the entrepreneurship channel

Fusion IO, of Salt Lake City has raised $48M in venture financing to develop next generation, Flash memory based “solid state server drive” io subsystems.

As a Fusion IO co-founder explains in this interview on the opening day of N+I Las Vegas (in Startup City), hard disk drive technology has not kept up with “Moore’s Law” which has defined the pace of innovation in semiconductors, especially memory, dsp, and processors for 40 years. Today it takes roughly 500 hard disk drives to keep up with a state of the art “quad quad” (16) core Pentium-based server. But fusion-io’s flash (semiconductor) based memory systems can keep up with the same server processor array, because it has no moving parts.

In this spectacular demo, a single FusionIO memory array delivers 1,000 HD video streams (about 4Mbps each) onto a “video wall”. The wall consists of sixteen 40″ LCD’s, each displaying 1000/16 = 62 separate HD video streams. With this setup, you could watch ALL of the Comcast channels (and then some) — at the same time!

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Reporting Live From Web 2.0 Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo made its way to San Francisco, CA March 31st through April 3rd. There was a lot of talk about the design of mobile applications, twitter vs google vs facebook vs linkedin, and much more.

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The SMX West 2009 Search Engine Expo (Conference) was held Feb 10-12 at the Santa Clara Convention Center

SMX West turned out to be an outstanding conference.  There was a strong presence from the big search engines including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ASK, as well as many SEO optimization industry experts and gurus.

If you want a lot of bang for your buck for your educational dollars, SMX West is a solid choice of conference to attend.  They are held at different locations around the country every few months.

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Matt’s first startup, Sitepoint.com, launched ten years ago when he was 15.  While living in Vancouver Island, Canada, and his staff working in New Zealand, Matt has just opened an office for his spinoff  called 99Designs.com in San Francisco.  Sitepoint is the 799th busiest site on the internet, and Matt has run it magnificently.  He’s a very impressive and accomplished young entrepreneur.

At 99Designs, graphic artists from around the world compete with each other to develop logos, web pages, and other graphics for corporations, small businesses, individuals, and others.

Steve Bell, consistently being one of the highest-rated contest holders at 99Designs.com since 2004, was invited into to this interview when he was in San Luis Obispo, taking photographs at Cal Poly.  He spoke to CBS for 30 minutes, but only got 30 seconds of video in the edited version.

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Nortel will discontinue its mobile WiMAX business and end its joint agreement with Alvarion. The agreement, announced in June 2008, outlined the integration of Alvarion’s advanced radio access network technology with Nortel’s core network solutions, backhaul solutions, and global services. It also covered the resale by Nortel of the Alvarion platform of WiMAX access products.

Nortel said its decision will allow it to narrow its focus, better manage its investments and strengthen its broader carrier business to better position itself for long-term competitiveness.

“We are taking rapid action to narrow our strategic focus to areas where we can drive maximum return on investment. We will work closely with Alvarion to transition our mobile WiMAX customers to them and assure customers that they will continue to benefit from leading-edge technology and high-quality service,” said Richard Lowe, president of carrier networks, Nortel.

For its part, Alvarion is said it is analyzing Nortel’s decision and will take action to mitigate the impact on its business, and expects to provide more information about these actions during its fourth quarter 2008 financial results conference call on Wednesday, February 4, 2009. Under the terms of the agreement, Nortel is obligated to pay Alvarion for certain research and development services beyond Q4; however, collection of these payments is uncertain and subject to Nortel’s creditor protection proceedings.

As a result of the foregoing, Alvarion will not be able to recognize approximately $2.4 million of revenues from the sale of products to Nortel during the fourth quarter of 2008. Accordingly, total revenues for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2008, are expected to be approximately $70 million, at the low end of the Company’s revenue guidance of $70 to $78 million.

Tzvika Friedman, President and CEO of Alvarion, said, “We are obviously disappointed in the direction this has taken; however, Alvarion’s industry position has never been stronger. In Q4, our WiMAX shipments, excluding Nortel, reached a record $54.4 million and WiMAX revenues were $42.3 million. Our book-to-bill remained well above 1, and we ended the year with over $140 million in cash on our balance sheet.” http://www.nortel.com/ http://www.alvarion.com 30-Jan-09

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