Is it us, or is the dream of a full Windows experience on low-power ARM tablets getting steadily eroded? We’ve long known that these slates would sacrifice backwards compatibility with legacy software, but now it seems the familiar desktop mode could be getting the chop too. Paul Thurrott from SuperSite for Windows says he has good insider information that this mode will be limited to x86 devices, which would rule out using the traditional keyboard-and-mouse UI on an ARM tablet and force users to stick with the Metro UI at all times. By the sound of it, though, the matter is still being argued over within Microsoft and it’s unclear whether the decision will apply to ARM-based notebooks too. All Thurrott could be sure of is that “the people who don’t want there to be a desktop mode [in ARM tablets] have apparently won the day.” Man, and just when we thought everyone was starting to get along so nicely.

Update: Paul Thurrott has just provided a bit of an update that he heard from a different source that, yes indeed, Windows 8 will include a desktop mode, even when running on ARM. Paul indicates he trusts these two sources equally, leaving us somewhat stuck in the middle.

Enjoy !

VC investment in UK and Irish high-tech companies this year is rapidly outstripping last year’s investment volume, according to the technology-focussed investment group, Ascendant.

In the first half of 2011, £455m has been invested compared to £620m in the first half of 2010.

“In Q2 2011, £234m (up from £190m in Q2 2010) was invested in 48 UK/Irish companies (47) by 70 investors (84),” says Stuart McKnight, managing director of Ascendant, “when added to our figures for Q1 that makes £455m invested in 91 companies in the first half of 2011. It is worth noting that in the whole of 2010, just £620m was invested in 213 companies so while we are seeing good progress in terms of funds committed, the market is a bit behind in the volume of companies receiving money.”

There were three notable trends in Q2. Perhaps the biggest was the bounce back of Cleantech deals. In Q1, two Cleantech companies raised a total of £3m. In Q2, 10 Cleantech companies raised £70m.

“We believe that there was no single factor driving this,” says McKnight, “the reasons we see are a small number of new investors, greater participation by corporate/strategic investors, and a greater number of late stage deals – more than 50% were Series C or later. Whilst we are encouraged, we would still be very cautious about concluding that all is well in the green tech sector as we are aware of a number of investors who will no longer look at new Cleantech deals, and the extended timetables that Cleantech companies are enduring to close their rounds – much longer than other tech companies.”

A second trend was the continuing high level of funds being committed to small numbers of companies. A good measure of this concentration is the percentage of funds invested in each quarter that are secured by the top 10 deals. In Q1 this peaked at 82%. Whilst it dropped in Q2 to 65%, this is still relatively high compared to norms of around 50%.

So it looks as though many investors have decided to get behind (or place big bets on) what they perceive to be an elite group of companies. This has happened before – about 11 years ago. The main difference now is that the big money is going to established businesses in late stage deals. So lessons have been learned.

The third trend was a gradual withdrawal of investors from the market. In Q1 2008, over 100 investors participated in UK/Irish VC deals. In Q2, 2011 that number was just 70. Apart from a significant drop in early 2009 due the recession, there has been a clear and consistent decrease during this period.

“Given that we know that there have been a number of new entrants – particularly in the corporate sector – this implies that there has been shrinkage in the main body of technology investors,” adds McKnight, “we are doing some deeper research on this and will publish this later this year.”

Even security alarm systems, new cell phones, business answering services, and other essential home and business based services are available for promotion through american communications networks services. It’s not every single day that you can find somewhere to own a business for under $500.00 that lets you be on the edge of technological innovations and that is one of the huge benefits and great things about a company like this. Imagine being able to promote the first iPad and tablet and make money off of it truly is an amazing idea.

“When we commented on the prospects for the year at the end of Q1, we suggested that: ‘If the normal pattern of investment holds then we should expect a modest uplift from the 2010 probably getting close to £750m for the whole of 2011’,” continues McKnight, “clearly Q2 has been much better than many of us expected – particularly in Cleantech – and we are minded to push up our “guestimate” for the year to between £800m-£850m. As always, there are a number of significant dynamics that could push this number in either direction.”

Trends highlighted by Ascendant are:

In Q2 2011, £234m was invested in 48 deals by 70 investors.

In the first half of 2011, £455m was invested in 91 companies

In Q2, the busiest investors were Index, DFJ Esprit, Eden and Finance Wales

57% of deals were syndicated – i.e. involved more than one investor

Private investors participated in 22% of VC deals, US investors in 2%, Euro investors in 10% and Corporate Investors in 22%

The biggest deals were: Enecsys (£25m), Oxford Nanopore (£25m), Shazam (£20m), Media Ingenuity (£18m), Wind Energy Direct (£18m), EVO Electric, Nujira (£10m), Worldstores (£10m), eWise (£9m) and Neul (£8m)

There were three primary areas of investment focus – Cleantech (£70m), Internet/Wireless Services (£60m), and Software (£45m).

There were 10 Cleantech deals in Q2 with the largest being: Enecsys (£25m), Wind Energy Direct (£18m), Evo-Electric (ND), Intelligent Energy (£7m) and Acal Energy (£5.1m).

14 Internet/Wireless Services companies received investment in Q2. The big deals were: Media Ingenuity (£18m), Worldstores (£10m), eWise (£9m), Borro (£8m) and StylistPick (£5m).

14 Software companies received VC backing. Shazam (£20m), Metaforic (£5m), Site Intelligence (£4m), Cognitive Match (£3.5m) and Brightpearl (£3m) were the largest.

The only semi/opto company to receive venture capital in this quarter was SmartKem.

18 London based companies raised £94m representing 37% of volume and 40% of the value of all UK/Irish Deals

All other regions managed to finance between 3 and 5 companies each.

Investment in companies from Scotland and the SW was particularly low with these regions only managing to raise £7m and £4m respectively.

Source: electronicsweekly.com

Personal printers are a fantastic commodity. Personal printers have allowed for the practical liberation of information and, together with the many functionalities of internet have turned bits of electricity into knowledge, art and entertainment at our fingertips. Inexpensive printing for business have made much easier to dispense graphic marketing, forward company-wide memos and even send complimentary football tickets to someone that lives on the other side of the world. While personal printers do seem to come from the magical world of fairy tales the truth cuts as a double edged sword: we are using a mighty huge amount of paper and ink with our newly found power to put everything down on an A4 sheet.

 State of the art gadgets are all the rage, especially in the mobile phone arena. Today you can do so much with your small mobile device, send emails, measure your jogging statistics and even gamble at a mobile casino!

Enjoy!

As the Linux Foundation tells it, the Linux-related job market is today 80 percent larger than it was five years ago. Whereas other industries have had to shed workers in the current recession, the Foundation is hopeful penny-pinching measures might actually encourage businesses to transition to Linux-based software and thereby further stimulate employment opportunities within the sector. We’re not told exactly what “Linux-related” means in this context, but the newly set up Linux.com Job Board indicates that the vast majority of new openings are for system admins. That’s right, the corporate world is crying out for more geeks — won’t you answer the call?

[Thanks to Overlord59 for the Tux images]

We just got an interesting news tip pointing to the HTC Twitter account from Russia. The tweet mentions that the only HTC device currently on the market to receive a Windows Mobile 7 upgrade will be the HD2. And we’ve suspected this for a while, considering that the HD2 meets Microsoft’s hardware requirements for Windows Mobile 7. Here’s what they said:

for Diamond 2 firmware is not planned. Of the existing communicators on the market, only the HD2 firmware to get WM7.

Hopefully what we see here is a true (and considering that this was said by an official HTC rep, it should be), because the HD2 is going to turn out to be one of the most popular smartphones of all time. If it’s getting an upgrade to 7, this will make a lot of people happy.

Thanks for the tip, av8612.

Source:  Prevx

Much to Ballmer’s chagrin, Windows Mobile 7 is still a rather nebulous thing, but it’s getting a wee bit clearer thanks to some bits and bytes extracted from the LinkedIn profiles of current and former Microsofties and Motorolites, the latter group indicating the company that brought you the Droid is also rather committed to Microsoft’s theoretical new hotness.

Various experience line-items reveal that the OS will support Silverlight (natch), will have a new navigation app, and will include much better game support along with some sort of Zune integration — finally. Now, any guesses on how many people will lose their jobs for being so open about what those positions entail?

Google will let its Gears offline utility essentially languish as it attempts to move the Web forward into HTML 5.0, Google executives said Monday.

According to Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google, Gears’ time has come and gone. The technology will be supported for compatibility’s sake, but not improved upon.

“Yes, we are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears],” Upson said in an interview. “We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don’t want to break anything out there.”

Google Gears was originally launched in 2007 as a tool for allowing Web-based Google applications to work offline, like rivals Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. But in May of 2008, Google used its I/O Conference to make a push for HTML 5.0 and capabilities that include the ability to cache apps and databases, and apply canvas, video, and geolocation tags. A “web worker” tag also allows for the background processing of Javascript, a tool to avoid, in one executive’s words, “hosing” a Web browser by monopolizing its CPU cycles.

HTML 5.0, in Google’s view, is the future. One indication of that direction has been the inclusion of the “My Location” feature in Google Maps, which attempts to use geolocation to identify the user’s position.

“We’re very focused on moving HTML 5 forward, and that’s where we’re putting all of our energy,” Upson said. “When we started the Gears project, three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago now, we did it because we couldn’t get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications. And so, so we said, okay, we’ll build a plugin that could do it. And lo and behold, once we shipped Gears, suddenly the browser vendors got very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications.

“And so, I think Gears has accomplished its mission very well, in getting these capabilities into HTML 5,” Upson added. “In fact, the team that designed Gears was also instrumental in designing the HTML 5 versions of those APIs. You can almost think of what’s in HTML 5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2, and that’s how we view it.”

Put another way, the goal of HTML 5.0 is to avoid “plug-in prison,” the requirement to call a variety of plug-ins to make various capabilities actually work, according to Jay Sullivan, a Mozilla Foundation vice president, who spoke at Google I/O last year. Opera Mobile added Gears capability last year as well, following Google’s own mobile Gears implementation in March 2008.

Upson, who runs both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS engineering teams, said he’s readying the Mac version of Chrome for a release by the end of the year, as originally planned. He did not directly address reports that said Gears would be left out of the Mac version of the Chrome browser, as Apple’s Mac OS X reportedly does not support it. But he confirmed that that was the direction that Chrome would take.

“We want to move all applications to just use standards based HTML 5 APIs, and not focus on Gears going forward,” Upson added. “And now that we’re a browser vendor, we can help move HTML 5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome.”

Windows 7 isn’t just getting good reviews, it’s also selling well, CEO Steve Ballmer told shareholders Thursday.

Delivering opening remarks at Microsoft’s shareholder meeting, Ballmer said that Windows 7 was off to a “fantastic start.”

“We’ve already sold twice as many units as any OS in a comparable time frame,” Ballmer said. “Windows 7 is simply the best PC operating system that we or anyone else has ever built.” 

By last week, Windows 7 accounted for 4 percent of Web-accessing devices, according to Net Applications; it took Vista more than seven months to reach that level.

Addressing the overall economy, Ballmer reiterated that things seem to have stabilized.

“The economy has, at least for now, leveled off,” he said.

The meeting is still going on and has just entered the question-and-answer session and I’ll update this post if anything interesting comes up. So far, though, it’s been mostly about local and legislative matters, rather than technological issues.

Microsoft vs. Apple
There was one fun one from a shareholder who noted that young people tend to gravitate toward Macs and that Apple seems to be outmarketing Microsoft.

“You’ve got a real bad image out there,” the shareholder said. “You sure don’t have that younger generation.”

Ballmer acknowledged that there are “certainly always opportunities for improvement.”

“We all watch television,” he said.

That said, Ballmer noted that “96 times out of 100, worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows.”

He added that even in the toughest market–the high end of the U.S. consumer market–Windows is chosen 83 times out of 100.

“That doesn’t let us rest on our laurels,” Ballmer said. “Apple has picked up a couple tenths of a percent of market share.”

But those couple tenths matter, he agreed. He said the downturn in the economy has actually bolstered Windows’ competitive position. “People understand that Macintoshes are quite a bit more expensive.”

Another questioner asked why Microsoft can’t better compete against Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones.

“Certainly our objective is to have the leading position,” Ballmer said. “I think we have a lot of opportunity to improve…Undoubtedly we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

He did say that Microsoft has put a lot of smart people on the task.

“We’ve got our heads down to do our best,” Ballmer said.

Source: CNET

Toshiba America Information Systems introduced entry-level unified messaging server hardware for small to medium-sized businesses.

Strata Messaging is compatible with TAIS’ Strata CIX family of Internet-based business communications systems. The new product, which is available through the company’s dealers nationwide, is marketed as offering unified messaging to SMBs at a “very affordable price.”

“In the past, small to medium businesses had to purchase expensive equipment for unified messaging features,” Ron Hunsaker, senior product manager for TAIS’ telecommunications systems division, said in a statement.

Strata Messaging is sized and priced for TAIS’ smaller voice over IP systems, the Strata CIX40 and CIX100. The new product supports two to eight ports of voice mail, up to 400 mailboxes and has 300 hours of storage. The base system package offers two voice mail ports and 10 seats of unified messaging.

Strata Messaging, introduced Tuesday, is deployed on an external Linux-based appliance that connects to the Strata CIX through IP channels.

A major advantage of unified messaging is having one repository for e-mail, fax, voice mail, instant messaging and even video conferencing. The technology is particularly useful to companies that depend on staying connected, since a unified messaging system marries asynchronous applications such as store-and-forward e-mail with real-time applications that incorporate unified communications.

Today, implementation of unified communications platforms have been complicated by the tug of war between the types of devices employees want to use and the pragmatic concerns over security in running a business. With the iPhone, Macintosh computers, Linux PCs and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter infiltrating the workforce, most enterprises are looking for ways to support the diversity of systems and devices.

In approaching the problem, Bruce Morse, IBM’s VP of unified communications and collaboration, recently advised attendees of VoiceCon 2009 in San Francisco to look for solutions that incorporate collaborative technologies as an important part of business communications.