The story behind iUnlock

A hack story

Google moves into online phone service.

Google's acquisiton of GrandCentral gives a hint on its vision. Combining GoogleTalk with an online phone service, will create a serious competitor to Skype and another mean to draw more people to Google sites.

What is amazing in this transaction is the fact that the founders of GrandCentral are Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, the fromer CEO and VP of BD (business development) of DialPad, a company acquired by Yahoo in June 2005. An oversight of Yahoo BD team who let these guys go!!

Drooling to Get an iPhone :)

Can't wait for this toy :)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With free wireless Internet, a hot dog stand and a few friends, Daniel Eran Dilger calculates he could survive for days outside a store in a dogged attempt to grab the latest must-have consumer gadget.

Dilger, a 33-year-old technology consultant from San Francisco, will camp outside an Apple store before the June 29 release of the iPhone, a cell phone with a touchscreen, music and video player and Internet browser with email capability.

"I might get my friends to camp with me," he said.

Dilger is typical of the sort of person likely to line up for the iPhone, according to Kaan Yigit, study director at the Solutions Research Group, a consumer research organization based in Toronto.

The typical iPhone buyer is a young man with a college degree and a higher than average annual household income, according to the group's online survey of buyers.

The iPhone, to cost between $500 and $600, will be available online and in Apple and AT&T stores.[...]

Earlier this week, sellers offering the phone -- when it became available -- were getting bids as high as $830 on online auctioneer eBay, according to media reports.

By Friday, the postings had been removed and eBay spokesperson Catherine England confirmed the company was no longer allowing pre-sales of the iPhone because of the extraordinarily high demand expected.[...]

Clearly, the iPhone is hot, but why?

Two reasons, said Jen O'Connell, author of "The Cell Phone Decoder Ring," a book that helps readers pick a cell phone.

First, O'Connell recognizes the power of the publicity machine at Apple, famous these days for its Mac notebook computers and iPod music players.

"They give just enough information for people to freak out over it," said O'Connell, who credits the company as having enough reach to touch her grandmother in Montana.

Though
Steve Jobs, Apple's iconic co-founder and chief executive, introduced the phone in January, the company did not announce the phone's release date until it began airing television commercials last Sunday.

The ads can also be seen on the company's Web site (www.apple.com/iphone) and on YouTube, which already has spoofs of the commercials posted.

But O'Connell also believes the hype around the iPhone is because of its uniqueness.

"This is nothing like anyone else has manufactured before," she said. "It looks cool and the way you interact with it is cool. I'm drooling at the mouth to get one."

http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/

A Mechanic's Dream !!! F430.

iPhone on target for end of June launch ;-)

BOSTON (Reuters) - The iPhone, Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) first mobile handset, is on schedule to hit the U.S. market at the end of June, a senior executive with AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - news) said on Wednesday.


AT&T's wireless unit has an exclusive U.S. deal to sell the highly anticipated new handset.

"Our expectations are good. Our testing has been good," said AT&T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson. "The iPhone is on target to launch in June."

The iPhone has become one of the most highly awaited product debuts since Apple Chief Executive
Steve Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the device in January.

There had been speculation by some blogs and reports that the iPhone could be delayed due to technical issues.

Stephenson said more than 1 million customers have said that they would like to buy one of the phones when they're available for purchase.

He made the comments while in Boston to speak at a Boston College Chief Executives' Club luncheon.

Stephenson said he was not sure how many iPhones will be available at launch.

"We're sorting through that right now," he said. "We got a million people waiting to buy it so we're hoping we get a million."

I am one of the million ;-))

Microsoft, Samsung sign broad patent pact

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said on Thursday they have agreed to a broad technology patent pact to develop future products.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but the companies said they will both receive monetary payments compensating them for the patent usage.

The companies said the deal would help speed up development of new products including digital media players, televisions and computer-related devices.

Microsoft will never give up :-)

Moore’s Law, still proofed correct.

Gordon Moore one of the founders of Intel, made an empirical observation in the 60’s stating that the number of transistors in a ship will double every 18 to 24 months.

In the last years, a lot of rumors were floating around that Moore’s law is hitting a wall because current technologies are reaching the limit of what we can put on a silicon ship. But in the last few months , announcements came from Intel and IBM that saved Moore’s law. Intel came up with the new multiple core technology, where combining new materials allowed it to be able to build gates and switches insulated at 45nm while reducing transistor leakage and thus minimizing power consumption. But still this does not solve the performance problem, for that Intel introduced with the Core concept a way to use multiple processors on a ship to increase the performance. They even have a prototype of an 80 core layered in tiles consuming only 62 Watts. As a comparison, in 1996 to achieve Tera-Flop performance Intel used 10000 Pentium Pro (ASCI Red Supercomputer) that consumed 500 KWatt of Electricity!!!

By successfully shrinking the silicon gate dielectric to as little as 1.2nm thick –(five atomic layers!!), they solved the density problem in the past and with this new breakthrgouh, they would replace silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, reducing leakage by more than 10 times allowing to put more transistors, thus more processors on the same surface.

This is a leap that will take performance to level we’ve never see in PC’s before, assuming that MS Vista will leave some of that to the applications :-).

These processors use tera-scale computing in which chips can perform trillions of calculations per second and move terabytes of data. These processors can reconfigure themselves to perform tasks that were only possible using specialized ICs.

IBM on the other side is not idling and it announced a new memory technology that reduce memory cycle time to 2 ns which is 10 time faster than the existing RAM. By embedding these memories inside the processor, IBM will achieve a comparable level of performance to Intel’s architecture. Now imagine combining these two technologies together!!!

So Moore’s law still have good days laying ahead.