Author Archives: Ajit Deshpande
Video subscriptions on YouTube
Last week, Google’s YouTube announced that it was in talks to let video creators charge viewers. With more than 800 million monthly unique visitors and more than 4 billion hours of monthly viewing, YouTube is up there with the major content sharing networks. Pre-roll and banner advertising on videos has been YouTube’s main source of […]
Linksys is Cisco’s no more
Linksys, which was Cisco’s first acquisition in the consumer networking segment, was sold to home automation products manufacturer Belkin for an undisclosed amount last week. Established in 1988 and acquired in 2003 by Cisco for around $500 million, Linksys has been synonymous with home and small office networking products, while at the same time being […]
Rackspace and the Open Compute Project
During last week’s Open Compute Summit, Rackspace announced that it is working on designing its own servers using open-source Facebook specs. Rackspace has been involved with Open Compute since its inception in April’11, and has been itself a founder of the open-source cloud computing operating system Open Stack. This recent announcement by Rackspace thus underlines […]
The connected home
The phrase ‘Internet of Things’ has been somewhat synonymous with the cutting-edge of technology for more than a decade now; every major technological advancement, whether in computing, connectivity or mobility, has resulted in applications that have led to a more connected world. Last week’s CES show helped move the ball further down the field, with […]
Fewer ‘Ville’s
Last week, leading social game developer Zynga announced that over the month of December it had followed through with its planned closure of 11 game titles, including Petville, Forestville, Fishville and Mafia Wars 2. As part of the announcement, Zynga also mentioned it was shifting its focus towards mobile games, and was also applying to […]
A boost to NFC?
In an announcement that is indicative of the increasing relevance of Near Field Communications (NFC) to the smartphone industry, Broadcom last week released a new quad-radio wireless chip that provides support to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and NFC. This new chip follows Broadcom’s introduction in Sept’11 of a standalone NFC chip for smartphones. The company had […]
Gamification in the Enterprise
Capgemini Consulting, a global strategy and transformation consulting firm, and Badgeville, a fast growing startup focused on gamification of enterprise applications, last week announced a partnership to accelerate the use of gamification techniques to enable enterprises to motivate employees and customers. This partnership seems like a win-win solution for both parties. Enterprise operations have seen […]
Consolidation at Point-of-Sale
Last week brought news of consolidation in the POS system segment – National Cash Register (NCR) Corporation announced its $650M acquisition of Retalix, a developer of software for managing sales, stores and logistics for retail chains. This is the second large acquisition for NCR, coming a years after its acquisition of hospitality and specialty retail […]
A Dish-Google Partnership?
On November 16th, news broke out that Dish and Google were discussing a potential partnership to build out a wireless network to rival those of the top carriers. Dish has for a while been exploring ways to use its satellite spectrum for terrestrial wireless communication. A failed bid for MetroPCS, an ongoing discussion with the […]
Foursquare takes on Yelp
Last week, Foursquare introduced a new version of its mobile app that now includes a key new rating feature. Using data from its ~25M mobile app users and ~3 billion check-ins worldwide, Foursquare will provide a 1-10 point rating for places and businesses. This feature puts the company squarely in competition with current reviews and […]