in a matter of weeks or months and, potentially, take the world by storm. Or they can build a web company by renting a little server space in the cloud.
This ability to start a company without a lot of capital has led to a boom in software startups. It’s also led to a boom in incubators, like Y Combinator and Plug and Play, to mention just a few. Incubators bring in nascent companies for four to six months or so, give them a space to do their development, and introduce them to marketing and business folks before booting them out of the nest into the commercial world.
While the established incubators do hatch the occasional hardware startup, for the most part, the companies that have flocked to them are building low-overhead apps- or web-based businesses. Hardware engineers looking to do a startup haven’t had quite the same kind of support as software folks. They’ve been, it seems, lonely.
Until this week. Wednesday, at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a group of these hardware “Makers,” that is, hobbyists who make technology—electronics, 3D printers, digital fabrication tools—came together to hear from a series of speakers how makers can become entrepreneurs and build real businesses. In a day and a half “Hardware Innovation Workshop,” organized by Make Magazine, they found each other; and, perhaps more important, they agreed that they are a movement.
Again and again, whether from the stage or from the audience, attendees referred to the kind of energy that was palpable in the room. Said one attendee, “Everyone feels that there is a revolution starting to happen, a wave starting to break.” The only disagreement came when the Silicon Valley veterans asked themselves the last time they’d seen this kind of wave before…was it in the late 70s, when the HomeBrew Computer folks unleashed personal computing on the world, building shooting stars like Atari and Commodore, as well as companies like Apple that are still growing today? Or was it in the mid 90s, when open source software came into its own, and spawned a wave of businesses built on its foundations? Or was it the early 2000s, and the birth of Web 2.0?
Whatever the historical precedent, it’s all good for the hardware engineering community. And, as a sign that venture capitalists and others who fund and help build businesses are taking the trend seriously, the hardware makers are getting their own incubators, one on each coast.
Earlier this year, Jeremy Conrad and Helen Zelman started Lemnos Labs in San Francisco, an all-hardware incubator about to graduate its first class. Out East, Ben Einstein’s Bolt will welcome its first class in the fall. Lemnos Labs and Bolt have slightly different business models; Lemnos Labs makes equity investments in their companies, Bolt is more focused on licensing. They’re both supported by investors; Einstein pointed out that half his investment is from local angel investors, about 80 percent of whom are “guys with mechanical engineering degrees who wound up doing software their entire lives” and want to reestablish a connection to hardware.
Neither incubator is having any trouble finding entrepreneurial eggs to hatch. One reason, besides the access incubators give their companies to mentors, investors, manufacturers, and other help, Conrad says, is “you can’t start a hardware company at Starbucks,” rather, you need space to set up equipment and leave it.
Bolt just opened up its website a few days ago, and applicants have already flocked to it. Lemnos Labs has about 100 applications for its next class; its first class of four includes companies developing an industrial robot that makes hamburgers, an electric guitar with built in speaker and amp, a low speed electric vehicle for corporate campuses and universities, and a connected coffee machine with sophisticated brew controls. Of course, these aren’t necessarily devices that are going to change the world. And Zelman admits that quite a few of the hundred applications the lab is currently evaluating involve robotic toys.
But, pointed out Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, “most entrepreneurs failed. And that’s okay, because amazing things got built, and a lot of people have to try to make a revolution.”
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May 19th, 2012
NEW YORK (TheStreet) — If you want to buy Apple(AAPL) but think you missed the boat, another chance to climb on is approaching.
Apple traded $100 off the all-time high of $644 put in last month. After slipping through the 60-day moving average a couple of weeks ago, Apple is staring at a test of the 90-day average as support.
An entry target this week based on the moving averages is $512, using a relatively small $15 closing price per share stop-loss.
An even better risk-to-reward position is selling put options as a synthetic covered call. Selling a put option has a very similar profit and loss graph as a covered call. The advantage of cash covered puts is fewer transactions and accompanying costs.
I know some out there will claim valuations no longer apply and it’s a changing world with disrupting forces never before seen. As I become older, require reading glasses, and increasingly have difficulty keeping up with my children, I have gained market wisdom. What may appear as a certainty today can become absurd tomorrow.
Looking at Sprint(S) and Apple, you would be forgiven for not noticing how much they have in common.
After all, Sprint’s shares trade for about $2.40 — much closer in price to Apple option than an Apple share.
But both Sprint and Apple are technical buys, albeit for very different reasons.
Although Sprint’s shares have plummeted to about one half of their price from a year ago, the moving averages averages are rounding out or are on the upswing. Sprint has strong support at $2.32 and no major resistance until $2.70.
Apple is also a technical buy just under its current price.
In addition, both companies have attractive long-term fundamentals. Apple is a legal cash printing press, while Sprint is likely to either buy others in the space or get bought out.
Sprint could still engineer a takeover of MetroPCS Communications(PCS) after Sprint finishes its network upgrades.
Or perhaps MetroPCS Communications(PCS) could try to acquire Sprint.
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TheStreet Ratings updates stock ratings daily. However, if no rating change occurs, the data on this page does not update. The data does update after 90 days if no rating change occurs within that time period.
IDC calculates the Market Cap for the basic symbol to include common shares only. Year-to-date mutual fund returns are calculated on a monthly basis by Value Line and posted mid-month.
*Oil Data in Market Overview is Brent Crude Pricing
© 2012 TheStreet, Inc. All rights reserved.
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May 17th, 2012
Over 1.25 million app downloads! bit.ly In this video, Mahalo expert Sean Hewitt provides some safe practice tips to ensure you maintain your computer properly and don’t damage it. A Few Computer Hardware Tips ——————————————————————— It’s always nice to install new hardware in your computer to make it run faster, but it’s a good idea to follow these best practices so you don’t damage your computer in the process. To open your case and access its internal components, remove the screws along the back outer edge. Some cases come with thumb screws that can be removed with your bare hands. Other cases require you to use a screwdriver. You’ll need a non-magnetic screwdriver if such is the case. When the screws are removed you can either slide the entire cover off the top of the unit or slide each side off individually. Use an ESD (electrostatic discharge) wrist strap connected to an anti-static mat to ground yourself and keep from shocking any of the electronic components inside the computer case. Even the slightest unintended shock can completely fry one of the many processing chips and cause great harm, requiring you to possibly replace many parts. Also, when handling the hardware components, you’ll want to grab them by the edges to avoid your fingers touching any of the important electronic chips located on them. Use an air can to blow out any dust that has accumulated inside your computer. You’ll definitely want to make sure you <b>…</b>
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May 17th, 2012
Hardware and software provided by foreign suppliers could compromise the security of Canada's telecommunication systems and leave them vulnerable to attack, computer experts warn.
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May 17th, 2012
Google uploaded a new Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts, which addresses a question about the hardware/server-side software that powers a typical Googlebot server.
“So one of the secrets of Google is that rather than employing these mainframe machines, this heavy iron, big iron kind of stuff, if you were to go into a Google data center and look at an example rack, it would look a lot like a PC,” says Cutts. “So there’s commodity PC parts. It’s the sort of thing where you’d recognize a lot of the stuff from having opened up your own computer,and what’s interesting is rather than have like special Googlebot web crawling servers, we tend to say, OK, build a whole bunch of different servers that can be used interchangeably for things like Googlebot, or web serving, or indexing. And then we have this fleet, this armada of machines, and you can deploy it on different types of tasks and different types of processing.”
“So hardware wise, they’re not exactly the same, but they look a lot like regular commodity PCs,” he adds. “And there’s no difference between Googlebot servers versus regular servers at Google. You might have differences in RAM or hard disk, but in general, it’s the same sorts of stuff.”
On the software side, Google of course builds everything itself, as to not have to rely on third-parties. Cutts says there’s a running joke at Google along the lines of “we don’t just build the cars oursevles, and we don’t just build the tires ourselves. We actually vulcanize the rubber on the tires ourselves.”
“We tend to look at everything all the way down to the metal,” Cutts explains. “I mean, if you think about it, there’s data center efficiency. There’s power efficiency on the motherboards. And so if you can sort of keep an eye on everything all the way down, you can make your stuff a lot more efficient, a lot more powerful. You’re not wasting things because you use some outside vendor and it’s black box.”
A couple months ago, Google put out a blog post discussing its data center efficiency, indicating that they are getting even more efficient.
“In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center,” wrote Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations at Google.
Cutts says Google uses a lot of Linux-based machines and Linux-based servers.
“We’ve got a lot of Linux kernel hackers,” he says. “And we tend to have software that we’ve built pretty much from the ground up to do all the different specialized tasks. So even to the point of our web servers. We don’t use Apache. We don’t use IIS. We use something called GWS, which stands for the Google Web Server.”
“So by having our own binaries that we’ve built from our own stuff and building that stack all the way up, it really unlocks a lot of efficiency,” he adds. “It makes sure that there’s nothing that you can’t go in and tweak to get performance gains or to fix if you find bugs.”
If you’re interested in how Google really works, you should watch this video too:
Google says the average search query travels as much as 1,500 miles.
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May 15th, 2012
This segment is to cover some of the orders for my business Singularity Computers. In this video I take a look at a lot of exciting hardware including the Razer Black Widow Ultimate Stealth Edition. I also have a look at some new audio equipment which I have purchased for my channel. Almost all of this hardware will also be covered in other videos. Please Subscribe, Like and Favourite if you want to see more.
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May 15th, 2012
We’ve seen the wacky homebrew projects of computer hardware hacker Mike Schropp before. Mindful Gizmag readers may recall his triple quad-core i7 LEGO PC housing that we looked at last July. But his latest project, the “Bio Computer,” is rather more oddball, taking a turn distinctly towards the horticultural with a PC case adapted to … grow wheatgrass.
“I’m not complaining by any means, but I do feel as my basement becomes populated with more and more tech based projects that the environment is missing something organic, something natural to balance things out,” writes Schropp, on his website, Total Geekdom. But where you or I might buy in a cactus or two, an amaryllis or perhaps even go bonsai, Schropp opted to merge the organic with the inorganic, putting the waste heat from a PC to use with an integrated flowerbed.
Well, not strictly a flowerbed. After a bit of research, Schropp decided that wheatgrass was the ideal species to grow from a PC, being drawn to its simple clean look and attractive hue. He patched together a working PC from various donated machines, selecting a 3-GHz Pentium 4 processor, which is notorious for running hot.
Schropp then went about refitting the case, a process which involved fitting clear acrylic panels so the soil in the wheatgrass bed and the interior workings of the machine could be seen. To get extra heat into the soil, a series of acrylic tubes protruding down inside the machine were introduced, which in turn proved the ideal place for a substrate to allow drainage of the soil. These were put in place and made watertight using a needle dropper, acrylic cement and a thin layer of silicone.
When completed, Schropp used a variable-speed fan and Prime95 to ensure the CPU ran flat out in order to carry out tastes growing wheatgrass. “When the soil temperature was too high, the growth of the wheatgrass would slow,” he writes, finding the optimum temperature for peak growth to be approximately 66 degrees F (19 degrees C).
It’s an impressive and thought-provoking project, not least because of the just-plain-weird sight of a computer with grass growing out of it says something about all the screens, hard edges and wires with which we increasingly surround ourselves (perhaps less so, the wires). It also makes a definite if somewhat ambiguous statement about waste hear and personal electronics. But this is no project for the novice case modder. Plants require water, and water and electrical devices are not the most amicable of bedfellows.
Source: Total Geekdom, via TreeHugger
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May 15th, 2012
 [Credit: Playsurface on Kickstarter]Table computers like the Merel mTouch and the Samsung SUR40 running Microsoft’s Surface software (nee PlayTable nee Project Milan nee Microsoft Table) have been a thing for a while now. The basic idea is very simple, just the iPad writ large–a giant, HD-quality, touch-sensitive screen, backed by a reasonably powerful PC.
But hardware like that will set you back four or eight grand, respectively, putting it out of reach of all but the most dedicated hobbyists and institutions, and so table computers have consequently seen little uptake. A device like that makes a nice CES demo, and there are lots of cool /ideas/ swirling around it, but at that price point basically nobody can afford to use it, so nobody is really sure what it’s worthwhile to /do/ with it.
The Playsurface Kickstarter aims to change that. It’s an open-source, open-hardware touch table that can be used as a peripheral for an external computer or with an integrated computer as a table computer. In order to get high enough screen resolution at a reasonable cost, the Platsurface team is using an extremely short-throw projector (rather than the expensive high-resolution active displays that the Merel and Samsung devices appear to be using).
Unfortunately, this means that existing but expensive multitouch input hardware won’t work with the new display. As a result, making the touch table work as a peripheral will entail designing a board, called the Blob Board, to make it available over USB like a mouse or Wacom tablet or an existing multitouch screen. This will allow software developers to all write to the standard USB interface rather than needing to each roll their own drivers for the touch table.
The upside of this, though, is that they’re aiming to make the table available as an Ikea-easy kit with a full computer inside for $1750, or $1250 for just the table. This places it within range of hobbyists and general consumers. (The kit will ship with a Windows computer, but we here at GeekTech trust that Linux enthusiasts will quickly provide a palatable alternative, if the table doesn’t work out-of-the-box with Linux’s existing multitouch hardware support.)
The Playsurface is being developed by Templeman Automation, an engineering consultancy from Somerville, Massachusetts, who have done previous work on touch tables for the US Navy and the National Science Foundation, in the latter case together with Tufts University, so they have experience and reputation in this area to build on. The team also pledges that half of the money (at least the lower-level pledges?) will be spent on “getting the prototype hardware out in an educational environment,” maybe one much like the Tufts project, so even if you don’t want one of the devices yourself, your money will go towards productive uses.
Even the lower pledge levels will get you early access to the mechanical and electronic designs for the table, which is a neat way to engage hobbyists who might want to build peripheral devices. A company like Apple might only extend that kind of privilege to a select group of partners, but in the open-hardware world, anyone is a potential integrator.
If you felt like it, you could have your cabinet all built by the time the computer and screen shipped. (Not currently on the list, but something I’d like to see: early access to the software, for purposes of someone porting the drivers to Linux or building client software specifically for the table.)
There are clearly a ton of cool and worthwhile ideas for how a device like this could be put to use–educational play, ordering food at restaurants, displaying maps for tabletop RPG campaigns, playing arcade games, controlling a home theater system…
If the Playsurface Kickstarter can reduce the price as far as it promises to, hopefully we’ll start to see a lot more of them.
[Kickstarter via Engadget]
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May 13th, 2012
NEW YORK (TheStreet) –
Even though Apple(AAPL) reported record second-quarter revenue and earnings, shares have given back all of their gains and then some. We now may have a reason why: It looks like the carriers are starting to fight back.
Apple depends so much on its iPhone for growth, which accounted for $22.7 billion in revenue, nearly 58% of quarterly revenue. It’s Apple’s largest product segment by far, and any dent in revenue could dent Apple’s stock.
U.S. carriers Verizon(VZ), AT&T(T) and Sprint(S) could either cut back on carrier subsidies or extend the life-cycle of their contracts, and evidence is mounting that it may happen.
There are signs across the industry that carriers are becoming more disciplined with subsidies, Credit Suisse analyst Jonathan Chaplin thinks.
“If this discipline holds, we believe there is upside to margins and earnings growth for all carriers,” Chaplin wrote in a research note. He upgraded AT&T and Verizon to outperform and raised his price targets to $36.50 and $45, respectively.
Most contracts for cell phone customers are about two years, and Chaplin noted that the upgrade eligibility has been pushed out over the past year, from around 13 months to around 20 months, while implementing upgrade fees to offset the subsidy paid to the handset makers. Apple’s subsidy is exceptionally high, given the iPhone retails for $649 without the subsidy. The average subsidy on phones is around $265, but Chaplin thinks it could go as low as $250 per phone, as fees are added and eligibility gets pushed out.
While this is a potential negative for all handset makers, Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha cut his estimates for Apple as evidence mounts of a shift in subsidies.
Garcha noted that North America counts for 38% of total units over the past six months for Apple, and cut his earnings estimates for 2012 and 2013 as a result.
“We maintain our view that Apple will continue to gain smartphone share globally, driven by a compute advantage and its ability to drive distribution led growth, not to mention innovation. We now forecast iPhone volumes of 140mn/187mn in calendar 2012/2013 (implying global share of 21%/22%, up from 19% in 2011),” Garcha said in his research note. He reiterated his outperform rating and $750 price target.
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TheStreet Ratings updates stock ratings daily. However, if no rating change occurs, the data on this page does not update. The data does update after 90 days if no rating change occurs within that time period.
IDC calculates the Market Cap for the basic symbol to include common shares only. Year-to-date mutual fund returns are calculated on a monthly basis by Value Line and posted mid-month.
*Oil Data in Market Overview is Brent Crude Pricing
© 2012 TheStreet, Inc. All rights reserved.
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May 13th, 2012
Microsoft revealed some information last week that points to the next stage of evolution of the desktop computer.
Windows big shot Steven Sinofsky wrote on a blog that the Windows Media Player included with the upcoming Windows 8 operating system will no longer play back DVDs.
Of course, Mr. Sinofsky tried to spin this as Microsoft listening to its customers.
“The media landscape has changed quite significantly since the release of Windows 7. Our telemetry data” (by this I suppose he means data collected from users’ computers) “and user research shows us that the vast majority of video consumption on the PC and other mobile devices is coming from online sources …
“On the PC, these online sources are growing much faster than DVD and broadcast TV consumption, which are in sharp decline …”
In other words, increasingly you don’t want to watch DVD content on your computer. But why not just leave the function there for those who do want it? (TechMan has lately been watching 1960s episodes of Julia Child’s PBS cooking show on DVD on his computer. That woman was a hoot.)
Could it have to do with money? Bingo.
“These traditional media playback scenarios, optical media (DVDs) and broadcast TV, require a specialized set of decoders (and hardware) that cost a significant amount in royalties,” Mr. Sinofsky said. And because Windows 8 is both a desktop and mobile platform, its different forms make the royalty problems even more complicated.
But do not fear. If you want to watch Julia Child on your computer, you still can — as long as you are willing to pay more to do it.
Microsoft will now offer something called Windows Media Center that can be purchased as an upgrade to Windows 8. It is different from Windows Media Player, which comes with Windows 8 — the main difference being that it allows DVD playback and watching live TV.
Hidden in all this kerfuffle about telemetry and reader feedback is the idea that Microsoft doesn’t think the DVD drive will be around much longer as standard equipment on your desktop or laptop.
“Globally, DVD sales have declined significantly year over year and Blu-ray on PCs is losing momentum as well,” Mr. Sinofsky said.
In fact, Apple’s lighter, slimmer Macbook Air does not include a DVD drive. Apple also offers a Mac mini without a DVD drive.
The morphing of desktop operating systems like Windows 8 into do-all systems that run on phones, tablets and desktop also spells death for the DVD drive.
A phone and a tablet and an Ultrabook don’t have a DVD drive; why should a desktop?
The loss of the DVD drive will be just another step toward the minimalist computer. Desktops, once bedecked with peripherals, have been stripped of their bangles.
HP and others now make touch-screen desktops. And Apple’s newest operating systems encourage use of a touch pad instead of a mouse. So a mouse becomes increasingly unnecessary.
The MacBook Air also introduced the idea that you don’t need a mechanical hard drive. Solid-state memory is faster, more reliable, sturdier and soon will match hard drives in storage capacity.
Again, beginning with Apple — the iMac specifically — desktops are increasingly one unit — computer, monitor and keyboard joined together. PC makers are following suit.
Good-bye to separate monitor and keyboard and computer tower. And as that all-in-one unit continues to get smaller, the difference between a desktop computer and a portable computer disappears.
So we’re down to one unit with keyboard, monitor and CPU.
In the future, those also will start to disappear.
Projectors are getting so small that there are cell phones with them built in. There goes the keyboard; just project it from your glasses. If you don’t like looking at your desktop on the inside of your glasses, project it on the nearest wall.
So it is obvious that in the not-too-distant future, you won’t have a computer on your desktop, you’ll be wearing it.
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