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Intel acquires two software firms | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News

Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.

In a company blog, the chipmaker indicated the acquisition of Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.

“Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It’s put parallelism in more and more machines,” James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, said in a phone interview Friday, explaining why Intel bought the two firms.

“If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it’s fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism–at least not to the full extent,” Reinders said.

A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores–so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.

“The operating system does stuff for applications in parallel,” Reinders said, referring to operating systems such as Windows. “But considering that we can produce more and more cores every year, to truly get the benefit of what the future holds, applications need to change. And most applications haven’t changed,” he said.

The goal is to facilitate the development of parallel programming. “How do we help software developers tackle parallel programming? Both companies had teams of experts that had been focused on this problem. So, they’re kindred spirits,” he said.

Writing about Cilk in a blog, Reinders said Intel sees “great opportunities for Cilk to integrate with our parallel tools…including Intel Parallel Studio.” The firm’s technology enables “mainstream programmers to develop multithreaded (or parallel) applications…Providing a smooth path to multicore for legacy (older) applications that otherwise cannot easily leverage the performance capabilities of multicore processors,” according to Cilk’s Web site. Original Cilk research was done at MIT.

Rapidmind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack and grew out of work at the University of Waterloo. It boasts advanced technology for helping software developers with data parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.

The cost of the two acquisitions was not disclosed.

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Intel acquires two software firms

Google’s Varian: Search scale is ‘bogus’ | Relevant Results – CNET News

Google’s Hal Varian would likely have raised an eyebrow at a term paper submitted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the search market.

Varian, currently on leave from the University of California at Berkeley to serve as Google’s chief economist, thinks a lot of the arguments advanced by Microsoft in justifying its 10-year deal for Yahoo search are, in a word, “bogus.” Microsoft has said that it needs “scale” to compete in the search market against Google, saying that larger amounts of traffic and data allow it to improve the quality of its search experience.

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
(Credit: Google)

As might be expected, that’s not exactly the way Varian sees it. He’s perhaps best known for perfecting the ad auction system that generates the vast majority of Google’s huge profits, having worked for Google since 2002. But he also holds forth over the array of statistical data and processes that Google uses to make just about any decision.

Varian shared his thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, the state of the economy, and the changing nature of innovation and Silicon Valley geography during a conversation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., this week.

Q: One thing we’ve been talking about over the last two weeks is scale in search and search advertising. Is there a point at which it doesn’t matter whether you have more market share in looking to make your product better?
Hal Varian: Absolutely. We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.

On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there’s a small statistical point that the accuracy with which you can measure things as they go up is the square root of the sample size. So there’s a kind of natural diminishing returns to scale just because of statistics: you have to have four times as big a sample to get twice as good an estimate.

Another point that I think is very important to remember…query traffic is growing at over 40 percent a year. If you have something that is growing at 40 percent a year, that means it doubles in two years.

So the amount of traffic that Yahoo, say, has now is about what Google had two years ago. So where’s this scale business? I mean, this is kind of crazy.

The other thing is, when we do improvements at Google, everything we do essentially is tested on a 1 percent or 0.5 percent experiment to see whether it’s really offering an improvement. So, if you’re half the size, well, you run a 2 percent experiment.

So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Maybe I’m pushing this metaphor farther than it should go, but I also think we have a better kitchen. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a really powerful infrastructure at Google, the development environment at Google is very good.

So, how’s the economy look?
Varian: The news on the economy I’d say is pretty good. You look at the housing sales, they’ve leveled out, prices are up slightly. The auto sales and production are up, The financial markets have all stabilized, the initial unemployment numbers are down over 100,000. So everything is looking pretty reasonable, and it’s somewhat earlier than expected.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, because we’ve got a long way to go to go back up. But you look at a most of the economic statistics, they have really turned around in the last couple of months, not only here, but in Europe and Asia.

Has anything changed fundamentally?
Varian: Well, the savings rate is up. People had a negative savings rate for several years and now it’s more like 7 percent. In some sense, that’s a good thing, I know people are complaining about it but you have to restore some reasonable balance. Maybe it’s not so good that we had to get to it by going through this recession, but at least we’re coming out at a more balanced rate than we were going in.

How do you see things in Silicon Valley? We’ve been wondering about the growing cost of living in this area and what effects that has on business development.
Varian: Well, there are some outposts: I’ve been telling Diana (Adair, Google spokeswoman) that she should go buy a house in Pleasanton. That’s where PeopleSoft used to be, and Oracle has a big establishment there, it’s a nice town….

It’s 105 today in Pleasanton.
Varian: Actually, I live up that way, if you get hot, you jump in the swimming pool. Anyway, there are some outposts that are still closely connected to the Valley. I think it is getting awfully expensive to live here, and commuting is getting more and more unpleasant, so I think you will be seeing some expansion.

A year ago, I told Google they should buy in Stockton. But nobody listened to me. The deal is, you have to pay for your food but your house is free.

What did they say?
Varian: They said, nah, we couldn’t get anybody to live there.

Is innovation in the Valley as high as it was 10 years ago?
Varian: I’ll tell you an angle that I think is different from 10 years ago, and that’s what I call the micro-multinational.

One day I bumped into a friend of mine, and asked what she was up to. She said, I’ve got a company. And I said tell me about it, and she said there are 12 people, three in New Delhi, two in Mountain View, and there’s somebody in Spain.

And then two days later I ran into another guy, and he said I’ve got a company, and there are four people in Italy, two people in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and three in San Francisco. And I said, whoa, what is this? A trend! It’s two of them!

But you talk to them and it’s amazing what you see in this area. I think the reason is that communication costs have basically gone to zero. We’ve got e-mail, Skype, Google Docs, wikis, doing round the clock continual communication and coordination that only the biggest multinational could have 10 years ago. The fact is that you have this essentially free communications and you’ve got entrepreneurs everywhere else in the world that can sync up.

So the question is, is it in the Valley? Well, in many cases, two or three of the people are in the Valley, but it’s not limited to the Valley.

I think it’s a crucial part because in a lot of cases you can find expertise, you can find venture capital. You’ve got the legal people to draw up the contracts, you’ve got the financing people, you’ve got the consultants and experts… But maybe it is part of the answer to this cost question, because you’ve got the expertise but the work can be distributed.

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The Boss – For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents – NYTimes.com

I GREW up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans. During the summers I was responsible for making sure the crops were irrigated.
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Jeff Chu/Associated Press

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working. I moved to Florida, where I did some freelance copywriting. After that I moved to Texas and stayed with my older sister while I figured out what to do next. In 1994, I returned to Nebraska and started my first company with my dad.

We didn’t know anything about the Internet, but I thought it was going to be a big deal. We produced CD-ROMs and a video on how to use the Internet, and we did some Web hosting. I recruited some friends and we tossed around some ideas, but none of us knew how to write software and we didn’t have much money. We watched what entrepreneurs in California were doing and tried to play along.

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn’t want to work on other people’s projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn’t worked at a real company. I didn’t know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I’d start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn’t keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn’t paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

In 1997, I moved to California and worked at what is now O’Reilly Media. By 1998, I had acquired enough technical skills to do freelance Web development. In 1999, I started Pyra Labs with a friend, Meg Hourihan, to develop project management programs. Then we started a side project called Blogger, a Web publishing tool. In 2003, we sold that company to Google. I worked for Google for two years.

Several years ago I started Odeo, a podcasting company, with Noah Glass, another friend. I ran that company for 18 months. We started Twitter as a side project within Odeo during that time.

I didn’t like the direction Odeo was going. For one thing, Apple made a lot of what we worked on obsolete when it introduced podcasts into iTunes. I bought Odeo back from the investors and moved the assets to another company of mine, Obvious, a Web product development lab now on hiatus. In 2007, I sold Odeo and spun off Twitter into a separate company.

I appointed Jack Dorsey, who was engineer at Odeo, as C.E.O. of Twitter. In October 2008 it became apparent that Twitter required a day-to-day approach from a single leader. I took over as C.E.O., and Jack became chairman and assumed a more strategic position. He had worked in the courier and dispatch field, which is where he got the idea for Twitter — a social network for sending short messages to friends over cellphones and the Internet.

When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, “In due time.” They forget that we’re only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I’ve been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn’t worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago.

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We’re building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge — that’s why she’s in charge.

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The Boss – For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents

An experimental system automatically figures out where to send e-mail.

Credit: Technology Review

A prototype e-mail system being tested at Stanford University later this year will radically change how users specify where their messages are supposed to be delivered. Called SEAmail, for “semantic e-mail addressing,” the system allows users to direct a message to people who fulfill certain criteria without necessarily knowing recipients’ e-mail addresses, or even their names.

E-mail addresses are an artificial way of directing messages to the right people, says Michael Genesereth, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford who works on SEAmail. “You want to send messages to people or roles, not to strings of characters,” he says. Semantic technologies are aimed at making just this sort of thing possible. The idea is to create programs that understand context, so that users can interact with the software more naturally. Technical details, such as the need to specify an e-mail address, get hidden inside the system, so that everyday users no longer have to pay attention to them.

Genesereth says that users were wildly positive about a previous prototype built by his group and used among semantic researchers. For example, people wanting to send a message to “Michael Genesereth” could simply type his name as a recipient, and his most recent e-mail address would automatically be selected. A user could also send a message to a group such as “all professors who graduated from Harvard University since 1960.” SEAmail can handle both of these examples, Genesereth explains, without requiring the user to spend time doing research or keeping an address book up to date.

In SEAmail, a user selects recipients for a message in much the way that she would set up a search query. The parameters can be as simple as a person’s name, or as complex as sets of logical requirements. But the system is limited by how much information it has about potential recipients. “To realize the full potential, we need to have rich data about the people who are sending messages to each other, their interests, and so forth,” Genesereth says. Within an organization, he says, there’s usually a lot of available data. The technical challenge is setting up an integrated version of the data that SEAmail can access easily. The data needed to fulfill the request for professors who graduated from Harvard, for example, would probably come from several databases, Genesereth says. His team is currently researching ways to pull together existing databases without affecting how they’re already being used.

But getting good data for SEAmail becomes a much harder problem on the broader Internet than it is within an organization, Genesereth says. Although there are semantic standards that can allow systems to extract information about people from Web pages, he worries that outdated information could degrade the quality of the system.

Automatically addressing mail: SEAmail, a semantic e-mail addressing system, lets users send messages without necessarily knowing recipients’ e-mail addresses or even names. An interface, shown above, is used to define the characteristics of intended recipients, and the system takes care of the rest. Credit: Michael Genesereth/Stanford Logic Group

“This technology has clear benefits, but it’s also ripe for misuse,” says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington. “The technical issues are solvable. The tricky things are the social issues. How do we create a workable system, given the vagaries of human nature?” In particular, Etzioni worries that, if the tool were broadly available, some people would receive overwhelming amounts of mail, without a good way to limit it. While semantic tools could be used to create filters for e-mails coming in, he says that there’s no clear way to control the flow of incoming mail without also losing out on some of the serendipitous messages that make such a system useful.

Assuming that worries about spam could be properly resolved, semantic e-mail addressing might be interesting in combination with other semantic approaches, says Luke McDowell, an assistant professor of computer science at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, MD. McDowell worked on a system that extracted information from the body of e-mails to simplify the process of planning parties and agreeing on meeting times. In general, he says, semantic tools could help people manage their e-mails better by using contextual knowledge to automate tasks.

SEAmail will be used at Stanford later this year as part of a larger “digital department” project that aims to introduce several semantic technologies, Genesereth says. The computer-science department will use the system first, but the plan is for the technology to spread through the university until everyone has the option of using SEAmail. He sees the technology as having a lot of potential for internal use by large businesses, for which its benefits far outweigh the potential for abuse. However, with more refinement, he says, it could eventually become a tool for the broader Internet too.

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Semantic E-Mail Delivery

November 13, 2008 Dell has just introduced an integrated disk-to-disk (D2D) based backup and recovery solution called the Dell PowerVault DL2000 that helps customers simplify data protection processes while slashing backup times by up to 52 percent and restore times by up to 77 percent compared to tape. An integrated hardware and software platform that can be set up in less than 30 minutes, the DL2000 automates and simplifies the setup and management of disk-to-disk backup allowing customers to optimize resources through a tiered storage strategy. The solution comes with a choice of CommVault or Symantec Backup Exec software pre-installed and verified. The turnkey solution is designed to provide automated storage setup and centralized management to ease all aspects of backup, recovery and de-duplication. Advanced add-on features, such as archive and replication capabilities, can be integrated seamlessly to scale and increase functionality as business demands dictate.

Program Agenda

All times are in Eastern Standard Time. 11:00am – Doors Open 11:05am – 11:50am – Dell/CommVault Presentation

11:50am – 12:00pm – Live Q&A Chat 12:00pm – 12:45pm – Dell/Symantec Presentation

12:45pm – 12:55pm – Live Q&A Chat 1:00pm – Doors Close THEN my eye caught this :

PC Requirements:

To interact with the online show requires a Windows PC with Internet Explorer 6.0 minimum or Firefox 1.5 or higher. Mac with Firefox 1.5 or higher is also supported. Access to the internet using high speed access (Cable, DSL, Network) is highly recommended for the overall show and is required for all Education Sessions and Presentations. Pop-up blockers must also be disabled. On entering the show, a system check is run which will identify PC requirements that need to be addressed to interact with the online show. more here Ed Note : I have long been an advocate of saving, time, space, cost and increasing convenience via straight to PC / Desktop information ( data, content ) and advertisement delivery, its heartening to see DELL go for it in such a big way ( the chances of a mess up on a product demo are always cause for sleepless nights to say the very least ) , I hope that the Virtual Trade Show is a hit and companies start to buy into the idea that you can have a BETTER and MORE PRODUCTIVE TradeShow this way You can Sign Up for the Virtual Trade Show here.

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Dell Simplifies Disk-Based Backup and Recovery with an Integrated Data Protection Solution

LOS ANGELES, CA, November 14, 2006 – The University of Tennessee Boling Center for Developmental Disabilities currently uses MegaMeeting’s browser based video and web conferencing software to provide training to distance learning participants who would otherwise not be able to travel and attend these meetings.

The Boling Center for Developmental Disabilities (BCDD) is an interdisciplinary program that supports children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families through training, service, applied research, information dissemination, planning, and policy development.

In addition to helping their members virtually attend conferences that they normally would not be able to make, BCDD also utilizes MegaMeeting’s web and video conferencing for its Administration and Board of Directors, as well as to conduct seminars, company meetings, training of both clients and employees, for quality assurance and to diagnose issues.

According to Elizabeth Bishop, BCDD’s Community Education Director, “MegaMeeting has allowed my staff to operate more freely with distance technology and create a competitive edge for our program to other programs nationally.” Bishop has found MegaMeeting software to be an excellent media to conduct trainings.

Prior to implementing the MegaMeeting software Bishop explained that they used a very antiquated, donated video conferencing system that was very expensive to maintain and operate. There was also an issue of whether the equipment would work and if the connections were still active prior to each use. MegaMeeting has removed the unpredictability and has saved them time and money, increased their productivity and decreased the aggravation.

The specific features of MegaMeeting that BCDD implements most often are the video conferencing capabilities that allow meeting attendees to see each other, the ability to share a PowerPoint presentation via the Internet, and screen sharing capabilities.

Some of the main reasons BCDD chose MegaMeeting over other web and video conferencing systems include the interactive ability of the software, the ease of use and the ability to adjust during conference events. BCDD also appreciates the amount of control they maintain in conducting their events and the ease of setting up meetings and extending invitations to their participants

MegaMeeting.com Enables the Disabled to Participate in University of Tennessee Web & Video Conferencing