August 19, 2010 Off

Intel in $7.68bn McAfee takeover

By David
Grazed from BBC.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Intel will pay $7.68bn (£5bn) in cash.

Under the terms of the deal, Intel said it would pay $48 per share in cash for McAfee, almost 60% higher than its closing price on Wednesday.

Through buying McAfee, a leading security technology firm, Intel intends to build security features into its microprocessors which go into products such as laptops and phones.

The two companies said they had been working together for 18 months and that, should the takeover pass regulatory and shareholder approval, the first new products would be revealed early next year.

August 18, 2010 Off

Startup Makes Probability-Based Chips for Big Data Apps

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Om Malik.

Lyric Semiconductor, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that was spun out of MIT in 2006, today announced a revolutionary new approach to processing data called probability processing. It wants to make chips that are fit for a world drowning in information and dealing with data deluge.

The company was started by Dr. Ben Vigoda, a chip industry veteran, and MIT Scientist and chip industry veteran David Reynolds. It’s backed by Analog Devices CEO and lead partner of Stata Ventures, Ray Stata, with more than $20 million in funding from DARPA. It’s coming out of stealth today.

August 17, 2010 Off

Is SaaS/Cloud Adoption Too Easy?

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Loraine Lawson.

A recent customer survey by TrackVia, a cloud-based application development platform, found it’s not cost savings that attract non-technical users to their solution. Fifty percent cited functionality and 30 percent cited ease-of-use, making these the two most popular reasons for moving development to the cloud.