I was this afternoon at Kensington's headquarters in Redwood Shores to speak with the gadget maker's President, Boris Elisman (pictured).
My first surprise was to learn that this 25 years old high-tech company, focus on the $5 billion+ computer accessories market, is now part of the comparatively low-tech office product supplier Acco Brands that sells staplers, binders, day-timers, etc. Somewhat a similar strategy to consumer company Newell Rubermaid's that built a high-tech business acquiring companies like business card scanner Cardscan, label printer Dymo or whiteboard maker Mimio.
With competitors like Microsoft, Logitech, Belkin, Targus (channel driven), etc... Kensington' strategy is to focus on the $20-100 price range and building "smart made simple" PC and mobile (iPod, iPhone, MP3 players) accessories versus high-performance and high-end gadgets that tech-driven Logitech or Microsoft would make.
More on Kensington's strategy and an edited video of our conversation after the jump.
After almost 2 years operating inside Dell and HP, high-end PC brands Alienware and Voodoo seem to finally find their "sweetspot" inside those 2 huge organisations.
In recent weeks, I've interviewed both Voodoo Chief Rahul Sood (pictured is the logo that was on his t-shirt!) and Dell's President of the consumer business, Ron Garriques who had radical different views in how to use Alienware and Voodoo in their consumer portfolio.
But if I have to sum it up, I'll say that Alienware=HP Voodoo DNA=Gaming and Dell XPS=Voodoo PC=Best machine. And to me, the Dell's strategy looks a bit more logical: a separate brand for gaming and another (XPS) that mimics the car industry modifiers (AMG, M, VR6, SRT, Denali...). Find both video clips after the jump, and tell me what you think.
Today I'm in San Diego visiting data-warehousing specialist Teradata (meeting with CTO Todd Walter pictured). But don't think I'm at the beach blogging this: the R&D facility is situated in Rancho Bernardo, north of the city, in an unappealing concrete squared campus but with 131 trees!
Inspite an apparent lack of communication between the company's international flacks (from France, Germany, Italy and the U.S.!) - yesterday evening's meeting was cancelled without notice and the scheduled 1:1 interviews were actually never booked! - I survived this trip "exclusively" (dis)-organised for the European media: 3 Italian reporters (I didn't realise Italy was such a major market for Teradata!), a Spaniard and a French (and surprisingly no Brits nor Germans... probably on vacation this time of year :). Actually, I should consider myself lucky as my Belgian colleague did not even made it to San Diego and had to fly back To Belgium from NYC because of bad weather over central U.S.
And to be honest, I also thought about flying back last night but I'm glad I didn't because the executives, the presentations and the overall topic were interesting. After the jump, the video of Teradata's marketing director Chris Twogood presentation on the competition, by far the most interesting of the day.
With Bill Gates leaving Microsoft and Steve Jobs' health in question, Michael Dell is the only other founder left of a big multi-billion dollars IT company. So naturally, the question of his succession came up during our visit to his company in Austin.
But when asked about it, Dell had a quite "down to earth" answer.
"When I talk to our board of directors, one of the questions they ask me from time to time is 'what happens if you get run over by a truck?' And it's a good question for a board to ask. And so the board knows exactly what to do if I get run over by a truck... I've gone to great length to hire a very talented team and this is a big company, yeah it 's got my name on it but I don't run the whole company by myself. .. It's an illusion that there are super star executives that do everything by themselves. It's not the way companies really work"
Well as you all know there are of course one exception to Michael Dell's comments about a "super star exec" running a company by himself and that's of course Steve Jobs. Also, I wonder if Apple's board ever asked those "good" succession plan questions to Jobs. But again he's a super hero, right? Dell's video response is right after the jump.
I'm today in sunny but humid Round Rock, TX, at Dell's corporate headquarters with reporters from Latin America and Western Europe.
Of course, we are scheduled to meet with Michael Dell (pictured), later this afternoon, but earlier we'll be speaking with Brad Anderson, the senior vice president in charge of Dell's enterprise product group and with Ron Garriques, the president of the consumer division.
I'll be posting pictures and videos of our meetings. Stay tuned!
At the Facebook f8 conference in San Francisco (like in 8 hours of non-stop hack-a-thon), CEO Mark Zuckenberg gave more details on the start-up Connect platform, a direct rival to the OpenID standard already adopted by Google, Yahoo...
In a nutshell, you will be to use your Facebook account information to login to Web sites like CBS.com, CitySearch, CNET, Disney, Digg, Evite, Hulu, Plaxo, Seesmic, Six Apart or Twitter.
And for me this is the one most important announcement made here at f8 because as Facebook grows its user base it'll be hard for small but also some very large sites (see above) to ignore that community.
So from being "just" this cool Web social layer, Facebook is becoming the center of the online universe. And that's huge, no?
I'll be posting soon videos and pictures done at the show.
At the Plug-In conference today, General Motors Hybrid Czar Larry Nitz (pictured) detailed the car maker's hybrid (fuel+electric) and PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) strategy and its goal of displacing petroleum with energy coming from the electrical grid. GM's dual strategy could also be summed up in 2 words: [Saturn] VUE and [Chevy] Volt.
"Our objective is to double the fuel economy of the Hybrid VUE [which is at 25 mpg in the city and 32 mpg on highways] for 20-30 miles during this charge depletion... As opposed to a Volt where we think 40 miles is a more appropriate distance for a pure EV operation", said Nitz.
Inspite 800,000 "equivalent" miles of testing (and millions more to go) GM is still working on its 2-mode power train that will be used by both vehicles. Nitz promised that both cars will still be fun to drive with great acceleration, good drivability and with a "tremendous" fuel economy. Check out Nitz video after the jump.
At the Plug-In show today, Efficient Drivetrains CEO, Prof. Andy Frank, 74, a.k.a. the 'Father' of the plug-in hybrid concept, brought his converted 200 MPG Chevy Equinox.
What's interesting about this SUV is that it can run about 40 miles on batteries alone and then switch to the Prius engine that's actually under the hood!
"This particular car is the gold standard of conversion. We take the engine transmission and throw it away and we redesign a much more efficient and smaller engine. This engine is only 1/3 the size of a conventional. The transmission is much simpler. And the weight we save in the engine and the transmission, we put it into batteries. So this car weight the same as a conventional car. And since it weights the same we projected that the costs are the same than the original car", said Prof. Andy Frank.
At the Plug-In show today I met with Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technologieshttp://hevt.com/ (HEVT) President, Dr. Ali Emadi who's company converted a Ford F-150 pick-up truck to a plug-in hybrid vehicle. HEVT is a start-up located on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus and that licensed its core technology from the university.
"The Ford F-150 which is the most popular car in the car history worldwide is our first plug-in hybrid prototype. We added an electric motor to the differential and this one can go all electric and then switch automatically to hybrid... If you drive 30 miles a day it gets to 41 MPG [versus 16 MPG for the standard version]: 15 miles all electric range and the rest is hybrid... Through the University, we are working on Hummer H1 and Humvees... with prototypes expected next year ", said Emadi.
The cost for the conversion is currently around $60,000 but it's still at a proof of concept stage and Emadi hopes to bring that price tag much lower when the final product launches sometimes between a year or 2. HEVT secret sauce includes a series/parallel drivetrain, an integrated motor differential and an adaptive control unit aka the brain of the system. Emadi's video interview after the jump.
This is typically the kind of day when I wish I had a hybrid or even better... an all-electric car or PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle). The person who found that acronym must be either a genius or had a lot of time to waste!
Anyway, the Plug-In Conference main focus is to look at technologies (engine, drive-train, batteries...) that will help "electrify" a vehicle i.e. a car, SUV, truck or a van and recharge it using the standard utility grid. The highlight of the event will be former Intel chairman and CEO, Andy Grove, keynote presentation later today. More to come!
During his keynote presentation at the MemCon 2008 conference, Denali Software analyst Lane Mason summed up the $58 billion memory market in just one word: Stinks!
"The years 2004-06 were good for the memory (both Flash and DRAM) makers. 2007 was a 'fair' year. 2008, stinks and next year will be probably good".
The Denali analyst expect more bad financial news coming from all the memory makers as time goes by: it's going to get worse before it gets better... next year.
Flash memory dominates the memory market as a whole. Flash memory makers are expected to invest (in new equipments, technologies, processes...) $13 billion this year for a market that Mason estimates at $15 billion! How can anyone make money in Flash, the analyst asked. Well... they don't! They can't!
I was today in Palo Alto visiting fabless chip company DisplayLink CEO, Hamid Farzaneh (pictured) before his presentation tomorrow at UBS Bank's Technology Forum hosted at the Four Seasons.
DisplayLink has been around for 6 years raising so far $54 million in hope of building "the next billion dollar company". Farzaneh plans to raise one more round and expects to reach profitability by 2009.
More videos of the interview coming up shortly... after the jump!
