Western Digital invests in Skyera start-up

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | Mar 13, 2013 5:41 PM CDT

Western Digital has invested in Skyera, a start-up focusing on all-SSD products for the enterprise market. The investment comes as part of Skyera's Series B round of financing, in which Skyera raised $51 million.

Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera:

The backing of Western Digital has enabled us to ramp our business across marketing, sales and engineering which has been instrumental in creating the industry's most innovative solid-state solution. With our skyHawk family of enterprise solid-state storage systems we are witnessing the next era of solid-state storage and I strongly believe that having a close working relationship with Western Digital, the world's top disk drive vendor, is invaluable as we set out to reshape the storage landscape.

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Google's Sundar Pichai takes over Android development

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | Mar 13, 2013 4:45 PM CDT

Andy Rubin has resigned from head of Android development. In his place, Google has appointed Sundar Pichai. Pichai has previously been the senior vice president for Chrome and Apps and is a nine-year veteran of Google. This could indicate that Chrome OS and Android will start to get cozy with each other, something that has previously been predicted.

It would be interesting if Google were able to allow Android apps to run on Chrome OS. It shouldn't be that hard of a task, but Pichai has said that it is much too early to discuss whether this is in the cards.

Sergey and I first heard about Android back in 2004, when Andy Rubin came to visit us at Google. He believed that aligning standards around an open-source operating system would drive innovation across the mobile industry. Most people thought he was nuts. But his insight immediately struck a chord because at the time it was extremely painful developing services for mobile devices. We had a closet full of more than 100 phones and were building our software pretty much device by device. It was nearly impossible for us to make truly great mobile experiences.

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ReportTT: Twitter planning to release music discovery app

Trace Hagan | Software & Apps | Mar 13, 2013 4:13 PM CDT

CNET is reporting that Twitter could release a standalone iOS music discovery app within the month. They say that Twitter is using their We Are Hunted acquisition from last year to power the new standalone music app. It's not clear why Twitter would want to join this crowded market.

CNET reporter Casey Newton:

Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

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Dell unveils massive 18" Windows 8 tablet, say hello to the hefty XPS 18

Charles Gantt | Mobile Devices, Tablets & Phones | Mar 13, 2013 12:01 PM CDT

Dell has just announced a new Windows 8 based tablet, and normally that would not be much of a big deal, but this tablet is actually a very big deal - literally. Measuring in at a whopping 18.4-inches, the new Dell XPS 18 is the direct competitor to Sony's VAIO Tap 20.

The 18" Windows 8 beast features a run-time of about five hours on a single charge, and weighs in at 4.85 pounds. The tablet features custom flip-out feet that allow it to transition from "desktop mode" to lap mode quickly. The tablet will ship with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse when it ships in April.

For a mere $900 you will get a dual-core Pentium ULV processor and 320GB hard drive. Premium editions will feature a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. This monstrosity may not be for everyone, but it is the first tablet that has me considering purchasing a Windows 8 device.

Continue reading: Dell unveils massive 18" Windows 8 tablet, say hello to the hefty XPS 18 (full post)

Intel Computing Technology Demo in Taipei - controlling lightning with our fingertips and driving a car with no hands

Earlier today here in Taipei we attended the yearly Intel Computing Technology Demo which is tour held by Intel folks from the headquarters in US where they give Asian press a look into some fairly exciting tech that it's working on and stuff that we may see in the future.

At the event at the Sherwood Hotel today, Intel showed off a lot of its new Ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones, which of course are all powered by Intel chips. A lot of those products have been seen at events prior to this one, but what took our interest was Intel's take on perceptual computing and where it sees it going in the future.

At the front of the room was an Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabook running Windows 8, some may get excited for that fact alone. Besides just multitouch where we are now with such Windows 8 based machines, Intel showed off various demos which makes uses of the computer's web camera to produce some rather interesting results.

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Android tablets to overtake iPad dominance this year according to analysts

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Mar 13, 2013 2:32 AM CDT

Research firm IDC have their latest report out, which expects to see a tip toward Android being dominant this year in the tablet market, taking the throne from Apple's iPad. IDC have increased their 2013 forecast for worldwide tablet shipments to 190.9 million, up from 172.4 million units.

Interestingly, Jitesh Ubrani, Research Analysts for IDC's Tablet Tracker, has said: "One in every two tablets shipped this quarter was below 8 inches in screen size. And in terms of shipments, we expect smaller tablets to continue growing in 2013 and beyond." Getting into the Android dominance, the IDC report that moving into 2013, Google will continue to expand their share of the tablet market.

Android's share of the tablet market is expected to reach 48.8%, a huge surge compared to the IDC's previous forecast of just 41.5%. Android's increased dominance comes at the expense of Apple's iOS, which is expected to drop from 51% market share to 46% in 2013. How about Microsoft's Windows 8 platform?

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Maxis insider says always-on for SimCity isn't entirely necessary

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Mar 12, 2013 10:38 PM CDT

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has quite the exclusive today, reporting from a SimCity developer who reached out to them that Maxis don't actually offload a large portion of their game's calculations to their servers. The Maxis insider has said that the server isn't actually handling these calculations for non-social aspects of the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would not require that much effort.

RPS have verified that the Maxis insider works on the game, and has first-hand knowledge of how SimCity works. This insider has also made is clear that his repeated claims of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on, where he explains:

The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they're doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything. I have no idea why they're claiming otherwise. It's possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I'm clueless.

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Seagate have shipped over two billion HDDs, one billion of those in the last four years

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Mar 12, 2013 9:38 PM CDT

It was only a matter of time, but Seagate have reached the milestone first by shipping two billion hard disk drives. It took the storage giant 29 years to reach this goal, and more impressively they shipped one billion drives by 2009, and have shipped one billion since.

The one billion drives shipped in the last four years is thanks to the explosion of demand for storage in mobile applications, cloud infrastructures, social media, business applications and the ever increasing consumer market. Steve Luczo, president, CEO and chairman of Seagate, has said: "This is truly an impressive accomplishment and I am proud to lead this company as we celebrate this success."

John Rydning, IDC's research vice president, for hard drives and semiconductors said:

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 gets microtransactions in the form of cosmetic changes

Trace Hagan | Gaming | Mar 12, 2013 8:01 PM CDT

Activision has finally jumped on the microtransactions train by way of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Call of Duty games have traditionally earned money after launch by selling DLC content packs, normally consisting of new multiplayer and new Zombie maps. Black Ops 2 broke away from this by offering the Peacekeeper SMG in the first DLC pack.

Starting Wednesday, Black Ops 2 players on the Xbox 360 console will be able to change cosmetic features of their gaming experience. By purchasing "Personalization Paks" for 160 Microsoft Points, players will be able to change the look of their guns and gain access to new "Calling Cards."

Also available are World Calling Card Packs, $1, and Extra Slot Packs, $2. For the time being, Activision will likely stay with cosmetic microtransactions only. If they were to introduce microtransactions that changed the way multiplayer worked, Digital Trends notes that they would likely have player riots.

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Acer debuts upgraded C7 Chromebook, comes with more RAM, longer battery life, larger price tag

Trace Hagan | Laptops | Mar 12, 2013 6:32 PM CDT

Acer has announced a new version of its C7 Chromebook that comes with more RAM and longer battery life. Of course, these upgrades come for a price. The original C7 retailed for $199 and came with around 4 hours of battery life and 2GB of RAM. The new C710-2055 model will set you back $280.

For the additional $81, customers will get around two extra hours of battery life. Along with the larger 6-cell battery, the RAM has been upped from 2GB to 4GB. This puts the Chromebook into the price range of cheaper Windows laptops and the iPad mini. It also makes the purchase less of an impulse purchase and one that actually requires a bit of thought.

Gregg Prendergast, vice president, U.S. Commercial Sales, Acer America:

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