The two haven’t been married yet. But just listen to Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president at Facebook - where photo uploads are a popular feature today.
Video is the next “logical place to go,” said Palihapitiya at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.
He pointed to the mobile video streaming startup Qik. “I think it is going to be really powerful.”
What if Facebook allowed people to share this with their friends? he asked.
What if billions of people could share photos and live accounts of news events and other goings-ons? Wouldn’t a clearer picture of the world emerge?
That’s the expectation of Marc Davis, chief scientist at Yahoo!, who says such “multi-billion systems” are the likely consequence of rapidly expanding cellular networks and improving handsets.
Whole new applications are possible, Davis said at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.
Every year more than a billion handsets are sold, expanding the 3 billion or so people connected on mobile networks. The proliferation is changing news gathering already. After the London terrorist bombings, people posted photos from their mobile phones on Flickr. The world got an immediate image of what happened.
“How we come to know what’s happening will change dramatically,” Davis said.
The mobile business is being transformed by a new openness, says Rich Miner (pictured), group manager at Google.
But Miner was hush-hush about next week’s expected launch of Google’s Android-based cell phone during a keynote address at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco.
Phones running Google’s Android software are expected to be announced on Sept. 23 and to ship in October. Miner said only that Google would release the Android software to the open-source community once the phones are available.
He spent most of his keynote explaining that the past year has been a transformative one for the mobile phone business. Apple’s iPhone hit the market, Google described its Android and applications developers got new freedom to write applications for once closed cellular networks,
Wireless carriers are going to find “their business models are going to have to change,” he said. They will need to take advantage of advertising and plan to get more “micro-payments” from an expanding audience of users instead of charging high prices for things like text messaging, he said.
The transformation is similar to what happened on the Internet, Miner added.
The rapid evolution of the cell phone is destine to change our lives the way the Internet has since the public flood gates opened a decade ago.
So what imaginative applications are already doing this? Here’s the answer, according to a panel of industry designers at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco (pictured):
At the ZendCon developers conference yesterday, which is held at the same Santa Clara convention centre than DiskCon - making it a lot easier to cover both events -, I've attended part of the State of Ajax presentation by Ben Galbraith (pictured).
For the Ajaxian co-founder, and now part of the Mozilla developer team, Ajax applications are getting really close, both in terms of speed (thanks to faster Javascript interpreters inside of Web browsers) and graphical user-interface (GUI) capabilities that rivals desktop solutions like Adobe's Flash or Microsoft' Silverlight.
Galbraith also praised the rapid improvements of CSS (for GUI), HTML (with version 5) and Gears whose "goal is to look at the standards like HTML 5 and see where standards are headed and give developers a version that they can use today".
"HTML 5 is addressing the pain points that we have. CSS is getting better and the idea is that for those browsers that haven't implemented these improvements Gears can actually step in and provide the solution until it happens", Galbraith says.
Can hard disk and solid state drive makers work together? Maybe on some standards, intellectual property licensing or on a common nomenclature. But that's about it.
The two camps are just in such a fierce battle targeting the same market segments (consumer, desktops, enterprise...) albeit a different approach but with an underlying converging technology, that is hard to see how they can cooperate. And in this war, the consumer is the main beneficiary as prices should continue to drop while capacities increase.
Anyway, after listening to Sandisk talk about the netbook market opportunity for the SSD maker at lunch, it was amusing to hear from one of the leader of the hard disk drive industry, John Coyne, Westerm Digital CEO (pictured), that 80% of netbooks actually ship with a hard drive and not an SSD. Reality check anyone?
In his keynote tonight, Coyne also addressed the huge market opportunities in emerging markets, what he called the next 1 to 5 billion users. However, the industry should still continue to innovate for the "rich", the first billion users, that need faster and higher capacity drives.
"There are 2 [opportunities]. One is basically what we've been doing for years, which is addressing solutions for rich people... The other huge opportunity that we have as yet untapped is to focus on the next level of economic development", Coyne said.
At the DiskCon conference, I sat down with IDEMA president - also the show's organiser-, Joel Weiss (pictured) to discuss some of the changes his 22 years old trade organisation had to confront in the face of a consolidating disk drive industry that went from 60 to now only 6 disk drive companies!
To survive, IDEMA had to widen its scope from just being the association of disk drive companies and their suppliers (heads, substrate, platters...) to now include solid state/Flash drive companies like Sandisk and work on a common nomenclature. Weiss expects the DiskCon show to draw 1,600 to 1,700 attendees this week.
Although the IDEMA president does not see hard disk drives to disappear anytime soon, he does point to the industry's greatest challenge to stay relevant with the rise of SSDs.
"HDD companies need to continue to increase the capacity of their drives by 40% annually if they want to keep the SSD makers at bay. That means HDD companies will have to invest heavily in semiconductor technologies like lithography, the same than the ones used by SSD makers. But that will carry an initial cost of $2.5 per drive. And that's a lot in this industry", says Weiss.
As expected at DiskCon, the disk drive industry conference being held this week in Santa Clara, there has been a lot of talks about drives. But not so much about the traditional magnetic spinning drive, as opposed to its Flash memory or SSD (solid state drive) competitor!
Case in point, was the conference's luncheon keynote by the general manager of Sandisk's SSD business unit, Rich Heye (pictured). In his expose, Heye is betting on a rapid growth of the consumer Netbook market that he estimates will reach 4 million units this year (from a mere 635,000 units in '07), 10 millions in 2009 and 33 millions in 2012!
"No consumer products have grown that fast!", said Heye.
Heye gave 2 reasons for "weeping of joy" when he looks at the Netbook market potential for his business:
1- Storage is the largest netbook line item (24% of the total cost of the machine vs 14% for LCD, 13% for the CPU+chipset and 6% for software) because most of the netbooks will use low-cost screens, CPUs and a free operating system;
2- And most of those low-cost small laptops will carry cheap 32 GB (the sweet-spot capacity for this category) pSSDs (Sandisk name for its consumer SSD line) instead of hard drives.
Tesla Motors offered new details on its planned Model S sedan Wednesday, saying the electric car will be unveiled early next year with a maximum 300-mile driving range.
The news from Chairman Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, came on the same day the company said it would construct a factory in San Jose. The Silicon Valley facility is to produce up to 20,000 cars a year, boosting the company’s manufacturing capacity from the 25 cars a week Tesla expects in November and the 40-car weekly pace anticipated for early next year.
The company presently makes a two-seat roadster costing more than $100,000 a year. The Model S sedan will start at $60,000 with options potentially bringing the price tag to $90,000.
Musk, speaking at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco, said he hopes to eventually build a $30,000 car, perhaps in a manufacturing agreement with one of the big three auto makers.
The first version of the Tesla sedan will have an option to extend its driving range to 300 miles, he said. Another option will allow a speedy recharge: 85 percent of battery capacity recharged in 45 minutes.
Referring to the Silicon Valley plant, he said: “This will hopefully be the center of the green car revolution.”
The high-definition video-disc crown can safely be placed on Blu-ray’s head. The Sony-backed technology came from behind to dispatch its cheaper rival: HD-DVD.
But winning the war may being few spoils. Sales of DVD players have declined in major markets in North America, Europe, Japan and China after reaching 142 million units in 2007, according to in-Stat.
Part of the reason is market saturation. Another explanation is that consumers are soaking up hard-drive-based digital video recorders instead.
In-Stat now expected sales of Blu-ray players and recorders will reach 5 million units in 2008.
The pace of technological change is picking up. But the source isn’t what you might expect.
It’s not strictly computers, but the intersection of nanotechnology and synthetic genetics, where researchers re-engineer the code of life in microorganisms, said Steve Jurvetson, partner at the venture firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
In the next 20 years, this evolving science will offer disruptive innovation and give new opportunities for entrepreneurs, he said at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco.
One example today is the startup Genomatica, which genetically engineers microbes to produce chemicals from a variety of feed stocks.
“What may feel like 100 years out will happen in the next 20 years,” Jurvetson said.
San Francisco-based CallWave launched its widely anticipated Fuze collaboration and high-definition video conferencing service.
The company said Tuesday the service will go into beta testing and can be used from a computer or cell phone. Fuze also requires that participants have only a browser for access, simplifying its use, said Jeff Cavins, CEO.
“It’s our new growth path,” Cavins said.
CallWave also said it developed a version of its WebMessenger Mobile instant messaging software for Apple’s iPhone. The software is available at Apple’s App Store.
