Facebook Buys Onavo

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been shopping again. This time he picked up Onavo, the Tel Aviv based startup whose apps include services designed to monitor and compress mobile data.

The move will benefit Zuckerberg’s interests at two levels. With Facebook keenly emphasising its mobile credentials, the Onavo service could persuade doubters that it’s time to give the service a go.

Meanwhile his Internet.org initiative plans to bring internet connectivity to the parts that other means just can’t reach. Compression technology might make Facebook a viable option in parts of the developing world where data is an expensive luxury, while for the rest of us the prospect of lower roaming charges might be enticing.

As well as being a new subsidiary of Facebook, Onavo will become a satellite office for Facebook in Tel Aviv, the first time it has had a direct presence in Israel. So far there’s no information on how much money has changed hands, but figures of between $100m and $200m have been mentioned.

In a blog post, Onavo said, “We’re excited to join their team, and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share.

“When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”

However, we might speculate that the technology involved could also be integrated into mobile Facebook apps to make them more data efficient, luring more people to share their lives as they live them.

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New USB Chip Developed

Silicon Motion says it has begun shipping samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost performance by up to 50%.

The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160MB/s read, and 60MB/s write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30% to 50% performance improvement over today’s USB 3.0 flash drive technology.

Even though the USB 3.0 specification has the capability to support 4.8Gbps throughput speeds, the speed of a USB 3.0-enabled flash drive is dictated by the speed of the accessing flash devices in the drive. Today, most consumer-USB 3.0 flash drives support about 100MB/s read speeds.

We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.

The new integrated chip will also be able to run at lower voltages, from 5 volts to 1.2 volts, enabling a 25% to 30% lower USB flash drive device temperature compared with other USB 3.0 flash controller products in the market, Silicon Motion said.

The new IC will support the vast majority of NAND flash technology, including new triple-level cell (TLC), multi-level cell (MLC), high speed Toggle, and ONFI DDR NAND manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel.

The new chip has already passed both USB-IF compliance testing and WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) tests for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The new IC is available in a Chip-on-Board (COB) and in a 48-pin QFN green package.

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Stanford Develops Carbon Nanotubes

Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the first functional computer constructed using only carbon nanotube transistors.

Scientists have been experimenting with transistors based on carbon nanotubes, or CNTs, as substitutes for silicon transistors, which may soon hit their physical limits.

The rudimentary CNT computer is said to run a simple operating system capable of multitasking, according to a synopsis of an article published in the journal Nature.

Made of 178 transistors, each containing between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes, the computer can do four tasks summarized as instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back, and run two different programs concurrently.

The research team was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong.

“People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon,” Mitra said in a statement. “But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using [the] technology. Here is the proof.”

IBM last October said its scientists had placed more than 10,000 transistors made of nano-size tubes of carbon on a single chip. Previous efforts had yielded chips with just a few hundred carbon nanotubes.

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Banks Join Instant Chat

Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co and six other financial institutions have agreed to join a new instant messaging network from Markit and Thomson Reuters Corp to connect disparate messaging systems.

The network, called Markit Collaboration Services, launched on Monday and allows members to chat with one another regardless of the proprietary messaging technology that each firm uses.

This open platform differs Bloomberg LP’s messaging system, which is a closed network only for users of Bloomberg terminals.

Bloomberg messaging is the most popular form of chat on Wall Street, and often cited as one of the reasons banks are willing to pay around $20,000 a year for a subscription to a Bloomberg terminal.

Markit and Thomson Reuters said they hoped their open messaging network will attract banks that want to chat with their clients or other financial institutions but cannot currently do so because they are on different messaging systems.

The other banks that have joined the new network are Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, according to a statement from Markit.

The banks collectively employ more than 1 million people worldwide, though it was not immediately clear how many individuals will use the new Markit service.

David Craig, president of Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk division, said one of the challenges facing banks is that their messaging systems do not always talk to one another. “That creates costs and complexity,” he said.

Markit and Thomson Reuters said the messages on the new network are encrypted, and the system does not store them.

Representatives from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were not immediately available to comment on the new messaging system. Representatives from Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan also declined to comment.

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Chip Makers Going After Cars

Chip makers including Broadcom and Renesas Electronics are putting more focus on in-car entertainment with faster processors and networks for wireless HD movies and navigation, aiming to keep drivers informed and passengers entertained.

With PC sales slipping and the mobile device market proving highly competitive, chip makers are looking for greener pastures in other sectors like in-car entertainment and information.

From Renesas comes the R-Car M2 automotive SoC (System-on-a-Chip), which has enough power to handle simultaneous high-definition navigation, video and voice-controlled browsing.

The SoC is meant for use in mid-range systems. It features two ARM Cortex A-15 cores running at up to 1.5GHz and Renesas’ own SH-4A processor plus the PowerVR SGX544MP2 from Imagination Technologies for 3D graphics. This combination helps the M2 exceed the previous R-Car H1 with more than three times the CPU capacity and approximately six times better graphics performance.

Car makers that want to put a more advanced entertainment system in their upcoming models should go for the eight core R-Car H2 SoC, which was announced earlier this year. It is based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, and uses four Cortex-A15 cores and another four Cortex-A7 cores.

The H2 will be able to handle four streams of 1080p video, including Blu-Ray at 60 frames per second, according to Renesas. Mass production is scheduled for the middle of next year, while the M2 won’t arrive in larger volumes until June 2015.

Broadcom on the other hand is seeking to drive better networking on the road. The company’s latest line of wireless chipsets for in-car connectivity uses the fast 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless standard, which offers enough bandwidth for multiple displays and screen resolution of up to 1080p. Use of the 5GHz band for video allows it to coexist with Bluetooth hands-free calls on 2.4GHz, according Broadcom.

Broadcom has also implemented Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast. Wi-Fi Direct lets products such as smartphones, cameras and in this case in-car computers connect to one another without joining a traditional hotspot network, while Miracast lets users stream videos and share photos between smartphones, tablets and displays.

The BCM89335 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Smart Ready combo chip and the BCM89071 Bluetooth and Bluetooth Smart Ready chip are now shipping in small volumes.

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Micron Ships Hybrid Memory Cube

Micron Technology has announced that is is currently shipping 2GB Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) engineering samples that represent a dramatic step forward in memory technology and are designed for applications that require high-bandwidth access to memory like data processing, data packet buffering or storage.

According to Micron, the Hybrid Memory Cube uses advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs)-vertical conduit that connect a stack of individual chips in order to combine high-performance logic with Micron’s DRAM. The current engineering sample features a 2GB memory cube that consists of four 4Gb DRAM dies. It provides 160GB/s of memory bandwidth while using up to 70 percent less energy per bit when compared to currently available technologies.

Micron expects 4GB HMC engineering samples to be available in early 2014 while volume production of both 2GB and 4GB HMC is scheduled to begin later in 2014.

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Sharp Shows MEMs

Sharp on Monday unveiled its latest prototypes of a new kind of display screen that it says brings several advantages over today’s liquid crystal display (LCD) screens.

The screens, called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) displays for the tiny moving parts they contain, are being developed by the Japanese company in partnership with Qualcomm and were on show at the Ceatec electronics show just outside of Tokyo.

Behind each pixel in a MEMS display is a backlight that flashes red, green and blue in fast succession, and in front of it is a tiny shutter can be opened to let light through.

Synchronized to the backlight, the shutter can control the amount of each color of light allowed through. The eye perceives these flashes as the desired hue.

In contrast, today’s LCD screens create colored pixels using three filters. The filters swallow about two thirds of the brightness of the backlight before it leaves the display, said Akira Imai, deputy general manager of Sharp’s new business development center.

The MEMS display can allow all the light through, so the intensity of the backlight can be reduced using less power for the display, said Imai.

In a portable gadget, the screen often consumes more power than any other component, so reducing its demands can have a big impact on battery life.

The screens on show at Ceatec were 7-inch models with 800 pixel by 1,280 pixel resolution. The colors were bright and the screen image was sharp, although people viewing the screens did tend to see a brief flash of red, green and blue pixel each time they turned their eyes away from the display. That’s something Sharp is working on, said Imai.

Sharp also showed a version of the screen working in several low power modes.

The development work with Qualcomm began earlier this year when the U.S. company said it would invest $120 million into Sharp. The money, which was invested in two parts, was accompanied by Qualcomm’s MEMS expertise. Sharp has a long history in flat-panel display technology, especially LCD, and has recently been working on a new type of display called IGZO, on which the MEMS display is partly based.

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King.com Has IPO In The Works

King.com Ltd, the British mobile gaming firm best known for its popular puzzle game ‘Candy Crush Saga’, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Online technology companies are rushing to the stock market on the backs of Twitter Inc’s announcement earlier this month that it plans to go public in the most eagerly anticipated IPO since last year’s flotation ofFacebook Inc.

Emerging growth companies such as King can use a secretive IPO registration process in the U.S. thanks to the Jumpstart Our BusinessStartups (JOBS) Act, which loosened a number of federal securities regulations in hopes of boosting capital raising and thereby increasing job growth.

King has hired Bank of America Merrill Lynch Corp, Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co to lead the offering, said the person, confirming an earlier report by the Daily Telegraph and asking not to be identified because the information is confidential.

Representatives for King and the banks either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

King offers 150 games in 14 languages through mobile phones, Facebook and its website. It boasts more than 1 billion gameplays per day from its users.

The company’s games appeal to a growing trend for players to play puzzles with their friends in short bursts, especially as games are increasingly played on the move on phones or tablets to kill spare minutes.

Rival Zynga Inc went public two years ago in a high-profile IPO that raised $1 billion. Since then, Zynga has suffered from sagging morale during several quarters of worsening performance and repeated waves of layoffs.

Founded in 2003, King has been profitable since 2005 and has not had a funding round since September of that year, when it raised 34 million euros ($46.04 million) from investment firms Apax Partners and Index Ventures.

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Does Intel Need Help?

As time runs out for Intel to bring its Internet-based TV service by the end of the year, the outfit has approached Samsung and Amazon to ask them to lend a hand. Intel has asked about providing funding and distribution for the service. It looks like the set-top box project could be scrapped if a strategic partner isn’t found soon.

OnCue was supposed to allow users to watch live TV, on demand, and other offerings. Intel said it would provide the hardware and services directly to consumers and that the box would come with a camera that can detect who is in front of the TV. More than 300 engineers are working on the project under Erik Huggers, the head of Intel Media. A version of the service running on Intel hardware is testing with 3,000 Intel employees. Goodness knows what content they are running. Intel is having difficulty getting content deals.

Intel has yet to announce any TV programming partners, and Time Warner Cable and other cable TV providers have been pressuring channel owners to shun pacts with Intel and other Internet-based TV providers. Samsung, which ships millions of smart TVs, could distribute the service as a bundle, while Amazon could provide access to its growing library of movies and TV shows.

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Oracle Goes After SAP’s HANA

Oracle has upped its game in its fight against SAP HANA, having added in-memory processing to its Oracle 12c database management system, which it claims will speed up queries by 100 times.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed the update on Sunday evening during his opening keynote at the Oracle Openworld show in San Francisco.

The in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c is designed to ramp up the speeds of data queries – and will also give Oracle a new weapon in the fight against SAP’s rival HANA in-memory system.

“When you put data in memory, one of the reasons you do that is to make the system go faster,” Ellison said. “It will make queries go faster, 100 times faster. You can load the same data into the identical machines, and it’s 100 times faster, you get results at the speed of thought.”

Ellison was keen to allay concerns that these faster query times would have a negative impact on transactions.

“We didn’t want to make transactions go slower with adding and changing data in the database. We figured out a way to speed up query processing and at least double your transaction processing rates,” he said.

In traditional databases, data is stored in rows, for example a row of sales orders, Ellison explained. These types of row format databases were designed to operate at high speeds when processing a few rows that each contain lots of columns. More recently, a new format was proposed to store data in columns rather than rows to speed up query processing.

Oracle plans to store the data in both formats simultaneously, according to Ellison, so transactions run faster in the row format and analytics run faster in column format.

“We can process data at ungodly speeds,” Ellison claimed. As evidence of this, Oracle demoed the technology, showing seven billion rows could be queried per second via in-memory compared to five million rows per second in a traditional database.

The new approach also allows database administrators to speed up their workloads by removing the requirement for analytics indexes.

“If you create a table in Oracle today, you create the table but also decide which columns of the table you’ll create indexes for,” Ellison explained. “We’re replacing the analytics indexes with the in-memory option. Let’s get rid of analytic indexes and replace them with the column store.”

Ellison added that firms can choose to have just part of the database for in-memory querying. “Hot data can be in DRAM, you can have some in flash, some on disk,” he noted. “Data automatically migrates from disk into flash into DRAM based on your access patterns. You only have to pay by capacity at the cost of disk.”

Firms wanting to take advantage of this new in-memory option can do so straightaway, according to Ellison, with no need for changes to functions, no loading or reloading of data, and no data migration. Costs were not disclosed.

And for those firms keen to rush out and invest in new hardware to take advantage of this new in-memory option, Ellison took the wraps off the M6-32, dubbed the Big Memory Machine. According to Ellison, the M6-32 has twice the memory, can process data much faster and costs less than a third of IBM’s biggest comparable machine, making it ideal for in-memory databases.

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