Hasta La Gadget!

Yet more exits for Israeli startups, with the latest two developments a throwback to the hardware and engineering muscle that raised the tech profile of the region in the first place, before the Waze’s of the world got us thinking about Israel as a hotbed of consumer internet companies.

Today, reports leaked out, and we have now confirmed, that Intel has acquired Omek Interactive, a company it had already invested in that makes technology for gesture-based interfaces. At the same time, Israel publication the Calcalist is reporting that Apple is circling around PrimeSense, another developer of gesture-based technology that has been used in Microsoft’s Kinect. Together, the moves could be a sign that gesture-based controls such as those in Microsoft’s Kinect may become even more prevalent.

The Apple/PrimeSense talk, however, appears to be too early, if not altogether inaccurate. The Calcalist’s report notes that this is based around some meetings between the two companies, and that the price for the deal would be around $280 million. But a source at the company described the report as “BS.”

This is “journalist delusion based on unverified and twisted hints,” the source added, also questioning the valuation: “280M? Come on! We’re worth 10 times that. ” Up to now, PrimeSense has raised nearly $30 million from investors that include Gemini Israel Funds, Canaan Partners, Genesis Partners and Silver Lake Partners and bills itself as “giving digital devices the gift of sight.”

Meanwhile, we have contacted Omek, where the person we tracked down on the phone giggled (yes) and then referred us to Intel for any questions.

We have yet to hear back from Intel or investing arm Intel Capital. A post on Harretz notes the deal actually concluded last week. Haaretz has also managed to get a confirmation directly from Intel: “The acquisition of Omek Interactive will help increase Intel’s capabilities in the delivery of more immersive perceptual computing experiences,” the statement says.
Update: Intel has confirmed to me that the transaction has closed. In addition to the same statement it gave Haaretz, an Intel spokesperson added it’s not confirming the value of the deal, and “we are also not disclosing the timelines on future products that integrate this technology.”

The reported value of Intel’s deal for Omek is between $30 million and $50 million. Without actually hearing from Intel on the details, for now there appears to be a few lines of thinking behind why Intel is going beyond being simply a strategic investor. (Omek has raised $13.8 million to date, with $7 million of that coming from Intel Capital.)

The first of these — as explained in a story in VentureBeat, which first reported talks between the two in March of this year — is that Omek may have been in the market to raise more money and that it chose the exit route instead of going it alone.

Another is that Intel wants the technology as part of its bigger moves into 3D visualization and “perceptual computing”, Intel’s catch-all term for gesture, touch, voice, and other AI-style sensory technologies. This is also the subject of a $100 million investment fund Intel launched in April.

And a third is more mundane and cynical, and potentially true regardless of Intel’s wider, more airy ambitions. The blog GeekTime suggests that this is a hardware play: Intel wants Omek for technology that it can embed into chips. The more functionality it can add that will drive new purchases of those chips by device makers, the better:

“The search for worthy power eating technologies to justify the need for yearly chip version upgrades is an integral part of the hardware industries market management strategy,” it writes. “Device companies must be convinced of the need to design their products to support the more expensive vanguard models of the processing world, placing the need for innovation above price point, and even quality in some cases.”

Whether or not the PrimeSense news is accurate, 9to5Mac makes a convincing argument for how the startup’s intellectual property could fit in with other IP at Apple already; and with Apple’s bigger ambitions to develop products that take it further into the living room, specifically with Apple TV.

And that, in the end, seems to be the crux of today’s news as well. However you cut it, and whoever ends up controlling it (in the tech sense), gesture is increasingly coming into focus and will let us get machines to do our bidding with the wave of a hand, or finger, soon.

Considering Microsoft’s history of supporting desktop operating systems past their expiration date, learning that Windows Phone 8 would be cut off from updates after a short 18 months was a bit of a slap to the face. Thankfully, Redmond has come to its senses: as of this week Microsoft has doubled its mobile OS’ support life cycle. Devices running Windows Phone 8 will be sustained through January 2016, provided your carrier of choice chooses to make the update available to you. The company hopes this will make the platform more appealing to enterprise users. Speaking of courting the business crowd, the official Windows Phone Blog also outlines a set of enterprise-specific features, including new options for corporate-level email, WiFi and application management. The full info with all the high-level security features you can handle is in the links below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft

Comments

Source: Windows Phone Blog

While iOS already has a place in the corporate world, that spot isn’t guaranteed when there’s competition with both a renewed BlackBerry and Samsung’s Knox. Accordingly, Apple isn’t leaving anything to chance: it just posted a page explaining the business-friendly iOS 7 features that it teased at WWDC. The biggest improvements for end users may be enterprise single sign-on and per app VPN, both of which will save hassles when launching work apps. IT managers should have it easier as well — iOS devices can join Mobile Device Management as soon as they’re activated, and a company can assign apps to individual users without losing control. There’s considerably more features than we can list here, but it’s clear from a cursory glimpse that Apple likes its foothold in the enterprise.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, Apple

Comments

Via: The Verge

Source: Apple

Is there aught the Raspberry Pi can’t do? Here’s another interesting implementation of the $35 microcromputer — or rather a stack of 56 Pis, linked together to form what its creators have called PiCloud, using LEGO bricks as bespoke racks for the Pi stacks. (Not the first time we’ve seen Pi paired with LEGO either.)

The project comes out of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, and is intended as a teaching aid so students can hack around with a model cloud platform and play with techs like virtualisation to learn about the infrastructure underpinning services like Amazon’s AWS.

The 56 Raspberry Pis in PiCloud are stacked in four mini Lego racks, each topped off with a top-of-rack-switch which has 16 Ethernet connections: 14 used to network the Pis and the other two for connecting the switches. At the software stack layer of PiCloud, each Pi board is running Raspbian Linux, with three LXC containers per Pi each running a Linux instance.

Hosted software on PiCloud includes running “simple workloads” within each container (such as lighttpd) and “artificial workloads” (like lookbusy) for experiments. Other experimental hacking on PiCloud has featured libvirt and docker. Hadoop is also part of the mix, although this is only currently working on the native Linux instance, rather than an LXC instance.

One of the computing schools’s students has also built an AWS-like web console interface for PiCloud (see screengrab below).

PiCloud’s creators describe it as a “never-ending work-in-progress”. Aka a teaching aid. Their future plans for the platform include using standard tools such as ovirt, “if/when we get libvirt working” — but they’re also asking for suggestions for research directions and collaborations. For more on PiCloud, check out the project homepage.

PiCloud is a great example of how the Pi is fulfilling the mission of its creators, as well as proving popular with the maker community. The Raspberry Pi Foundation originally set out to build a low-cost microcromputer to get more U.K. kids learning to code. PiCloud is certainly helping with that.

Since enterprise-level social networking isn’t really our bag, we haven’t been paying that much attention to Yammer after Microsoft’s paid $1.2 billion to buy it. Still, as part of Redmond’s project to merge Twitter-for-business with Office 365, organizations can now make Yammer the primary sharing tool for their users. Unfortunately, we suspect some heavy-handed sysadmin will prevent you from sending those amusing LOLCat pictures your nephew emailed you to the folks in sector G.

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft

Comments

Source: Microsoft