Inside a nondescript warehouse on a nondescript street of this Seattle suburb is a research laboratory that looks like it came out of a James Bond movie–had Q the gadget master been a gastronome.

Here Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft (MSFT), and his company, Intellectual Ventures, pursue an eclectic array of speculative and potentially world-changing ideas–inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease. And here, along with the laser designed to shoot mosquitoes out of the air (a high-speed camera counts the rate of wing-flapping to ensure that innocent insects are not vaporized), is the best-equipped restaurant kitchen anywhere that never serves any customers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site ]]> http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091118/after-microsoft-bringing-a-high-tech-eye-to-professional-kitchens/feed/ 0 http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091111/applied-materials-the-next-tech-layoffs/ http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091111/applied-materials-the-next-tech-layoffs/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:55:22 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17738 By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

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Microsoft (MSFT) announced more layoffs today, and I was one of them. This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling…but only for a minute or two.

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When Microsoft (MSFT) made the decision this week to drop out as the sole sponsor of Fox’s upcoming special “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” the software giant said, “The content was not a fit with the Windows brand.”

The special from “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein, who also works on the animated show, featured skits and bits with jokes about the Holocaust, feminine hygiene, bowel movements and incest. In other words, it was much like a typical episode of “Family Guy.”

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I’ve had a couple days now with Windows 7 and it is certainly an improvement over both Vista and XP, requiring slightly less resources than either (significantly less than Vista), booting faster, and offering superior usability. Yeah, but why does it cost so much? I know why.

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“I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?” the chief executive of The Associated Press, Tom Curley, was telling a few people in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “I’m saying they were brilliant, and we didn’t, collectively, license as aggressively as we could have. So now there’s this moment, and the two of them are competing.” He meant Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). “So where does that take us?”

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The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the likes of Google (GOOG), Facebook and Microsoft (MSFT), which all battle energy costs on a huge scale.

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Ultra-low prices on portable computers are nothing new, and in fact have increasingly become the norm since the debut of netbooks–small and light ultraportables that are virtually defined by their low cost. However, there are some strong reasons to believe that Microsoft’s (MSFT) upcoming Windows 7 operating system, in addition to new types of Linux-based portables, could help drive profit margins for hardware manufacturers to surprising new bottoms.

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As soon as Microsoft (MSFT) releases the final bits of a new Windows release to manufacturing–and often before–many users’ thoughts turn to what’s next.

Windows 7 and its server complement, Windows Server 2008 R2, were released to manufacturing in late July. By late August, Microsoft’s Windows client unit already was turning the crank on Windows 8 client and server.

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Launched just last week, Learn That Name is a new iPhone application with an award already under its belt–from a Microsoft (MSFT) event.

Eric Koester, a 32-year-old attorney at Cooley Godward Kronish, won at the recent Startup Weekend on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus, for the app.

Here’s how it works: Learn That Name connects to your LinkedIn account to pull a photo from one of your contacts. You then have to identify the person’s name from four multiple-choice options, also taken from your contacts. You get points for making the correct match (it’s timed, with quicker responses yielding more points) and, in a bonus round, identifying your connection’s employer.

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TV Everywhere is a concept put out by TV distributors that basically says that if you pay for cable or satellite, you should be able to watch the content you want, where you want. Everywhere. To some people this is not a good idea.

As is always the case, many people think tv programming should be widely available for free on the internet. Of course the content is never free. Someone has to pay to create it and we purchasers of cable and satellite services pay the subscription fees that pay the content companies and allow them to create all that content.

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Microsoft (MSFT) has revealed that, for a $1000 PC, it has always charged the OEM about $50, or five percent, for Windows.

At the Jefferies Annual Technology Conference, Charles Songhurst, general manager of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft, answered a rather long onslaught of questions about where Redmond is heading. At one point, Songhurst started talking about how investors were asking Microsoft what its standpoint was on the “skewing PC price point” (i.e. “the netbook effect”). Songhurst explained that it was more interesting to look at “the growth merchandise volume of all PCs sold” despite the “emergence of a lot more segmented SKUs.” In other words, he believes that although the price range for the PC is widening, the market is still growing, and that’s all that matters to Microsoft.

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On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

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On the same day that Microsoft Corp. reported some of its worst financial results ever earlier this summer, a dozen buses left the company’s headquarters campus. During rush hour, they headed toward the highway as a phalanx of police officers on motorcycles shut down the on-ramps ahead, clearing the path to a local museum.

Microsoft had rented the museum for a private party and a screening of the most recent “Harry Potter” movie. After the film, the roughly 600 attendees received a free Xbox 360 video-game console.

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Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

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