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Dell offers mini-notebook for $99
Dell hasn’t rolled out a smart phone yet, but it’s working with a wireless carrier to subsidize one of its small laptops instead.
The company said today it will sell one of its mini-notebook computers for $99 — after a $350 mail-in rebate and the purchase of a two-year wireless broadband contract with AT&T Corp. The offer on the Inspiron Mini 9 runs through the end of the month.
The deal on the Mini 9, which normally starts at $449, will be available only at Dell.com. The computer will come with built-in mobile broadband capability.
Computer makers have rolled out a number of new mini-notebooks, or “netbooks,” over the past year. While the netbooks often sell as a second PC, many analysts and investors worry they could cut into sales of more-expensive and more profitable laptops.
A netbook typically doesn’t have the processing power or storage capacity of a larger model, but are cheaper and easier to take on the go. The increasing use of Web-based storage and software has helped offset the netbooks’ lack of juice.
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Update: Dell joins the CES hoopla with new product launches
(Updated: Adds information about sneak preview of Adamo, Dell’s new thin and light notebook PC.)
The Consumer Electronics Show is underway in Las Vegas, and every consumer electronics company worth its salt has something to show for it. Dell put out a spray of new releases today, and said it will offer a sneak peek tomorrow of its new Adamo notebook, rumored to be thinner and lighter than Apple’s MacBook Air.
Of the Dell products unveiled today, perhaps the most interesting is a small, USB digital TV tuner designed for some of its smaller computers. Its price will start around $50, the company said.
On the PC side, it launched a new gaming rig, the XPS 625, that starts for less than $1,000 (pictured at right). It’s designed for mid-level gamers who don’t need a $5,000 screamer of a PC but still want to get more performance than a run-of-the-mill model offers.
The company also released some new XPS notebooks and monitors.
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End of the (virtual) world for Google
Google is giving up on its virtual world project, shuttering its not-so-lively site called Lively at the end of this year, the company announced.
The short-lived virtual world, where users could create animated avatars like the sad little guy on the left and dance and play and compete against fellow fake beings, never really got a foothold in the universe of online make believe.
Lively isn’t alone. Many virtual world sites for grown-ups - from the vaunted Second Life on down - are seeing real-world problems, even though kid-focused sites like Webkinz and Club Penguin are doing pretty well.
According to Austin-based research firm Virtual Worlds Management, more than 150 virtual world sites have popped up on the Internet over the past few years, most targeted users under age 18.
Do you ever visit virtual worlds? Ever been on Lively - and if so why do you think it’s dying?
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Yahoo founder Yang out as CEO
From the As-the-Yahoo-turns department, the Internet giant just announced that it has begun searching for a CEO to replace founder Jerry Yang.
Yahoo, of course, has been fraught with troubles and suffering from shareholder angst since its on-again, off-again, gone-for-good merger talks by Microsoft Corp. earlier this year.
It’s tried all sorts of steps to regain footing, from putting angry investor Carl Icahn on its board to thwart an ugly proxy fight to striking deals with arch-rival Google Inc. to boost its advertising business.
Yang took over again in June 2007 to try and right the ship he helped build. But his day-to-day control of the company has done little: Yahoo’s stock price is about a third what it was back when it was being courted by Microsoft, and it is still far behind Google and other online competitors when it comes to generating advertising and other revenues.
Yang has tried several programs to re-energize his company and increase its innovation, but obviously Yahoo’s board thinks maybe somebody else can do the job a little better.
Click here for the announcement from Yahoo.
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IBM and Cray take fastest supercomputer spots
Roadrunner is still the fastest animal in the supercomputing world, but Jaguar is nipping at its heels.
IBM’s Roadrunner system kept its hold on the No. 1 spot on the latest Top500.org list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Cray’s XT5 Jaguar system, however, has become the first to join it beyond the petaflop mark.
The list is scheduled to be released today at the SC08 supercomputing conference, which is being held through Friday at the Austin Convention Center. The event is expected to draw 9,000 people from around the world.
Austin’s own supercomputer - the “Ranger” system at the University of Texas’ advanced computing center - dropped two places on the list, but remained in the top 10 at No. 6.
With the aid of a few enhancements added since June, the Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory pushed its performance on a benchmark test to 1.105 petaflops.
Normally, we’d try to come up with a clever way to portray the magnitude of that number. In this case, just typing it out seems impressive enough - 1,105,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
(Generally speaking, a desktop PC might pump through roughly 10,000,000,000 “flops.” What a puny little number that is.)
The supercomputer runs all those calculations through a combination of IBM Cell and AMD Opteron processors. The bulk of the design work for both processors occurred at those companies’ offices in Austin.
Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to surpass the petaflop barrier earlier this year. Cray now has joined it.
The Jaguar supercomputer, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, clocked in at 1.059 petaflops. Again, for effect: That’s 1,059,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second.
Cray and IBM dominate the top 10, taking seven of those spots (Cray 4, IBM 3).
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Prognosis for PC sales: Grim
It’s getting ugly out there for personal computer makers.
The current recession has sparked “rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior” that have made this holiday season “the most difficult climate we’ve ever seen,” Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson said today. The company dropped its forecast for the current quarter, just days after its main rival, Circuit City, declared bankruptcy.
Best Buy’s news prompted another round of pessimistic research notes from analysts today, many saying the announcement confirmed their expectations of a tough holiday season for computer makers.
Even before Circuit City’s news, UBS analyst Ben Reitzes said the smaller, cheaper netbooks popular this year would put a damper on average PC sales prices through the holiday season. Yesterday, he dropped his revenue estimate on Dell and H-P for the second time in a month.
It doesn’t look like it’ll get any better next year. Research firm IDC, which tracks technology sales, lowered its forecast today for worldwide technology spending growth in 2009 — dropping it to 2.6 percent from 5.9 percent. For the U.S., IDC scaled back its estimate to 0.9 percent from 4.2 percent.
Any way you slice it, the recession is making life difficult for computer and information-technology companies. Then again, it’s not exactly roses for the rest of us, either.
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Internet sales in the dumps too
Not even the mighty Internet is immune from this economic downturn.
It’s easy to see that consumers are spending less when your neighborhood store closes or marks goods down to fire-sale prices. It’s less obvious on the Internet.
New numbers from comScore Inc. show that retail sales are still growing online - but at a much, much slower rate. Web sales grew by 6 percent in the last quarter and by 5 percent in September alone according to comScore. That may sound pretty good - until you compare that to the 19 percent growth in September 2007 and realize September’s growth was the lowest rate in recent memory, at least.
“Consumers’ economic pressures continue to have a significant impact on retail spending, which is evident in the slowing growth rates in the online channel,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement.
Fulgoni - like most in the Web biz - said he expects growth rates at Web retailers to continue to outpace their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
He may be right. If nothing else, budget-strapped consumers are likely to rely more on the Web for bargain hunting. They may also cut back on trips to the shopping mall to save gas money.
Then again, if they can’t afford to pay their Internet bills, it may make it a bit harder to buy stuff online too.
Here are the figures from comScore:
U.S. Retail E-Commerce Growth Rates (Excludes travel, auctions, autos and large corporate purchases) Source: comScore, Inc.
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Dell launches new site for the holidays
The holiday season will bring millions of people to retail stores in search of new computers, but Dell is getting ready for millions of shoppers who want to buy online, too.
The computer maker rolled out a new Web page today that throughout the holidays will showcase daily deals, advice, customer reviews and range of other options and information. And in keeping with the company’s push to become more interactive, customers who visit Dell.com/everyday can sign up for notifications on new deals through e-mail, RSS feeds, Facebook and other social media.
With its traditional build-to-order direct-sales model, Dell allowed shoppers to customize their computers. By expanding the shopping options on the new site, senior managers said this week, the company wants to give online visitors more ways to personalize not just what they buy, but how they go about buying it.
This year’s holidays should prove interesting gauge on the ability of computer makers to push sales through the current economy. Most economists and retailers expect consumers to scale back their spending.
The season also will provide a measuring stick for Dell’s more-concerted push into the consumer market. While the company sold PCs through some retail stores last year, this will be the first season it has models designed specifically for in-store sales.
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Google agreement would digitize more books
In another major step toward changing the idea of books as we know them, Google Inc. has reached an agreement with publishers and authors to scan millions of books and post them on the Internet for users to read, download and print for a fee.
Under the agreement, Google will pay $125 million to settle a longstanding class-action copyright lawsuit with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild.
In exchange, the two groups will let Google scan millions of out-of-print and in-print books and post them on the Internet through Google’s Book Search system. Authors and publishers will get royalties fees and a portion of the advertising revenues Google generates on Book Search.
Working with libraries in California, Wisconsin and Michigan, Google already has scanned about 7 million books and posted parts or all of them on its Book Search Web site. They range from classics like Homer’s Iliad and out-of-print college textbooks to modern-day children’s readers like Kumak’s Fish.
But the agreement announced Tuesday marks the beginning of a monumental expansion of the service, according to its backers.
In particular, the agreement promises to greatly increase the availability of out-of-print books - which now can be found only in limited collections - by making them accessible to anyone, anywhere in America.
“This innovative settlement breathes new life into millions of books without jeopardizing the rights of individual property owners,” Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers said in a conference call with reporters.
Under the agreement, consumers will be able to find and read samples of books online and view entire copies on their computers for a fee. They’ll also be able to print unlimited pages from a book for a per-page fee. Institutions such as schools and libraries will be able to purchase a subscription that would give the users broader access.
Proceeds from the services will be split between Google, publishers and authors. Exactly how much the services would cost consumers, universities and other users hasn’t been determined yet, officials said Tuesday.
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Michael Dell, chief blogging officer
A couple years ago, Michael Dell urged his company to expand its presence on blogs and other social media. Now, he’s joining the fray.
Dell opened up a new company blog today with its first entry, offering tips on how companies of all sizes can simplify and save money on their technology systems — particularly in the current economic mess.
While he often posts on the company’s internal blogs, this was the first time Dell authored an external piece. Apparently, it won’t be his last, either.
“He’ll continue to selectively blog on topics of interest to Dell stakeholders,” said company spokesman David Frink.
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