Author Archives: Ajit Deshpande

We discussed back in July that despite Netflix’s announcements of strong growth in subscriber content consumption, the going in the long run would be tough for the company in the face of competition from larger players such as Amazon, Apple and Youtube. Well, Carl Icahn seems to have decided that the time is now ripe […]

On October 25th, ARM, Red Hat and Applied Micro announced a partnership to develop a disruptive 64-bit server platform for datacenters and enterprises. This announcement came on the heels of other recent announcements from Calxeda and Dell, and is expected to be followed next week by one from AMD. ARM is the dominant architecture in […]

The new, third-generation Chromebook from Google and Samsung is here, priced at an extremely affordable $249. Google has long been considered as trying to do everything for everyone – arguably no other player is involved with apps, devices, operating systems and infrastructure to this extent – and Chromebook seems to be the company’s latest attempt […]

Oracle OpenWorld, held in the first week of October, officially heralded the company’s acceptance of cloud as the new reality for the enterprise. And with the company’s announcement that the next version of its flagship database will include a new architecture called ‘pluggable databases’, Oracle seems to now be on a path that none of […]

Earlier this past week, comScore reported that Facebook-owned photo-sharing site Instagram had surpassed Twitter in terms of daily active users for their respective smartphone apps during the month of August. This news becomes even more impressive when comparing the respective user bases: Twitter has a user base of more than 500M users whereas Instagram has […]

Last week, Pinterest hit an interesting albeit purely notional milestone – that of becoming a larger source of traffic for publishers than Yahoo – in its journey towards becoming a truly influential player in the world of social commerce. Shareaholics, a developer of tools for web content discovery and sharing, published its August traffic sources […]

Last week, VMware hosted its annual conference, VMworld, over three days between August 27th and August 29th. Coming just a few weeks after the company’s acquisition of software defined networking pioneer Nicira (as well as of Opus portfolio company Wanova), this year’s VMworld was all about driving home VMware’s strategic vision of becoming an end-to-end […]

Last week, a nine-member San Jose jury ruled in favor of Apple in the company’s patent infringement lawsuit against Android-based smartphone and tablet manufacturer Samsung. The jury awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages, while deciding that Apple on its part had not violated any of Samsung’s patents. A total of seven Apple patentswere […]

On August 9th, Starbucks announced a $25 million investment in Square at a valuation of $3.25 billion. A partnership was also announced wherein Square would process all Starbucks credit/debit card payments and wherein the approximately 11,000 Starbucks stores will become part of the Square merchant network. Howard Schulz, the CEO of Starbucks will be joining […]

On July 31st, Microsoft unveiled its new cloud-based email service, Outlook.com, complete with a simple and clean UI and featuring integration with its own SkyDrive as well as with outside social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Subscribers to its existing Hotmail service will over time be transitioned over to Outlook.com (a potential subscriber pipeline […]