harpwest.com

Vator now lets companies post status updates that other users can respond to. The service also tracks changes companies have made to profiles.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One thing that’s missing, and something Francisco tells me is planned in a future release, is a way to take this stream of information elsewhere. For the time being the only place to get it is in your e-mail in-box through notifications, or on Vator’s company pages, both things designed to keep users coming back.

Vator.tv, the “YouTube for start-ups” has a new feature going live on Tuesday morning that lets companies post short updates to their Vator.tv-hosted information pages. Similar to Twitter, the messages are limited to just a few hundred characters and other Vator users are simply able to follow a company to keep tabs on what it’s doing.

Vator has already been testing this out with a handful of companies for the past two weeks. New sign-ups to the service get an offer to sign-up for these companies’ updates right from the get go, and all of the information is fed straight into their dashboard.

Vator Co-founder and CEO Bambi Francisco told me her company isn’t trying to replace the idea of the company blog, company Twitter profiles, or online customer support solutions like Get Satisfaction with this news feed. Instead she says it’s an attempt to give people a simpler way to keep up with any changes companies have made, while giving the companies a more structured place to post information where they might already be doing so.

Companies with access can post new updates anytime they’d like, and interact directly with users who can reply in the threaded commented section below each item. Vator has borrowed a page from Facebook in letting users get notified of any changes companies have made, be it edits or additions to the company pages.

After the police failed to turn up any leads, Thompson posted the video on YouTube a week later with the title “Burglars Caught in Fort Wayne.” It now appears to be deleted. Detective Everett D. White of the Fort Wayne Police Department’s Neighborhood Response Team–who was off-duty and at home–happened to notice it.

Thompson and Officer Stephanie Souther found that the house’s front door was unlocked and a window in the rear was open, but that nobody was actually inside. The recorded video showed a man entering from the rear of the house, unlocking the front door to let someone else in, and then the two walked around inside. An eight-foot piece of copper pipe was missing.

On November 16, 2006, Richard Klaff was charged with felony burglary and felony theft. A jury convicted him the following June, and a judge sentenced him to six years in prison and one year of probation.

Score one, home automation. (Yes, perhaps this isn’t technically home automation in the same way an Indigo-and-Insteon-equipped home is, but it’s still pretty close.)

Klaff appealed his conviction, claiming the evidence was insufficient. But the Indiana appeals court ruled on March 31 that the recorded video “establishes that not only was Klaff present at the house, but also that he was an active participant, and thus the evidence may raise a reasonable inference of guilt.”

Fans of home automation systems controlled by a personal computer like to speculate about how their software might be able to snare intruders. An Indiana man named Fred Thompson actually did it.

On October 10, 2006, the system notified Thompson that movement was detected. He jumped in his
car, called the police, and headed home.

Court documents show the story started after Thompson’s home in Fort Wayne, Ind., was burglarized. Thompson responded by setting up a video camera hooked up to his computer and configured it to remotely notify him when motion was detected when the house was supposed to be empty.

For background on automated burglar-nabbing, check out this tale of another successful effort. Here’s a Windows tutorial; Linux users have the Motion project. I use Perceptive Automation’s Indigo software on my Macintosh computers at home.

He showed it to his colleagues at work the next day, and one recognized the two men.

Of course, you should remember to configure your computer to upload or e-mail the captured images to a remote server instead of storing them locally on a hard drive that could be stolen. And if that doesn’t work, this might be an even better countermeasure (and video). Bonus: It should deter FBI agents sneaking into your house, too.

The video service, called FunSpace Channels, will reportedly include shows from CBS, Comcast’s E! Entertainment channel, NBC, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., and other media companies. Slide will recommend videos based on how often they are forwarded by others. Slide will either sell ads against the videos, or take a cut of the ads sold by the content owners, the article said.

CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Now the company is expanding its reach to include somewhat more sophisticated media. On Thursday, it plans to announce deals with several major media companies that would allow people to view clips of popular TV shows on social-networking sites, according to the Journal.

Slide, the start-up that brought sheep-flinging to the social-networking world, has inked deals with several major content companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

San Francisco-based Slide makes software tools that let people add some personalization–in the form of slideshows, guestbooks, skins, or virtual pets–to their pages on all the major social networks.

While Slide’s early ventures might have been modest, it’s never been lacking in Silicon Valley starpower. It was launched in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and is backed by Khosla Ventures.

One can only hope for some form of reconciliation in the sad Google Street View divorce. At the very least, wouldn’t it be nice if Google picked up the legal bills? Or if the company offered to pay for counseling? On the other hand, will the poor husband threaten to sue Google?

Whatever will they pick up next?

(Credit: CC Byrion)

Britain has already been shaken to what remains of its foundations by Google Street View’s unerring ability to discover people and things where an idealist might wish they weren’t: from the vomiting man to the man walking out of a sex shop. Yes, not even the same man.

However, his wife, bathing in uncontrollable suspicion, decided to do the only thing she could. She dialed up the local detective agency. Yes, Google Street View.

Divorce appears to be proceeding.

In the story as related by the Sun newspaper (and which still, as of 7.50am PST sits proudly on the Sun’s Website), the unnamed woman seems to have had some sense of whom her errant husband might be squiring.

Further update 1.58pm PST: The Times of London quoted an esteemed lawyer a couple of days ago who related the broad facts as being true.

Editors’ note: Some readers have pointed out that the Sun’s story appears to have been debunked.

And now, despite some confusion as to whether this whole story is nothing more than a street legend, perhaps some doubtful wife will today be inspired to leap to Street View to find evidence of her husband’s philandering.

Unlike with marriage, the possibilities with Google Street View are endless.

She Google-zoomed in on the woman’s house and discovered that her husband’s Range Rover proved that he was, indeed, roving.

He didn’t even say he was working late. No, no. He said he was away on business.

Yes, its distinctive shape, and its even more distinctive fancy hubcaps, were parked exactly where they shouldn’t be.

“The market’s just too darn oversupplied–still,” he told me.

This hasn’t been the best of times for the DRAM market. For months, the market’s been unable to digest a surplus of DRAMs and NAND flash and prices have predictably trended down. But Handy doesn’t expect any major impact.

“A power loss, no matter how brief, may force the company to scrap some of the wafers that were undergoing a high-temperature process at the time of the outage. Other wafers, for example those going through photographic processes, will simply need to be re-worked by backing up and starting at some prior step of the process. Short power losses tend to cause more minor difficulties than do longer interruptions. A power loss of 20 minutes or longer may require a longer period of downtime to allow furnaces to be brought back to a stable temperature.”

(Credit:
Jim Handy, Objective Analysis)

Oddly enough, prices for NAND and DRAM haven’t moved in lockstep following natural disasters. A study by Jim Handy of Objective Analysis found that while NAND prices climbed after a March 2007 earthquake in Japan, they didn’t also rise after a July earthquake. In contrast, DRAM prices fell right away after both events even though production was not affected by the earthquake. He also had this take:

DRAM and NAND spot price per gigabyte

A lot of original equipment manufacturers are holding their collective breath right now. Hynix Semiconductor’s fab in Wuxi, China, suffered an outage lasting more than 15 hours on Monday and that’s inevitably raised questions about the potential impact on DRAM prices.
Here’s the short story: The company estimates it will take a couple of days to return to full production at the plant, which makes about half of Hynix’s total DRAM output. And what about chip prices? Still to be determined, but this market has been awash in inventory for quite awhile.

The question now is whether or not any further road map revisions are in store for AMD’s PC processor lineup. For some time, AMD had planned to introduce its “accelerated computing” initative, formerly known as the Fusion project, in 2009 in its notebook lineup.

AMD has dramatically revised its future road map for server processors, adding a new six-core processor and pushing out the arrival of a next-generation core well into the next decade.

The changes seem designed to ensure AMD delivers on its promises. Barcelona was a crisis on two fronts: the technical execution problems that delayed the chip by almost a year, and the worry among AMD’s customers and investors that the company was in over its head in its transition into a stable, trusted enterprise computing supplier.

For now, that plan appears unchanged, but with the departure of Fusion planner CTO Phil Hester and a 10 percent layoff going into effect over the next several months, something might have to give.

The chip will buy AMD time, however, to concentrate on its new plan for 2010. Bulldozer was that plan as recently as July 2007, but plans for chips based on the Bulldozer core–a powerful, modular core designed as part of the Fusion project–vanished from AMD’s road map in December.

After all, before Opteron arrived, AMD had virtually no track record in the server market. Opteron changed that, making AMD a well-known quantity inside the server rooms of the Fortune 500 and a supplier to every major server vendor on the planet.

But the Barcelona debacle had to have changed the way AMD’s customers viewed the company, and the feedback appears to have been simple: Just make contact. Don’t swing for the fences.

Istanbul is a clear response to Intel’s Dunnington processor, a six-core server chip also scheduled for the second half of this year. But Istanbul won’t be out until the second half of 2009, long after Intel’s Nehalem generation of processors has begun to ship.

Server customers with heavily parallelized workloads will opt for Magny-Cours, while Sao Paolo will be the choice of customers that just need a few threads worth of performance to run at faster speeds. Clock speeds have yet to be determined, but the 6-core Sao Paolo will run faster than the 12-core Magny-Cours, Allen said.

(Credit:
AMD)

Instead, AMD decided to push forward with the Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours products and reuse the existing core design used in Barcelona and planned for Shanghai and Istanbul. Upping the core count planned for that timeframe from 4 and 8 to 6 and 12 will deliver a nice performance boost, Allen said.

As recently as April, AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer was telling financial analysts that samples of Bulldozer were still on the schedule for 2009. But he neglected to mention how AMD intends to use it, because AMD isn’t confident enough in its plans for the Bulldozer cores to share them with the public, Allen said.

Istanbul, Sao Paolo, and Magny-Cours are the new chips on AMD's roadmap, replacing a previous plan code-named Montreal.

Now that the company finally has the Barcelona mess in its rearview mirror, AMD has taken a hard look at its server plans. The chipmaker will extend the life of its current processor core technology through 2010, and has added a six-core processor code-named Istanbul for the second half of 2009.

Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours will require a new chipset to accomodate the switch to faster DDR3 memory and will be built using AMD’s 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. Istanbul will drop into servers built for Barcelona or Shanghai, the 45-nanometer version of Barcelona scheduled for later this year, making for an easier transition for customers using Barcelona. Montreal was scheduled to introduce a new chipset into AMD’s lineup in 2009, but that won’t arrive now until 2010.

A four-core and eight-core design code-named Montreal, on the road map as recently as last December (click for PDF, slide 21), has disappeared entirely. It will be replaced by six-core and 12-core designs known as “Sao Paolo” and “Magny-Cours” (Formula 1 race venues, I’m told), which are scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2010 and are based on the same underlying processor core technology as Barcelona, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and head of AMD’s server division. That means those chips will not use the “Bulldozer” core first introduced by AMD in July 2007.

Tearing up your road map is never a good sign, but at least it’s a signal that AMD is taking a pragmatic approach to the next several years. The company is in serious trouble, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several quarters and will probably need to break even in the second half of the year to save the job of CEO Hector Ruiz.

“The continued emphasis on renewable energy and economic development from the incoming (Bush) administration may put additional support in place to accelerate our efforts,” Fritzemeier said.

Les Fritzemeier heads up a tiny solar-energy start-up that most people have never heard of, Wakonda Technologies. But rather than worry about being steamrolled by the sliding economy, he feels like he’s in a great spot.

Nicholas Parker, executive chairman of the Cleantech Group research firm, said the difficulty in getting financing in the coming year will thin the ranks of clean-tech start-ups and, from an investment point of view, result in a “flight to quality.”

Advanced Electron Beams CEO Mitch Tyson said his early-stage clean-tech firm has not had to scale back.

Across the board, though, investors and entrepreneurs report that the valuations of green-tech start-ups–once considered in bubble territory–are going down, and there is a growing emphasis on having cash.

“In a lot of respects, the best time to start a company is in the middle of a recession, assuming you’ve got money,” he said. “Our target is to go to market when most people expect the economy to turn around.”

Consider Qteros, a young firm with a potential breakthrough process for making ethanol from agricultural waste, such as corn stover. One of its initial investors, ethanol maker VeraSun Energy, declared bankruptcy, shutting it out of any follow-on round.

To a large degree, that’s simply because younger firms, in general, demand less capital to operate. Those green ventures most vulnerable are the ones that need late-stage funding–the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to build a biofuel plant or solar-manufacturing line, they said.

He’s optimistic about the future because demand for technology that reduces the cost of solar electricity will remain strong, even in a down economy. The company is trying to develop disruptive solar-cell technology by combining low-cost, thin-film manufacturing techniques with very efficient cells.

“What’s out there is a level of nervousness in every business,” said Mitch Tyson, CEO of Advanced Electron Beams, which makes equipment to make industrial processes more energy- and water-efficient. “People still don’t have a good sense of where the bottom is.”

Seeking new sources

As a result, green-tech entrepreneurs–after being lavished with money and attention for the last three years–need to get creative with how they fund their ideas.

“I say to potential investors, ‘We have a product in the field now and look at the customer base–the market risk is low,’” he said. “Knock on wood…So far, my experience, has been typical of normal times.”

Without a doubt, the recession and lower oil prices are hurting many companies in clean tech, a situation likely to slow what has been a frenzied pace of innovation.

(Credit:
Advanced Electron Beams)

In another case of Wall Street colliding with green-tech garage start-ups, one newly formed firm nearly lost an investor when he lost half a million dollars on the stock market.

As more bad economic news comes out seemingly every day, many predict that the best companies–with paying customers–are the ones that have the best chance of thriving. A number of successful companies, including Google and Cisco Systems, were founded during an economic downturn.

Flight to quality

Certainly, being in the right industry helps a small company’s chances. While biofuels are closely tied to falling commodity and gasoline prices, products that save energy can appeal to cost-cutting businesses or utilities looking to make the electricity grid more efficient.

Like most people in clean tech, he’s eager to see the shape of the Obama administration’s energy and green-job initiatives.

Fritzemeier of Wakonda Technologies seems have gotten the timing right too: he was fortunate enough to raise money in July, before the financial markets’ meltdown.

Advanced Electron Beams’ Tyson is out, trying to raise another $20 million to $25 million Series C round, and he’s gotten a commitment from existing investors and a good reception from others. The interest could well stem from the fact that the company already has customers using its product.

“This Wall Street meltdown is having effects on early-stage green-tech companies getting the money they need to grow,” said Jonathan Gorman, the manager of business development at Qteros. “There was a huge due diligence process, with outside scientists, as we looked for money, which they probably wouldn’t have done before.”

Late last month, SunRun, which installs and finances consumer solar-panel purchases, secured a $105 million commitment from U.S. Bank, but it wasn’t as easy as it would have been a few months ago: one investor said getting a bank to sign on to a tax equity fund was like getting on “the last helicopter leaving Saigon.”

“We feel better that we’re in the efficiency business selling to businesses,” said Robert LeFort, the CEO of Ember, a wireless-networking firm that has shifted its focus to smart-grid products. “That’s better than putting something on the shelf at Wal-Mart, and hoping the consumer picks it up…It’s the lesser of two evils.”

But investors and entrepreneurs say that so far, smaller
green-tech firms appear to weathering the storm the best, allowing them to continue developing new energy technologies.

Other sources of money, including BP and George Soros’ fund, filled the void. But the added work–compounded by cautious lenders–strung the process out from six months to nine.

Telefonica, the largest telecommunications provider in Latin America, announced on Friday that it has officially been chosen by Microsoft to provide voice over Internet Protocol services to Windows Live Messenger customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela.

Rates are slightly higher in Canada and the United Kingdom–$0.055 and $0.023 per minute, respectively–but the service’s rate list reveals relatively competitive pricing. In fact, calls made in the States are cheaper on Voype than those made on Skype. Skype currently charges $0.021 for all calls sent to people in the United States.

That said, Voype is still in its infant stages. It’s currently available in select countries around the world but will soon be made available to customers in Latin America, which could increase its installed base.

More importantly, current Voype users won’t be able to receive calls on their PC. According to Telefonica, that functionality is scheduled for release at a “later point,” as part of the “second phase.”

Obviously taking aim at eBay’s popular Skype Internet telephony technology, Microsoft’s Live Messenger VoIP solution may not be such a bad choice. Calls to and from other Live Messenger users are free, and calls made to landlines or cell phones in the United States cost just $0.014 per minute.

Dubbed Voype, Telefonica’s VoIP service works with Live Messenger and will enable Windows Live customers to make calls directly from their PCs to any landline or mobile phone in the world.

Glover, who became CEO earlier this year, spoke with CNET News.com about the HBO deal and plans for the site.

Cross-media distribution with us and HBO is anticipated. Clearly, Funny or Die the Web site and HBO.com are players in all of this.

How is traffic to Funny or Die going? I know there was the initial huge rush with “The Landlord” video. How do you keep traffic coming back after that?
We’ve been averaging 3.2 million unique (visitors per month). We clearly have that huge swell of “The Landlord” and then that audience over several months tapered off not illogically. And the last couple of months, audience has been growing. And the one thing we say is, if your first movie was Star Wars, you’re always going to suffer by comparison. If you started at zero and after a year had grown to 3.2 million and continuing a nice growth pattern, you’d be thrilled.

The exact nature of the programming is still to be determined. First thing we need to do, and we’re busy at work, is hire a very high-level creative manager for the whole thing and start to come up with ideas.

Can you talk about the finances?
We don’t, but what everybody has said is it is small. We didn’t need money but did a second round of financing in December. Cash wasn’t the issue. The issue was strategic relationship.

How will the content be integrated with the existing site and with HBO.com? User-generated content is a big part of Funny or Die. Will that be part of the new programming?
It starts on the television service–the 10 half-hours, which could morph into 8 40-minute blocks, or back-to-back half-hours five times. The basic metric is 10 30-minute television programs. And those programs will reflect the same kind of inventiveness or voice and tone that is Funny or Die.

The HBO pact is part of a larger plan to turn the site–and the Or Die Network’s group of sites–into “premium brands” in their respective fields, CEO Dick Glover said Wednesday.

Anything that is part of the Web site and part of what we do can be a part of the television. Now again it hasn’t happened yet, so I don’t know exactly how. But an important part of our Web site is getting all these people to submit content that might be tied in or integrated. Yes, absolutely.

On Wednesday, the site snagged an equity investment from HBO. Funny or Die, which already had the backing of Sequoia Capital, also will also produce 10 half-hours of programming for HBO as part of the deal.

How did the HBO deal come about?
It is related in that all of the various participants or whatever at HBO or Funny or Die have had a variety of business dealings over time, including Gary Sanchez Productions (a company operated by Ferrell and Funny or Die co-founder Adam McKay), which is doing a show called East Bound and Down for HBO, a weekly half-hour comedy. So a meeting was set up of a bunch of people including Mark Kvamme from Sequoia, including people representing various folks that are part of our company. The purpose was literally just to brainstorm and talk at the core. What people like was we perceive ourselves as the premium comedy brand. They’re clearly the premium television network. The idea is: what could these two things, which have that in common…what more could we do that expands on that.

(Credit:
Funny or Die)

What’s the long-term plan? Do you see yourself as becoming a studio or a production company?
We clearly do see a vision of moving toward the 21st century comedy studio model. We really do look at it as becoming much more than a Web site or just a video content company. We think that model evolves, but we see opportunities. We’ve already done touring, and we will be doing much more in that area. We see the potential of print. We see the potential in audio. This is the logical next step as we seek to exploit.

Funny or Die, the comedy site co-founded by actor Will Ferrell, rose to fame a year ago with a wildly popular video called “The Landlord.” Plans for the site are growing as fast as Ferrell’s fro.

The long-term plan is to continue to grow brands from the Internet video content space that can then live as multimedia brands–and if all goes well, that each of those can be a dominant brand in their field. So someday the goal is that Funny or Die is clearly the premium comedy brand, regardless of media.

(It) did not seem to take advantage of our voice and assets to just do a television show–we didn’t see where that raised the bar. Let’s do a deal where the Funny or Die sensibilities can be brought to television, out of just this short-form area to a long-form area with HBO, and leverage that to potentially other businesses and things. And in order for that to happen, we have to have HBO be a strategic partner.

How big is the company now?
All of Or Die Networks, which includes Shred or Die (an action sports video site) Eat Drink or Die, (a community site aimed at foodies) PWN or Die (a gaming site), and we’re launching in Brazil next month and another site in the fall, it’s 42 people.

In the third quarter of its fiscal year, Nvidia’s profit dropped sharply from last year’s levels, but revenue came in above forecasts.

The desktop segment is a concern for Nvidia, however. “The big swing factor in all of this is what happens to desktop revenue. We’re focused on regaining some market share in that area,” said Marvin D . Burkett, Nvidia’s chief financial officer. “Caution tells me it could be a weak market in the fourth quarter,” he added.

Updated at 5:20 p.m. throughout. Also, correction made for earnings per share.

During the third quarter, Nvidia recorded an $8.3 million charge against operating expenses related to restructuring costs in connection with its workforce reduction. The company announced a 6.5 percent reduction in its workforce in September.

Nvidia also lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices’ ATI graphics unit. “We lost some market share recently. We’re focused on regaining market share,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia.

Revenue for the world’s largest graphics chip supplier declined 20 percent to $897.7 million from $1.12 billion last year.

For the three months that ended October 26, profit sank 74 percent to $61.7 million, or 11 cents a share, from $235.7 million a year earlier. Excluding costs from stock compensation and other expenses, earnings were 20 cents a share. This exceeded the average estimate of 11 cents projected by First Call.

“This is a very important growth opportunity for us. For the first time we have exposure to the vast majority of this fast-growing segment of the PC industry,” Huang said.

The company is aiming to gain share in the high-growth laptop segment. Nvidia launched the GeForce 9400M mobile chipset in the third quarter, its “first notebook chipset for Intel processors,” Huang said.

“We were caught flat footed at 65 (nanometer) and our chip and board solution was just too expensive. We’ve made that transition (to 55 nanometer) in Q2. And in Q3 we’re through that transition and we’re off and running,” Huang said. Nvidia shifted to a more advanced 55-nanometer manufacturing process from a 65-nanometer process for its “performance segment” graphics chips in the third quarter.