ReadWriteWeb

When a corporation stakes its reputation on the competitive value of its patent portfolio, it can't afford to watch that portfolio go down in flames. Although the novelty of most any patented technological concept perhaps warrants some re-examination, three patents assigned to memory maker Rambus were recently invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a dispute with graphics device maker Nvidia over whether the act of rendering functionality on a single chip is a novel idea or just an obvious improvement.

This morning, both companies announced they've settled all disputes over the remaining, still-valid Rambus patents, with Nvidia being granted a five-year license to the formerly disputed technology. But this Nvidia win will have implications throughout the industry, as the competitive value of nearly all technologies integrated into a single circuit, may have just decreased.

It was supposed to have been the heart of a concept called NGV - a video codec that utilized the same principles used by H.264, but produce a tighter stream by almost half. It was touted as the final "Hail Mary" pass for RealNetworks to re-enter the competitive space that was quickly being won over by Adobe, and where Microsoft and Apple still had their feet in the door. During 2008, Real's engineers were showing off potential stream size contraction of as much as 30%.

Now, the next-generation video effort that only culminated in RealVideo 11 in 2010, after much of the online world had left Real behind, is being regenerated by Intel. This morning, Intel announced the acquisition of an undisclosed number of RealNetwork patents related to next-generation video. And this afternoon, an Intel spokesperson confirmed to RWW that it will be offering employment to seven of Real's NGV engineers.

Two technologies have made the quantum speed leaps in high-performance computing possible. One is the rapid ascent of commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) processors that made computing speed cheaper. The second is InfiniBand (IB), the switching technology that Sun Microsystems helped evolve into a fabric - the underlying infrastructure of a carrier-grade cloud.

Today, after an on-again, off-again relationship with InfiniBand that stretches back to its very beginning, Intel is back in the networking fabric business in a big way. With as big a message of "we're back" as you can send, the company has agreed to purchase the InfiniBand production assets, along with many of the employees, of QLogic. Analysts estimate the company to be the #2 player in the InfiniBand switch market with over one-fourth the global market. The deal has a reported value of $125 million.

"The Store of the Future," as retail electronics vendors have depicted it over the past few years, features eight-foot touchscreen walls that double as mirrors, interacting with the customer as she tries on virtual clothes without sacrificing her own modesty, scanning the ID tags and profiles of items she's already selected, and giving store clerks tools to dazzle the customer with demos and make on-the-spot deals without having to rush to the back office. These are the wonders made possible by embedded technology... ah, can't you hear the voice-over announcer now!

The thing is, customers are already entering the stores right now with touchscreens, scanners, IM clients, Twitter clients, and live video displays - they're just in the customer's pocket or purse. So at the National Retail Federation's big show earlier this week in New York City, there were dueling visions of "The Store of the Future." The challenger looks more like a kind of smart Wi-Fi that communicates directly with the devices the customer already has, using hardware that could cost retailers a lot less.

The long evolution of Tizen continues and is about to get its biggest boost yet. Samsung is going to merge its Bada platform with the Tizen project, bringing the Linux-based operating system to more smartphones and developers across the world.

Tizen is the Linux smartphone operating system that was once called MeeGo that, in turn, was once the confluence of Maemo and Moblin from Nokia and Intel. Nothing tangible has ever really come out of the Tizen/MeeGo project except for a few demo phones and the Nokia N9 and N950. With Samsung throwing its manufacturing weight behind the Tizen development project, that may be about to change.

For at least seven years running, Intel has been working to specify a form factor for lightweight, mobile computing devices. No, not tablets. As early as 2005, the first whispers of a joint Intel/Microsoft specification were bandied about, where Intel specifies the internals, and they supply the plastic. At the time, insiders warned that while manufacturers would be eager to rally behind an all-in-one mobile PC specification, consumers would not embrace it until 1) its battery lasted at least as long as the movie it's playing; 2) it could reasonably connect to other devices outside a radius of 50 feet; 3) one could afford it without a second mortgage.

Now, the year after the Apple iPad's unprecedented rout of the tablet market, analysts are saying Intel may finally have the magic formula. Undaunted by the fact that ultrabooks, as they're now being called, only sold 1 million units worldwide last year, according to estimates from hardware analysis firm IHS, the firm is holding true to its ultrabook sales projections for 2015 - projections that assume a 342% annual growth rate.

It is no surprise to anyone who has covered either the computing or telecommunications markets for any length of time that manufacturers' visions of the future are centered around the ubiquity of the products they create. The 2007 vision of ubiquitous communications among carriers revolved around a kind of flip-phone with a detachable antenna you might wear on your head or in your pocket. When the iPhone happened, it was called "disruption," but really in the sense that a bad dream was disrupted by a better reality.

The 1995 vision of ubiquitous computing from Microsoft revolved around a universal acceptance of the role of packaged software; the word "Internet" was surgically inserted into a later draft of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead. So when you look carefully at concepts of an "Internet of Things" (IoT), if you're a veteran, you might want to focus on what these things are supposed to be. KORE Telematics President and COO Alex Brisbourne (whose business is machine-to-machine communication, or M2M) has done precisely that, and shares his thoughts with us in part 2 of his three-part discussion with ReadWriteWeb.

Research from Principled Technologies suggests that a large UNIX/RISC-based, business-critical database application handling peaks of 10,000 queries per hour is delivering good performance. Using that metric, Principled Technologies set about testing 12 VMs hosted on a server running VMware vSphere 5.0 using the Intel Xeon E7 processor family.

How did it handle? According to Principled Technologies, "this solution comfortably supported 12 80GB databases" without over-committing resources and allowing all VMs to run in parallel with solid performance.

The Android Ice Cream Sandwich source code for x86 systems-on-a-chip (SoC) to developers yesterday evening to give them a chance to put ICS onto devices running processors from Intel and AMD. It is not a complete release but is the first step in perhaps creating and actual market for smartphones running processors that use x86 architecture.

Intel has been floundering in the mobile space. To date, there are no significant smartphones or tablets running x86 processors (Windows 7 tablets not included because none fall into the category of "significant"). By extension, AMD suffers in this realm as well. Can Intel finally make a dent in the mobile market with Android?

Large server environments, network storage, and pervasive virtualization make for powerful computing – but also complex environments. But you can simplify your environment with unified networking.

This demo from Intel and NetApp shows you how you can reduce network complexity, while also bringing the performance you need to keep your network admins happy.