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Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang believes that the revolution in mobile computing electronics, driven by demand for smartphones and tablets, will eventually disrupt both the PC and server markets as well.

By engineering chips for mobile computing, graphics chip maker Nvidia is focusing on energy efficient computing so that mobile devices can be both powerful and have long battery lives. That kind of computing is exactly the kind that will be necessary in the PCs and servers of the future, Huang said.

“We expect if we focus on mobile, it will come back and disrupt the PC industry and come back and disrupt servers,” said Huang, speaking at the company’s analyst meeting today in Santa Clara, Calif.

Huang articulated many of these ideas during our recent Q&A with him. But he elaborated on them at the analyst meeting. The mobile computing shift is why Nvidia has invested so heavily in its Tegra mobile computing chips in the past five years and paid particular attention to parallel computing, where many small cores — or brains — can operate much more power efficiently than a single big core. As an analogy, Huang said that a multiple-cylinder car engine running at a reasonably fast RPM (revolutions per minute) is much more efficient than a single-cylinder engine running extremely fast.

Over the next four to five years, Tegra will go from eight cores now to more than 100 in a single chip, Huang said. That gives a good clue as to how Nvidia is approaching the design of Project Denver, the code-name for a high-performance ARM microprocessor that the company revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Project Denver is expected to be able to run Windows, which Microsoft is adapting to run on ARM chips in addition to the x86 Intel-compatible chips that they have run on in the past. Microsoft demoed a future version of Windows running on Nvidia Tegra processors at CES.

Project Denver is clearly the path that Nvidia will pursue as it uses mobile chips to disrupt the PC chip market.

“That’s a wonderful opportunity for us,” Huang said. “You will have a PC that is thin and light, has a long battery life, and has the productivity capability of Windows.”

Huang said servers will be disrupted because of rising energy costs. “If your energy bill is $10 million a year,” Huang said. “Then you would rather move from 20,000 server cores to more than 20 million if it means it will increase performance and reduce your energy bill at the same time.”

By moving into the mobile market, Huang said that Tegra boosted Nvidia’s total available market by six times. Nokia shifting from Symbian to Windows software will be a “fabulous opportunity” for Nvidia, Huang said. He noted that upcoming four-core Kal El chip, which now has working prototypes, has five times the performance of the previous-generation Tegra chips.

Huang said that the software makers are moving to smartphones and tablets because that is where the opportunity for bigger sales is. Those software makers are moving very quickly to the best operating systems and hardware, because the shift toward mobile computing is happening faster.

It took PCs about 15 years to fully disrupt the minicomputer and mainframe business. But mobile computing is changing the world faster and will likely disrupt the PC and server markets in a much shorter time, Huang said.

“The mobile computing revolution is a seismic shift,” he said.

Asked how Nvidia can compete with Intel and Qualcomm in manufacturing technology, Huang said Nvidia relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a contract chip manufacturer known as a foundry, for its manufacturing firepower.

Huang said Nvidia is working with almost every single computer maker now to get their first-generation tablets to market. Huang said that the company will launch new Tegra chips on a regular cadence, much like it did in the early days of the PC revolution, when new chips came out every six months or every year. “We have to keep that rhythm,” he said.

One analyst noted that the Motorola Xoom, an Android tablet that has a Tegra 2 chip from Nvidia, costs $800 while the Apple iPad 2 will cost less ($499 to $829). But Huang said the Xoom is not the only competitor to the iPad 2 and that users should be careful to compare the technical specifications of the tablets before rushing to judgment that one machine is more cost-effective than another.

Tags: Kal-El, Project Denver, Tegra

Companies: Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, TSMC

People: Jen Hsun Huang

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Social media tracker startup Tynt has launched a new suite of publisher’s tools to help its clients keep a close eye on what their key audience is following.

San Francisco-based Tynt works with online publishers and websites to track and analyze data about the sharing activity of their users.

It currently claims 600,000 online publishers and websites, which track the sharing activity of a combined 1 billion unique users.

The four new tools, dubbed Tynt Keywords,Tynt Social, Tynt Content and Tynt Publisher API, were created to help publishers find where their content is most popular on social networking communities.

They will also be able to track what words are driving traffic to and from their site.

Tynt Keywords tell publishers what searches and keywords are bringing readers to the site and, perhaps more importantly, what searches and keywords are causing users to leave.

Tynt Social allows publishers to view where their links and content go when they’re shared, helping them understand what specific content is gaining the most traction.

Tynt Content is designed for writers and editors specifically and provides information about the content and keywords that users are most likely to respond to positively.

The Tynt Publisher API gives publishers access to the data on their dashboard in whatever format they choose. Publishers can now use one dashboard to tell Tynt that they want their data through an API and reciting their unique publisher code.

The company has been busily expanding its product offerings and reach over the last six months.

It recently unveiled its new Content Discovery feature, where visitors can see top stories, popular search terms and images of in the sections of celebrity, how-to, New York, sports, technology and travel.

It also simultaneously announced its new Geo-location service, which shows the specific areas, images, search terms and stories that people in New York are most closely following.

Tynt raised $8 million in private equity from 11 Silicon Valley investors led by Panorama Venture Capital in April.

Tags: analysis, Social Media, tracking

Companies: panorama venture capital, tynt

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Kony Solutions, the application tool for creating mobile apps that can run on any mobile system, today announced it secured a first round of funding for $19.1 million from Insight Venture Partners. An initial $13.4 million tranche of the funding will be used to expand research and development as well as global expansion of sales and marketing.

The company dubs its service as “write once, run everywhere” which allows users to create a single source code to run on multiple channels, including mobile, SMS, web and desktop as well as any device. Kony Solutions also allows for changes to the code, which would then be pushed to all channels and devices.

Competitor Netbiscuits also announced it had secured funding today, according to TechCrunch. While an exact number wasn’t given, the company says it has raised several million euros from T-Venture and Creathor Venture.

The San Mateo, California-based company, founded in 2007, claims to have more than 400 employees and targets fortune 500 companies, including half of the U.S. airline industry.

Tags: app development, apps

Companies: Kony Solutions

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Citigroup’s chip analyst Glen Yeung this morning initiated coverage of flash memory chip maker Spansion (CODE), which emerged from bankruptcy back in May. He places a Hold rating on the stock and a $23.50 price target.
The company is attracting renewed interest in the NOR flash chip market, writes Yeung, and [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Folks who had a hard time believing that Twitter was worth $1 billion year ago are going to have an even harder time swallowing the company’s new valuation.

AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher reports that Twitter just raised a $200 million round that valued the company at $3.7 billion.

In a company blog post, CEO Dick Costolo confirmed that the company has raised a new round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors. (Kleiner partner John Doerr recently said that his firm was wrong to turn Twitter down in its early days). And Twitter has two new board members — Mike McCue, former CEO of Microsoft-acquired TellMe and currently CEO of Flipboard, and David Rosenblatt, former CEO of Google-acquired DoubleClick. (The post doesn’t mention funding amount or valuation.)

Earlier speculation has placed Twitter’s new valuation at $3 billion, which led VentureBeat’s executive editor Owen Thomas to ask (since it’s all speculative math), “Why not $10 billion?”

Costolo titled his post “Meaningful Growth”, and he starts off with a list of numbers showing Twitter’s growth for 2010: 25 billion tweets, 100 million new registered accounts, and growth from 130 to more than 350 employees.

What’s missing is any mention of revenue. It has only been a few months since Costolo declared that Twitter has “cracked the code” on advertising, and co-founder Ev Williams said more recently that the company is still exploring business models.

Earlier today, the company declared, “It’s Business Time” and unveiled an upgraded website at business.twitter.com, including pages highlighting its advertising products (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts). But even then, each product is described as “in beta with a small selection of advertisers.” If you want, you can fill out a form — not to place ads, but so Twitter can “notify me” when the company is finally ready to accept your money.

Tags: advertising, Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets, valuations

Companies: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Twitter

People: Dick Costolo

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Live video streaming site Justin.tv today announced an update that includes what it has dubbed “Frame Reinsertion,” which will allow users to upload the full resolution version of a video in the background, even as the video is being broadcast live.

Justin.tv lets users stream content live to the internet, whether it is from their webcams, mobile phones or wired in from a TV. Its competitors include Ustream.TV, blogTV and Flixwagon.

It is currently available on iPhone and Android smartphones. It has 3.6 million total mobile application installs, with 20 percent of JTV users using mobile apps and 27,000 hours of mobile video since their launch of mobile apps in March.

Justin.tv says its new update means that the archive version is only constrained by the capabilities of the device, so that no matter what the network conditions, the archive version of the video will be very high quality.

Live streaming has become a particularly popular form of media consumption, with live stream usage jumping 650 percent this year when compared to 2009.

The company has made a major push into a the mobile space via a consumer-driven “YouTube model” for live streaming over the last eight months or so, a decision which led to the departure of former chief business officer David Aufhauser in October of this year.

The broadcasting quality of live video via mobile device has always been constrained by the network conditions during broadcast, with broadcasters automatically adjusting for any given network conditions during broadcast. That means that when broadcast over 3G or WiFi, the quality can be very good, but when broadcast over slower networks like slower networks like AT&T’s EDGE, users can often be frustrated by the speed and quality of their downloads.

But the San Francisco-based startup says it has now crossed that gap in quality — after it realized that 90 percent or more of their video views were post-live, archive views, not live viewing.

That was the key they said they needed to make it easier for them to reconfigure their app to stream content more smoothly and at a much higher quality than it had before.

“Quality has always been a major stumbling block for mobile live video, and something that is holding the technology back from broader adoption,” Matthew DiPietro, vice president of marketing and communications told VentureBeat. “But now we really feel like we’ve cracked the code on this.”

Tags: Android, apps, iPhone, smartphones, Social Media

Companies: AT&T, BlogTV, Flixwagon, Justin Tv, Ustream.tv, YouTube

People: David Aufhauser, Matthew DiPietro

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Caris & Co. analyst Sandeep Aggarwal this morning joins the chorus of analysts defending Google’s (GOOG) potential acquisition of Groupon, the flash-mob style electronic coupon/deals provider.
Aggarwal, who has a Buy rating on Google shares, writes that no one so far has “cracked the code” for the $100 billion U.S. local [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

IBM’s smartcamp global entrepreneur competition culminated in Dublin today with 9 startups from all around the world competing for the title of the “world’s smartest startup”. From 660 original applicants the final winner was Streetline, which helps cities track parking violations and drivers to find parking spots.

Ultra-low power sensors are installed in parking spots, which can detect if the space is occupied. Sensors can also be installed in the parking meter to verify whether the meter had been fed and therefore detect violations.

According to Streetline, 30 percent of traffic in major cities consists of people driving around looking for parking, making it a major congestion and environmental problem. Parking fines are also a significant source of revenue for cities and currently many violations do not result in fines. Streetline systems are already deployed in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. New York and Washington are about to be added. Streetline charges the city per space, per month in a service model. The company also just did its first deal with a private parking garage.

In addition to detecting parking violations, Streetline will release a smartphone application in early December to direct users to the closest parking pots. Once that is in place, a city could even start doing dynamic pricing of parking spots  in order to direct drivers to particular parking areas. CEO Zia Yusuf told me that there are three major ways to get their product to consumers rather than just cities: the smartphone application, digital signs which direct people to parking (“3 spots if you turn left”) and finally partnerships with car navigation systems.

Ideally, Yusuf would like to see cities introduce integrated parking systems which include monitoring like that supplied by Streetline, mobile payment for parking, alerts when parking time is running out and mobile ticketing. He suggests that a city could even send a ticket to your mobile phone with an offer that if you pay instantly, you get a discount on the fine. Streetline also has ambitions to extend its services into traffic monitoring and beyond.

A couple of other startups received special mentions from the judges. Treemetrics is a local Irish company which uses 3D laser scanning to measure the height, straightness, taper and volume of trees in a forest. This allows foresters to reduce measurement costs and schedule logging to maximise yield.

Sproxil tackles the huge problem of drug counterfeiting in developing countries using a simple scratch-off code attached to the packaging which works in a similar way to pre-paid mobile billing. The user exposes the code and sends it by text message to a verification number which checks its validity.

For IBM, the smartcamp competition isn’t just a marketing exercise. 35 percent of IBM’s $100+ billion in revenue is driven by partners including startups. Irish social security software company Cúram Software, for example, has alone driven 1 billion EU in sales for IBM over the course of their partnership.

The common theme among startups in the finals was IBM’s smarter world mantra of instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence; basically lots of sensors and analysis of the data they produce. Most of the competing startups had deep domain knowledge in areas like healthcare, forestry, water treatment and seismic measurement as well as technical expertise. This fits well into IBM’s focus on vertical markets.

The smartcamp competition was the brainchild of Martin Kelly, the European partner of IBM’s Venture Capital group and the first, smaller-scale competition was staged in Ireland last year. IBM’s Venture Capital group operates an unusual model in that it does not manage its own venture fund (like Intel and Google) but works with VCs to identify startups of interest.

The startups get access to IBM’s market intelligence, customers and local know-how as well as the credibility a young company sometimes needs to deal with large enterprise customers. IBM gets an early look at interesting companies which could become partners or eventually acquisitions without actually investing its own cash. IBM has done 18 acquisitions in the last year alone. The company has set aside $20 billion for acquisitions up to 2015.

Front photo by John Vachon, via Touching Harms the Art

Tags: data, parking, sensors, smartcamp

Companies: IBM, Sproxil, streetline, treemetrics

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

LB says we’ll just have to wait and see!

Speaking to investors at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Banking and Financial Services Conference…Blankfein said future guidelines over such [compensation are "still an evolving picture," adding that the firm has averaged a compensation expense that was under 50% of its net revenue.

Also an evolving picture: whether Gary Cohn will distribute bonuses by driving a dump truck onto the middle of the trading floor or go with the gun they use to shoot tee-shirts out of at sporting events.

Goldman Sachs CEO: Co. Will Return Capital To Shareholders 'Where Appropriate' [Dow Jones]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker