Maureen O'Gara

Reports of an Android tablet coming from Amazon this fall have graduated from DigiTimes to the Wall Street Journal, which heard that Amazon would put out a nine-inch camera-less iPad rival before October. Apparently Amazon has outsourced both the widget's design and manufacturing to some Asian ODM. And apparently that's to get into the market now. It's reportedly designing another one itself but that won't be ready until next year. The key is supposed to be in the pricing where the merchant prince is supposed to have no leverage unless the dingus sells at a loss. Users can watch videos, read e-books and listen to digital music they buy or rent from Amazon, which is supposed to aggravate Apple to no end, the paper said. TechCrunch figures Amazon's one hope would be to pre-install its Appstore and its other stores on the thing. "When that happens," it says, "Amazon w... (more)

Microsoft Embraces Amazon’s Cloud

Microsoft is going to let users move some of their licensed Microsoft server software to Amazon's cloud under its newfangled Microsoft License Mobility with Software Assurance program. It says they can move Windows Server application licenses between their on-premises environment and AWS. In a blog Microsoft goes off on an Azure-ignoring riff saying, "This is a game changer because now you can get industry leading enterprise-grade software from Microsoft and run them on the highly reliable, scalable on-demand infrastructure from AWS - it's the best of both worlds....Imagine the... (more)

Cisco Seems to Remember It’s in the Switching Business

Cisco, which has been having trouble moving its switches up against competition from HP and Juniper et al, updated the Catalyst 6500 Tuesday, its most popular product even, generator of some $42 billion in revenue the last 12 years with 700,000 installations out there somewhere, a seeming indication that it had gotten some focus back on its most important business. The widgetry promises to let users plug the upgrade into existing chasses. Meanwhile, HP claims market share gains in networking at Cisco's expense. Cisco's switching business was down 9% in the April quarter to $3.3 bil... (more)

Heroku Hires Ruby Creator

Heroku, Salesforce.com's bought-in Rack-/Ruby-on-Rails-based Platform-as-a-Service, has hired Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto as its chief Ruby architect expecting he'll make the language friendlier. Heroki couldn't help point out that Ruby runs many of the world's most popular brands like Comcast, Best Buy, AT&T;'s Yellow pages, Hulu and Twitter. Heroku itself reportedly powers more than 150,000 apps written by Ruby developers. The start-up says "Matz" will continue working as research fellow at the Network Applied Communication Laboratory, an open source systems integrator in... (more)

Intellectual Ventures Strikes Again

Without any hoopla or press releases, Intellectual Ventures (IV) quietly filed a second sweeping patent suit Monday charging Hynix Semiconductor and Elpida Memory, HP, Dell, Acer, Asustek - two of the largest memory chip makers in the world and a nice representative swat of the largest PC OEMs - with infringing five DDR2, DDR3 and GDDR4 memory patents in district court in Washington state. It also named Logitech, Kingston Technology, A-Data Technology, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Pantech in the suit. Naturally IV wants treble damages. Then picking up the pace and recalling that it ha... (more)