Last month, Skydeck released the beta version of its mobile phone app. By the end of the year, the 1-year-old company plans to formally launch the application and itself, according to CEO Jason Devitt. Skydeck's software allows users to...

Tiny Pictures likes to say your mobile phone is your social network. That's because its Radar application for mobile phones and computers lets groups of friends share photos and videos, and then comment back and forth. Already the service...

"We can probably get to break even very shortly," quipped Bart Decrem, CEO of the startup Tapulous, over dinner Tuesday. Tapulous is the maker of the popular (if somewhat frivolous) musical Tap Tap Revenge (pictured) application for the iPhone...

Time to have a break from Nvision and head to much cooler San Francisco for a Mobile Web Roundtable dinner moderated by Mitch Lasky of VC firm Benchmark Capital at Orson restaurant. Present at the event are the executives...

Ambitious targets for lowering the cost of solar cells are achievable as today's high cost of silicon comes down, SunPower co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Richard Swanson (pictured) said Tuesday. Today, solar cells remain relatively high priced – at...

Just got out of the interview with Dan Vivoli (pictured), the man in charge of NVIDIA's GPU businesses and also Sr VP Marketing. Vivoli first confirmed that inspite rumours, Nividia "has no desire to exit the chipset business (from...

Intel is repeating its Nehalem strategy to anyone who will listen in briefings that generally mimic one another. The company appeared in the past month at IDF, Siggraph, etc. Little new was discussed from one appearance to the next....

First thing today, I'll be covering the Emerging Companies Summit hosted at the Nvision conference with presentations from over 60 companies leveraging the power of GPUs for both visual and high-performance computing applications (and not only games!). The Summit...

Although I enjoyed the appearance of Battlestar Galactica actress Tricia Helfer at the end of Nvidia's keynote, I thought it was not really necessary as it purpose was to show how actors deal with virtual characters. Which is no...

According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured), it was him who insisted to tell the world about the quality issues in some of the Nvidia chips. Not his customers -the PC makers- who were more concerned that the press...

Nvidia is cozying up to Via's Nano processor. "VIA has a really terrific CPU, the Nano... You put Nano with GeForce together and you put a box around it, you'd think it's a high-performance computer. Everything works: Blu-Ray works,...

According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the main reason for creating Nvision was that there was no industry event for the visual computing eco-system. When I asked him about Siggraph, here's what he answered: "People who go to Siggraph...

The graphics industry is on the verge of a powerful transformation that will bring three-dimensional video displays and screens to computers and other computing devices. "We are on the cusp of a display revolution," Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang...

Nvidia's chief took another swipe at Intel's planned Larrabee graphics chip on Monday, at the Nvision 2008 conference, suggesting the chip would trail Nvidia's best effort several years from now when it is expected in the market. In past...

Critics have dubbed Nvision 2008 as the anti-Intel Developer Forum (IDF). But when asked, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang refuted the idea joking that "it's not quite that unambitious, that's just a non-objective" and suggesting on the contrary that Nvidia's...

Today, AMD revealed that it sold its Digital TV business, that came with its ATI acquisition, to partner and rival Broadcom for $192.8 million in cash. That's below the $250 million to $375 million that analyst firm American Technology...

August is undoubtedly the month of Semiconductor. It started with the Flash Memory Summit for all things Flash Memory, then Intel's IDF and this week super technical Hot Chips conference is being held in Stanford University and graphics chip...

After my "client" briefing with AMD's Pat Moorhead, I left his nice suite at the top floor of the W hotel for a tiny room several floors below where the server roadmap update was being held. Funny when you...

For those interested, below is our Picasa album with all the photos taken at IDF this week. Enjoy!...

Moorhead's (pictured) purpose for the AMD briefings at IDF is to "educate" (another word for spin I guess!) the reporters/bloggers that inspite of AMD's desktop/mobile slower chips versus Intel's, consumers actually can hope having a better user experience on...

Earlier this week, I checked out AMD "client and server" briefing held at the W hotel, just a few steps away from the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Unfortunately, this year, no air balloons, no limousines, no Intel...

The economic slowdown hasn't yet scuttled the server market, according the Gartner researchers. The market-monitoring firm said Thursday that global server shipments rose 12.2% in the second quarter and revenue climbed 5.7% to $13.8 billion. Companies continue to build out...

IPhone owners have sharply increased their use of location-based phone applications since the opening of Apple's App Store, says one industry executive. The number of location "look-ups" has increased to an "unbelievable" number, said Ryan Sarver, founder and vice president...

Intel is maybe celebrating its 40 year's birthday but during his IDF keynote, Intel CTO Justin Rattner (pictured) preferred to take us back to the future, looking at some of the technology advancements that we could see in the...

This morning at the Intel Developer Forum, uber-geek Steve Wozniak is interviewed on-stage by Moira Gunn, host of Tech Nation and Bio Tech Nation on NPR (pictured). My take is that Wozniak will remain an engineer 'for life'. The...

Winning the top spot on a search page is more valuable than you might imagine. That is according to research from Bill Barnes (pictured), co-founder or Enquiro Search Solutions. Barnes says that people using a generic search term, such...

Social networks and other interactive sites where people share information will become integral parts of corporate marketing campaigns in the next several years. While this observation may not seem startling, it suggests a powerful transformation in how people buy...

After their keynotes at IDF, both Pat Gelsinger (Intel's desktop and server boss) and David Perlmutter (the mobile boss), stayed for a short media Q&A session (pictured). Three main items were covered: 1- How Intel "dealt" with the Viiv...

During a press briefing this morning, HP product marketing manager for business notebooks, Sarah Bussell (pictured), confirmed that HP "re-tested" its EliteBook 6930P notebook introduced last June using this time Intel's latest SSD and an LED flat panel display...

Intel's foot-to-the-floor push into consumer electronics is still at an early stage. But already the critical expansion is showing some success, said Senior Vice President Patrick Gelsinger (pictured). The Santa Clara, CA, chip maker has more than 700 "design...

Intel unveiled its first flash memory drives for personal computers and servers Tuesday, boasting the products would eliminate worries about performance and power savings when they begin shipping in 30 days. No pricing was available during a presentation at...

Search engine giant Google is beta testing a plan that would allow creators of YouTube videos to promote their material by purchasing keywords, one search engine expert said. The system would display the videos on a YouTube search results...

During AMD's pre-IDF conference call, CPU boss Randy Allen (pictured), recognised Phenom's lack-luster performance versus Intel's Core 2 chips. "It's absolutely true that there's certainly a deficit that we have in terms of some of the performance benchmarks for...

Slow economic conditions are cutting into corporate profits. But IT spending doesn't appear headed for a recession as businesses around the globe continue to buy new gear, according to Gartner researchers. Worldwide IT spending should climb 8% this year...

Americans may be taking fewer summer vacations this year, but you would never know it from their Internet activity. Travel sites that focus on ground travel and cruises saw traffic jump 10% to 12.7 million visitors in July and...

Nintendo's Wii game machine claimed the top spot in the console wars in July, selling 555,000 units and garnering a 49% share of the market, according to NPD Group. Nintendo's DS handheld outsold even that, giving the company the...

A few days before Intel's bi-annual developer conference (IDF), AMD hosted a conference call today to give its version of the "distorted" information its rival will "boast" next week. During the call, AMD took aim particularly at Intel's IDF...

Flash memory drives have big ambitions. They hope to elbow aside traditional hard disk drives to become standard equipment in tomorrow's laptop computers – taking charge of a huge market in the process. Today, price is a hurdle. They...

At the Q&A session yesterday, Spansion CEO Bertrand Cambou (pictured) shed more lights on the company's bet on EcoRAM that will help the Sunnyvale, CA, based company move away from the commodity business of NOR Flash memory into premium...

Earlier this week, at Dell's business notebook launch event in San Francisco, I spoke with Andy Lark (pictured) who runs the computer maker's corporate marketing about its communication strategy. And not to sound too pessimistic for my colleagues in...

At the Flash Memory Summit "Green Flash" panel earlier this week, Spansion VP Jan Silverman (pictured) gave a bit more details on his company's new low-power Flash Memory dubbed EcoRAM, that was announced last month and is expected to...

After Eli Harari keynote, the Sandisk CEO went on with a short Q&A session. On his motivation of creating the first flash memory and thus founding Sandisk over 20 years ago after leaving Intel: " Solid state disks replacing disk...

NAND flash is the hot memory technology "du jour". Its chips sit at the heart of digital cameras and many iPods. But in the next decade it will be eclipsed by something new, says Eli Harari, an industry pioneer...

The flash memory business remains in a deep downturn. But new markets could turn famine into feast – and upset several large established industries – such as book and movie publishing – in the process. So says Eli Harari...

The hype surrounding the use of flash memory in personal computers remains high, but so is market adoption at companies such as Dell. This according to Paul Prince (pictured), chief technology officer of enterprise computing at computer maker Dell....

Just a couple weeks after MemCon, it's time yet for another memory focused event this week i.e. the Flash Memory Summit also happening in Santa Clara. My Colleague Mark Boslet and I will be at the show, so expect...

So how do you boost traffic to your web site when you are a cash-strapped start-up? From the entrepreneurs on the Churchill Club's start-up panel hosted by venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki (pictured), social media and bloggers are the way...

"Convertible Notes" is the main take-away from today's Churchill Club event titled "Startup or Hunker Down? What’s Happening With Tech Startup" through the experiences of 5 entrepreneurs. Richard Archuleta, CEO, Plastic Logic Rousseau Aurelien, CEO, Second Rotation Susan Coelius-Keplinger,...

After this morning HP Lab's media breakfast, I chat with Bernard Huberman (pictured), Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs whose purpose is to understand the interaction between social behaviour and information technology....

I'm on my way to San Francisco this morning to attend a media breakfast hosted by HP's Social Computing Lab to discuss how HP has created tools and methodologies to help companies improve their understanding of how to present...

Tonight, I joined a group of Silicon Valley Foreign Correspondents (all members of the International Press Club of California that a colleague and I started almost 9 years ago!) at Palo Alto's Fuki Sushi restaurant to meet with Josie...

Last December, Communications' giant WPP Group won a bid to create a "full service" advertising, marketing & PR agency in response to Dell's request to merge its 800 global agencies into one unit. After several months of research, the...

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...