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Archos tablets makes nice paperweights, but Seagate is still cool

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Hard drive and storage company, Seagate, announced today that it is putting its super slim notebook hard drives to new use. The drives, aimed at ultra-portable devices can now be found in Archos‘ G9 8-inch and 10-inch tablets, Android powered devices.

The problem is, it’s a spinner hard drive circa iPod generation one.

With the new hardware, Archos G9 users will have 250GB of space as opposed to the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB options available in the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Motorola Xoom. Sure, all that extra room for your heavy entertainment files might be nice, but not when it loses battery and becomes dead weight in your messenger bag.

At least performance issues have been addressed. In fact, Archos seems confident. It boasts that the tablet is one of the fastest available given its 1.5GHz processor. iPad, Galaxy Tab and Xoom all have 1GHz. According to Joni Clark, product marketing manager of Seagate, performance is also supported by the way people use tablets. Clark explained that people generally see tablets as a consuming device. They do their “creating”, such as document writing, larger scale photo editing, etc. on notebooks. Thus, the wear on the drive in terms of battery power and performance is less.

Not so sure I agree here. True, I’m much more likely to write an e-mail on my tablet than an article. But, I’m equally as likely to watch a small YouTube video as I am to download and watch an entire movie. Extra gigabytes for that media are great, but space is worth nothing if my tablet dies right at, “Luke, I am your father.”

While this may be a dud, Seagate does have some promising thoughts on mobile. The Seagate Momentus XT, currently only available in notebooks, could be the component needed to take expanded tablet drives to the next level.

The roughly one year old technology works as a hybrid model, taking expensive flash technology and combining it with your tradition spinner. First, it saves any programs and files to the traditional hard drive. Then, an algorithm called Adaptive Memory Technology detects what is frequented most and copies it to the flash drive. Consider the AMT your personal money-saving stalker because by copying only your “favorites”, less of the expensive flash drive is needed.

Hybrids are particularly efficient with battery and performance as well. Traditional spinning hard drives tend to break down, slow down and die faster than their flash counterparts. Since favorites are saved to the efficient flash, less time is spent working off the traditional hard drive.

This is where it gets interesting for tablets. If a hybrid hard drive can be placed in mobile devices, it could mean gaining space without sacrificing quality and duration of usage. It also means cutting cost usually associated with flash technology.

Seagate is also thinking mobile with its recently released external hard drive for iOS devices.

Seagate was a 2007 DEMO participant.

Got six minutes to launch your game changer? We’re finding top shelf thinkers from around the world ready to showcase their products at DEMO Fall, on the same stage where companies like Netscape, TiVo, E-Trade, and Java got their start. After you sweat out your six minutes of fame, head off the the DEMO pavilion to chat with potential investors, partners and show off the goods.  Apply for your spot here. Demo Fall 2011 is located at the Hyatt Regency in Silicon Valley, September 12-14.


When it rains … WD has to pay $525M to Seagate in trade-secret theft settlement

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When it rains, it pours for hard disk maker WD. Already hit by floods in Thailand that have hobbled production of hard drives, WD has now been hit with an arbitration court decision ordering it to pay $525 million to Seagate.

WD will no doubt appeal the decision, made by an arbitrator in a case in Minnesota. The suit alleges misuse of confidential information including trade secrets involving a former Seagate employee.

WD CEO John Coyne has issued a terse statement: “We do not believe there is any basis in law or fact for the damage award of the arbitrator. We believe the company acted properly at all times and we will vigorously challenge the award.”

He added, “This does not affect our ability to conduct our operations, to complete the recovery and recommencement of our Thailand operations or, subject to obtaining the required regulatory approvals, to consummate our planned acquisition of Hitachi GST.”

Seagate filed a complaint in the case in October, 2006, alleging trade secret theft. WD asked for the arbitration in June, 2007. WD is in the midst of buying Hitachi GST’s storage business and is proceeding with reopening its factories in Thailand.

[picture credit caramon]

For super-fast laptops, Seagate launches next-generation hybrid flash/hard drive

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Seagate is now shipping a second-generation drive that combines chip-based flash memory with a mechanical hard disk. The combination results in a high-speed, high-capacity drive for laptops and the fastest personal computers.

The hybrid technology is innovative because it combines the speed of flash chips with the low-cost and high storage capacity of hard disks. And Seagate uses software that is smart enough to disguise the storage from the user, who will never know if their data is stored on a chip or the hard disk. It means that everything from games to music, video, spreadsheets, and documents will run faster.

The new drive is three times faster than a typical hard drive, said Joni Clark, product marketing manager at Seagate, in an interview.

“The user doesn’t have to worry about where the memory sits,” she said. “It can be used in any kind of situation.”

The first-generation hybrid drive came out in May 2010 and sold more than a million units. No original equipment manufacturers (computer makers known as OEMs) launched when the drives first came out. But now Seagate has lined up seven OEMs to ship new laptops with the Seagate Momentus XT drive.

Seagate’s drive uses Adaptive Memory and Fast Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory learns a user’s patterns, identifying data storage patterns, and then moves the most frequently retrieved data into the faster chip memory for quick access. Adaptive Memory tailors the hard drive’s performance for each user and the applications they use.

Fast Factor technology blends the strengths of flash chips and hard drives for faster access to applications, quick boot-up, and higher overall system speed.

The new drive competes with stand-alone hard drives, which have high capacity but are slower, and flash chips known as solid state drives, or SSDs. SSDs typically cost a lot more per amount stored, or about $2.50 to $3 per gigabyte. A hard drive can store data at 25 cents per gigabyte. Momentus XT is 70 percent faster than the prior Momentus drive and three times faster than a traditional hard disk. The new drive can also store 750 gigabytes of data, or 50 percent more than last year’s model. The drives include 8 gigabytes of single-level NAND flash chips, or double the storage from a year ago. It has double the interface and read-write speeds of the prior product.

Clark said that the flash portion of the Momentus XT will likely be more reliable than SSDs, which often wear out because they have to be written and overwritten so much. Those are taxing tasks when it comes to reliability, whereas the Momentus XT uses the flash chips as a read cache more so than for writing. And if the flash chips fail, it isn’t catastrophic. The hybrid drive would then function as a normal hard drive.

The Momentus XP 750GB drive will sell for $245 and is available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect. The drive isn’t made in Thailand so supply shortages due to floods have not affected its availability.

Seagate gives you new entertainment choices with 4G LTE storage

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Seagate is announcing today that it is teaming up with Verizon Wireless to create the first 4G LTE mobile wireless storage devices for use with smartphones and tablets.

The devices use 4G LTE mobile networking to connect to the internet from any location and essentially allow you to add huge amounts of storage to your mobile device. Using the wireless connectivity, you can use your smartphone or iPad to view more than 300 high-definition movies stored on a Seagate mobile wireless storage device. You could store the whole catalog of James Bond movies in HD and have each movie ready to play at your fingertips.

Seagate and Verizon are demonstrating the new technology at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

The 4G LTE-connected storage will use the network to connect up to three WiFi-enabled devices to the internet at the same time. The two companies have been working on the technology for about two years and created a multi-party collaboration last year that also includes Novatel Wireless and Skycross. The timing for Seagate’s product hasn’t been determined yet.

“This is an example of innovation in storage,” said Scott Horn, vice president of global marketing for Seagate, in an interview. “It opens up new possibilities for getting your content when you are on the go.”

Consider, for instance, entertaining your kids by letting them watch a movie from a huge collection while they’re sitting in the backseat of a moving car. Each of the kids could be watching a different movie at the same time. The device will be portable, using rechargeable batteries with up to five hours of battery life. It can have WiFi connectivity.

Seagate is also showcasing other storage solutions as well at CES. They include the GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage, first introduced in May 2011. The drive is a WiFi-enabled storage device that can stream media to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Seagate is unveiling new features that improve the device.

The storage company is also unveiling its GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter (pictured right, $99) and the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter ($199), both of which will let users transfer data at high speeds using Intel’s Thunderbolt technology. The GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter will be available in the first quarter, and the desk version will be ready in the second half of the year. Seagate will also show some GoFlex Slim hard drives with more storage, 500 gigabytes instead of the previous 320, for the Mac.

For more gadget news, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

Holy hard drives! Seagate breaks terabit barrier, 60TB drive coming

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ss-hard-drive-655

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has become the first company of its kind to reach the storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, an incredible milestone that will lead to even larger hard drives like a 60TB drive.

The company was able to achieve the new density with a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). This technology allows drive makers to heat up each magnetic “bit” in such a way that their magnetism does not affect each other. Once the magnetism of each bit has been changed, you can pack them more densely into the same space.

“The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity,” said Mark Re, SVP of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate, in a statement. “Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage, and store digital content.”

Theoretically, HAMR allows for densities up to 10 terabits per square inch. Based on this, in the next 10 years we could see a 60TB hard drive made for desktops and laptops.

The maximum capacity of today’s standard 3.5-inch hard drives is just 3TB, while 2.5-inch drives max out at 750GB. The first generation of HAMR drives will most likely at least double these capacities, with 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models.

For someone who never feels like he has enough storage for music and media, this sounds amazing. Let’s hope Seagate (and other drive makers) can deliver.

Hard drive image: Sergej Khakimullin/Shutterstock

Seagate agrees to acquire LaCie for at least $186M

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Seagate said it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Paris-based storage making LaCie for at least $186 million.

Seagate, already one of the world’s largest hard drive makers, will buy the French maker of high-end storage equipment for consumers. Seagate will buy a 64.5 percent stake from LaCie’s founder, Philippe Spruch, for 4.05 euros per share, minus the cash and debt position of LaCie as the deal closes. Then Seagate will buy the rest of the company’s shares via a tender offer. The entire value of LaCie is expected to be about $186 million, including $65 million in cash.

The deal will close in the third calendar quarter, subject to regulatory reviews. The price is a premium of 29 percent to the company’s average closing stock price over the last 30 days.

“We see it as an opportunity to get good software talent,” said Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn in an interview with VentureBeat.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Seagate is also adding new geographic coverage in the consumer market and adds to its product offering. LaCie’s products include mobile cloud offerings, high-end business storage, and Porsche-branded hard drives for consumers. LaCie has several hundred employees.

GamesBeat Weekly Roundup

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Tomb Raider 2013 Concept

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, game developer 38 Studios laid off its entire staff after ongoing financial troubles, BioWare laid off a number of people working on Star Wars the Old Republic, Take-Two faces a larger than expected financial loss, and Blizzard announces its first patch for Diablo III.

You’ll also find previews for Defiance, Kingdom Hearts 3D, and When Viking’s Attack.

The DeanBeat: Playstudios launches myVegas social casino games with MGM as a partner

Blizzard announces first Diablo III patches and delays the real-money auction house

Kingdom Hearts 3D welcomes casual fans back into the series (hands-on preview)

Bringing back Tomb Raider: Our need to fill the old archeologist’s shoes

38 Studios lays off its entire staff

Sony’s When Vikings Attack offers goofy street combat (hands-on preview)

Konami kicks off pre-E3 character battle (gallery)

GameFly buzzes into mobile publishing

GREE mobile gaming platform enters open beta, plans two new Moshi Monsters games

Diablo III sets launch-day record

ShootMania Storm is geared for mass, competitive gaming

Take-Two CEO says product delays signal an “unwavering commitment to quality”

Marvel Heroes’ online game world will let you smash evil for free

SOE announces free-to-play shooter, Bullet Run…which sounds a lot like Super Monday Night Combat

What does a game “producer” do, exactly? (exclusive)

Plant a money tree in Farmville as Zynga and American Express launch new rewards program

ArenaNet president discusses careful monetization of Guild Wars 2, the least greedy Western MMO

Twilight Zone table to rise again in Pinball Arcade with the help of crowdfunding

Origin offers 90 days of free distribution to successful Kickstarter games

VentureBeat:

Video game series contract will be tough for Bungie, easy for Activision

Square Enix’s Mike Fischer says Activision was “crazy” to abandon True Crime: Hong Kong (interview)

Gaming art for your Facebook Timeline (Part 5: Social and Mobile)

Nvidia expects a “breakout year” for mobile chips

Nvidia CEO describes strategic importance of cloud graphics

THQ releases Metro Last Light cinematic story video

Seagate agrees to acquire LaCie for at least $186M

Take-Two disappoints Wall Street with larger-than-expected loss

Activision reacts to fan response to Call of Duty: Black Ops II (video interview)

BioWare lays off staff on Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA to shift employees [updated]

Trion’s Defiance is one story told in an online game and SyFy TV show (hands-on preview)

YoYo Games unveils GameMaker: Studio for cross-platform development

RocketFrog wants to revolutionize online gambling with real-world prizes

How Ghost Recon is gunning to take over the hardcore and social markets (interview)

Are You a Human replaces annoying CAPTCHAs with games

Game of Thrones Ascent aims to please fans with a Facebook game (exclusive)

Seagate invests in Israel’s DensBits to overhaul its flash memory strategy

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Seagate is one of the world’s biggest hard disk drive makers, but these days, storage is growing well beyond spinning disks. That’s why Seagate is announcing an investment and strategic agreement with Israel’s DensBits Technologies.

Under the deal, Strategic will help DensBits provide customers with low-cost, high-performance Solid State Drives, or chips based on flash memory technology. Those chips will be targeted at the consumer and enterprise markets.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Seagate invested an undisclosed amount for an equity stake in Haifa, Israel-based DensBits. It will make future products based on DensBits’ Memory Modem controller technology, which will be combined with Seagate’s various storage technologies including its 3-bits-per-cell 1Xnm Flash-based consumer-grade SSDs, and its 2 bits per cell 1Xnm Flash-based enterprise SSDs.

“We are very excited at the opportunity of collaborating with Seagate,” said DensBits chief executive Ilan Hen. “This is yet another testament to our technology leadership, and we strongly believe that the coupling between DensBits’ unique Memory Modem controller technology and Seagate’s exceptional storage capabilities across the board could truly disrupt the industry.”

DensBits improves the reliability of flash memory chips and brings down its costs without compromising on performance. Since flash memory is typically not 100 percent reliable, a considerable part of each chip has to be set aside for a process known as error correction. With better reliability, less error correction is necessary, and the overall chip can be much more efficient.


Weaker Q2 tech earnings could make investors jittery

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Earnings season starts this week for tech companies, and no one is expecting outstanding second-quarter results. If the reports turn out to be weaker than expected, then tech investors might run for the hills, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

The world economy has been shaky, mainly due to a slowdown in Europe. Demand for PCs, corporate computing gear, and software may have had a weak quarter. China’s economy is slowing, hurting the growth of the PC market, according to Bloomberg. And some suppliers to the PC market have warned about weaker financials.

Starting on Tuesday, Intel and Yahoo will report their second-quarter earnings. They will be followed by eBay and IBM on Wednesday; Google, Advanced Micro Devices, SanDisk, and Microsoft report on Thursday. Apple reports on July 24.

“Weakness is broad and is spreading in tech land,” Ambrish Srivastava, a financial analyst at BMO Capital Markets, warned in a report, the Mercury News said.

Apple is expected to have a good quarter, but there’s a chance that its sales will level off as consumers wait for an as-yet-unannounced new version of the iPhone. Facebook, on the other hand, has seen its stock price falter, bringing social game maker Zynga down with it. Yahoo has had a tough time with its CEO turnover.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, and Intel will rise or fall based on sales in the commercial tech sector. Advanced Micro Devices, a maker of microprocessors, and Applied Materials, the largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, warned that their sales would be lower than expected. Seagate, the storage giant, also offered a warning.

Nobody is expecting an outlook as gloomy as the 2008 financial crash.

Here’s the schedule for upcoming earnings announcements:

Tuesday July 17: Intel, Yahoo
Wednesday July 18: eBay, IBM
Thursday July 19: Google, AMD, SanDisk, Microsoft
July 23: VMware, THQ
July 24: Apple, Netflix, Juniper Networks, EMC
July 25: Symantec, Zynga
July 26: Facebook, Informatica
July 30: EA, Yelp, Seagate
Aug. 2: Activision, LinkedIn
Aug. 9: Nvidia
Aug. 13: GameStop, Groupon
Aug. 21: Dell
Aug. 22: HP

Seagate’s Wireless Plus mobile storage lets you take your whole media collection into the wilderness

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Seagate Wireless

When you’re out in the great outdoors, the last thing you want is to run out of videos to watch and music to listen to. OK, sarcasm aside, Seagate is launching a very cool gadget that will let you take your entire media collection out into the wilderness with you.

Seagate Wireless Plus Unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Seagate Wireless Plus is like a portable hard drive that you can carry with you. It is not connected to the Internet, but it can stream media stored on it to as many as eight smartphones or tablets at a time. If you’re driving in a car, it can stream a video to you and a song to your sibling sitting next to you.

The device has a 1 terabyte hard drive, with enough space to store up to 500 high-definition movies. With a 10-hour battery, it lets you extend the limits of today’s mobile lifestyle, said Greg Falgiano, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, in an interview with VentureBeat. That makes it a good match for the battery life of most smartphones and tablets, he said.

“You can access your content when you are off the grid — in the middle of the desert or on an island in the Pacific Ocean,” he said.

Now you can access your media when you’re on a long road trip or a flight, without an Internet connection. The device actually creates its own Wi-Fi network in a local area and uses that to stream the media to your devices.

You can access the device using the mobile Seagate Media app for Apple iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire HD devices. It works with any device that can connect to a Wi-Fi network. You can access your Seagate Wireless Plus media using Apple Airplay, which projects it onto a big screen TV. You can also access it via DLNA connections or Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players.

Seagate debuted its first device in this category in 2011.

“Smartphones and tablets offer amazing new opportunities for Seagate to provide new consumer storage solutions in an increasingly mobile world,” said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate developed the concept of wireless storage to free consumers to enjoy their documents, movies, photos, and music anywhere in the world, especially when they can’t connect to the Internet. Seagate Wireless Plus builds on the success of our first generation product and takes it even further.”

The drive comes with a removable SuperSpeed USB 3.0 adapter for quick loading of media. The Wireless Plus has its own Wi-Fi network so that you don’t need to stream or download your content from the Internet or spend money on a data plan.

Seagate CentralBrett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates, said that less than half of U.S. mobile phone users are highly satisfied with the storage of their mobile phone, and 20 percent are dissatisfied with their mobile storage capacity. The Seagate Wireless Plus device is available from Amazon and BestBuy.com for $200. The device replaces Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite and competes with the Kingston Wi-Drive, Transcend StoreJet Cloud, Maxell AirStash A02, and the Buffalo MiniStation Air. Seagate says its advantage is more storage for the buck and ease of use.

In another announcement at CES, Seagate said it is launching Seagate Central, an external backup drive that lets you gather all of your home data in one location. It lets you set up automatic backups for a bunch of computing devices, and it works across both Windows and Mac computers. Once you gather your content, you can access it from all of your devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets.

Robert Rodriguez, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, said the Seagate Central device replaces the GoFlex Home. You can upload or download data to the device via Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G connections.

The device is shipping in March. It comes in several sizes: two terabytes for $189, three terabytes for $219, and four terabytes for $259. You can make it secure by setting up a username and password. It works with USB 3.0 cables.

Seagate dumps $40M into Flash-storage startup Virident

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Today, hard drive giant Seagate announced it’s investing a huge $40 million chunk of change in Virident, a startup focused on Flash storage.

With the investment, Seagate will buy itself a board seat as well as the advantages of a “strategic partnership” with the younger company.

A rep for the companies said via email that as of the deal’s announcement, Seagate will immediately start selling a complete line of Flash-based technologies to its other partners (including OEMs), and Virident will be using Seagate’s ample marketing and distribution channels. Both companies will collaborate on next-gen hardware and software designs.

“This partnership validates Virident’s vision of pervasive flash in the performance tier and accelerates our shared vision by bringing next-generation SCM solutions to the enterprise and web datacenters worldwide.” said Virident CEO Mike Gustafson in a statement on the news.

Seagate’s heavy investment in Flash storage was also made evident in last year’s acquisition of LaCie (a French storage-focused company) and its investment in DensBits, an Israeli company that makes “Memory Modem, a revolutionary technology created to address the ever-increasing need for low-cost, high-performance NAND Flash-based storage systems.”

Virident, based in Milpitas, Calif., was founded in 2006. To date, the company has taken $103.7 million in four rounds of institutional funding. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Intel, and Cisco.

Funding Daily: Dancing on my own

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robynI love to dance. This does not mean I am good at it. Sure I used to take jazz and hip hop classes at summer camp and swung dance myself into a tizzy at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a “good dancer.” Still, I couldn’t conduct important research for my article on ChaCha’s round of funding without practicing a few dance steps. That is hard core journalism right there. 1, 2, cha cha cha.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

You got questions? ChaCha’s got $14M and answers

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s what keeps ChaCha chugging along. This human powered Q&A service, in which humans answer other humans’ questions in real time, has raised a new round of $14 million. This is its seventh round of institutional funding since it was founded in 2006. This investment came from VantagePoint Capital Partners, Rho Ventures, and Qualcomm. Previous investors include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Morton Meyerson. ChaCha has raised a total of $82 million to date. Read more on VentureBeat.

Seagate dumps $40M into Flash-storage startup Virident

Today, hard drive giant Seagate announced it’s investing a huge $40 million chunk of change in Virident, a startup focused on Flash storage. A rep for the companies said via email that as of the deal’s announcement, Seagate will immediately start selling a complete line of Flash-based technologies to its other partners (including OEMs), and Virident will be using Seagate’s ample marketing and distribution channels. Both companies will collaborate on next-gen hardware and software designs. Virident, based in Milpitas, Calif., was founded in 2006. To date, the company has taken $103.7 million in four rounds of institutional funding. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Intel, and Cisco. Read more on VentureBeat.

SALT sprinkles $2 million to flavor up its payments platform

Payments startup SALT Technology has received $2 million in its first round of financing. Its platform enables carriers, banks, and merchants to quickly set up secure mobile payments, including branded mobile wallets, QR-codes, and Near Field Communication, or peer-to-peer systems. SALT did not reveal the investors, although it claims it is an “impressive list of private investors formerly from organizations including Apple and PayPal.” Read the press release. 

FarmLogs yields $1M in seed funding

FarmLogs is a Y Combinator alum that seeks to modernize the farming industry.  FarmLogs’ software helps farmers manage their farm. Today, the company based out of Ann Arbor, Mich., announced it’s harvesting $1 million in seed funding, which is led by Huron River Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures. With this investment, FarmLogs will expand its team of four and accelerate development of mobile applications for the 2013 planting season. Read more on VentureBeat.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr user NRK P3. 


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Seagate shipped a billion hard drives in the last four years — thanks, data hogs!

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Blue LEDs on servers indicate all is well

Our never-ending hunger for data is helping Seagate make lots of money.

The hard drive manufacturer said today that it’s finally shipped its 2 billionth drive. Seagate says it attributes the feat in large part to the tech world’s newfound addiction to data-intensive streaming video services and social networks.

The most telling metric is this one: Seagate says it took it 29 years to ship a billion drives, but it only took it four years to reach its second billion. That makes our hunger for data sound like full-blown gluttony.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Seagate is one half of the hard drive duopoly shared with rival Western Digital, which, like Seagate, has made a habit of scooping up competitors (Seagate bought Lacie last year, for example, and Samsung’s hard drive business in 2011).This has created a largely uncontested space for the two big players, so it’s not the biggest surprise that Seagate’s doing so well.

Seagate moves deeper into flash memory as it launches consumer solid-state drives alongside enterprise line-up

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seagate ssd

Seagate was born many decades ago as a pioneer in hard disk drives, which are now generating $10 billion a year in revenue for the company. But now it is launching its own line of flash memory-based storage devices that mark a strategic shift for the company and the storage industry. Seagate first announced its move into flash, or solid-state drives (SSDs), in 2009. It has played in the enterprise flash market for a while, but now it is expanding into client-side SSDs.

Today, Seagate is unveiling its complete consumer-to-enterprise solid-state drive lineup that will be sold along with Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s hard disks and hybrid hard drives, or storage devices that combine both speedy flash memory chips and high-capacity hard disks. For consumers, this means that laptops should boot four times faster and applications should load twice as fast compared to a normal hard drive.

Gary Gentry, the senior vice president and general manager of Seagate’s solid state drive business, said in an interview with VentureBeat that Seagate is expanding its presence in the enterprise SSD market, which is about $8 billion in annual sales. The hard drive market is expected to be about $32.7 billion in 2013, down about 11.8 percent from $37.1 billion last year, according to market researcher IHS iSuppli. One of the reasons for that change is that SSDs are taking market share from hard drives. Hard drives have a cost advantage over SSDs, especially at higher storage densities. But SSDs are more power efficient and faster in some data center applications.

Seagate’s new lineup includes four major product lines: the Seagate 600 SSD, the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, the Seagate 1200 SSD, and a PCIe accelerator card, dubbed the Seagate X8 Accelerator powered by Virident. The latter product means that Seagate is going into battle with Fusion-io, which is a leader in the accelerator card market. Seagate made an investment in Virident in January, and the new card is a collaborative effort between the two companies.  Seagate is also fighting head-to-head with Fujitsu in the enterprise market.

The client-side Seagate 600 SSD has 6 gigabit-per-second performance and faster boot-up times than hard drives. The results means you won’t wait as long to access your programs and retrieve your data.

“SSDs continue to be among the most popular product categories on Newegg.com as more consumers increasingly turn to them to deliver more speed, faster boot-up times, and superior performance,” said Patrick Chung, the vice president of global product management at Newegg. “Seagate’s new line of SSDs, including the new 600 SSD, will be a great addition to our existing assortment. We’re excited to introduce the new SSDs to our customers and look forward to continuing our strategic partnership with Seagate.”

Tiger Direct, Rorke Data, and others will be selling the Seagate SSDs. The SSDs use about 2.8 watts while operating, dramatically reducing energy used compared to a hard drive. If the device loses power suddenly, it won’t lose the data. Seagate is pitching the products for both consumers and enterprises.

Will flash or disk drives own the future of data storage?

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This is a guest post by Gary Gentry, SVP of solid state drives at Seagate.

“Flash or disk?” That question — whether the future of data storage would be defined by flash memory or hard drives — has been a looming battle in the storage industry for the last several years.

Hard drives, of course, remain the heart of the storage industry. Manufacturers shipped 524 million disk drives in 2012, according to iSuppli, more than ten times the 39 million flash drives that were shipped in the same period. Worldwide manufacturing capacity for drives at the end of 2012 came to around 125,000 petabytes per quarter, compared to around 10,000 petabytes per quarter for flash. By volume, hard drives are tough to beat.

But look at the growth rates, say flash advocates. Shipments will grow from 39 million units in 2012 to 83 million units in 2013. By 2016, 239 million flash drives will be shipping annually, propelled by sales of tablets, smartphones, and notebooks. Enterprise arrays based on flash will also gain a stronger following among corporate buyers like banks and technology firms with an excruciating need for speed. Flash might be in the minority, argue advocates, but it has time on its side.

The debate, however, ignores a critical variable that changes the whole tenor of the debate. And that variable is the rate of data growth. The opportunity and demand is simply too large for either technology alone. When you start to look at it in that context, you can start to see that the future really isn’t “flash versus disk.” Instead, it’s “flash and disk.”

Online auction house eBay, for instance, recently said it installed 100 petabytes of storage last year. Two terabytes is the same amount of information contained in all of the U.S. research libraries. The company’s big data servers come with twelve drives containing two terabytes each.

“It is the storage, stupid,” Dean Nelson, eBay’s vice president of Global Foundation Services, told ReadWrite recently. “The volume of growth of storage is insane.”

IDC estimates that the total amount of digital information in the world grew 48 percent to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012. And a huge portion of that new data is unstructured files like YouTube videos and audio files.

On top of that, add in the data that will be generated by valves, security cameras, light bulbs, and the other residents of the coming “Internet of Things.” The world will need both disk and flash because it will need as much storage capacity as it can get its hands on. Gartner reports that many of its clients expanded their storage requirements by 80 percent in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Economics play a role too. It’s simply far less expensive to manufacture drives. A new facility for producing hard drives costs about $35 to $50 million and can be operational in about four months. A similar flash factory that can produce 100,000 wafers a month costs about $4 billion and takes two years to build. It would take $210 billion in factory investments to displace 15 percent of the demand for drives in 2014, according to Gartner. Partly as result, disk drives will invariably cost less. By 2016, a 2TB drive will cost manufacturers $39 to $45 to produce while a 300GB SSD drive will cost $90 to $100.

Displacing all of the demand for drives would take more than $1 trillion of new investment. Besides being impractical, a sudden surge in investment would likely plunge the semiconductor industry into a massive slump.

So does this mean flash won’t play a significant role? Not at all. At Seagate, we’ve been investing in flash and shipping flash-based products for more than four years and will continue to expand our flash portfolio.

Flash will be deployed strategically. Flash drives will likely take over markets where power consumption and size outweigh cost and capacity. Tablets will be dominated by flash: no one is going to put a hard drive in a lightweight tablet or e-book reader. Notebooks will come with flash drives or hybrid drives, which combine both technologies. Back-up drives, desktops, and set-top boxes will likely veer toward traditional disk drives.

In enterprises, most servers will come with a traditional drive or a hybrid drive alone with a flash-based PCIe card to accelerate the flow of data. Flash-based storage arrays will handle the most time-sensitive jobs but be backed by even larger arrays of disks. Flash-based PCIe cards are another opportunity to expand.

Some manufacturers have also begun to develop storage systems with server capabilities. With these systems, storage effectively becomes the focal point of the data center, not the computer.

Drives will experience a quantum leap in performance with the introduction of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that will increase density to over a terabit per square inch. Flash manufacturers, however, will follow up with memory devices made with three-dimensional transistors a few years later. Every reaction will lead to a complimentary reaction.

The technology world might want to see a battle between standards and technologies. But instead, it’s most likely going to get an uneasy truce.

Gary Gentry is senior vice president of solid state at Seagate. Gentry has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, including most recently as the general manager of the Enterprise SSD Division of Micron Corporation. Prior to rejoining Seagate, he held leadership positions focusing on solid-state technologies at Spansion Corporation and Storage Genetics.

Close up of hard disk with abstract reflection via kubais/Shutterstock


Seagate invests in custom chip design firm eASIC

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eASIC

Storage giant Seagate has made a strategic equity investment in custom chip design firm eASIC.

The companies didn’t disclose the amount of the deal.

On top of the investment, both companies are exploring the chance to jointly develop custom chips for Seagate’s portfolio of solid state drives — the flash memory-based cards that are replacing hard disk drives in many computers.

Seagate has been launching more of its own solid state drives (SSDs) in response to the changing market for corporate data storage: Flash chips, which are low-power, fast, and expensive, increasingly compete on a better cost footing with cheap, power-hungry, and slow hard disk drives in corporate data centers.

eASIC is a kind of middleman that makes it easier for chip designers to create custom chips that they can bring to market much faster than traditional custom semiconductors. Flash chips are getting more complex to design as the number of interfaces that interact with them multiply. Seagate and eASIC want to craft high-performance, low-cost, and low-power chips that can be targeted at consumer, enterprise, and cloud markets.

“eASIC has demonstrated innovative custom silicon technology with our industry-leading solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs)”, said Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer at Seagate, in a statement. “eASIC’s ability to quickly develop custom differentiated solutions while meeting stringent cost, power and performance requirements will enable us to rapidly deliver storage solutions and improve our product position in both SSD and SSHD’s.”

“We are extremely excited to be working with one of the world leaders in storage technology,” said Ronnie Vasishta, president and chief executive of eASIC. “Seagate has an exceptional history in bringing world class technology and innovation to the storage market. Using our eASIC [technology] will help Seagate to bring storage innovation at a pace not yet seen in this industry.”

Funding Daily: Hot off the press

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Washington Post

Acquisition news usually does not get included in Funding Daily, but today I am making an exception. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. As a journalist and D.C. native, this news strikes pretty close at home. I wrote a lengthy report on Katharine Graham in middle school and my fellow high school newspaper editors and I spent hours poring over the Post’s pages for inspiration. I know this news does not mean that the Post will go away, but certainly it is the end of an era. Here is to the Graham family, you had a good ride.

FireEye brings more legitimacy to new security solutions with IPO filing

Security company FireEye filed to go public last week, joining only a handful of security companies to IPO in the last two years. FireEye monitors your company’s network by setting up virtual machines that watch anything coming in or out of the system. It learns what malware activity looks like and then stops anything it recognizes as a threat in the virtual machine before it ever reaches you. According to the filing, the company has proposed a maximum aggregate offering price of $175 million. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Clutch puts $5.3M into its own mobile wallet 

Mobile payments startup Clutch has raised $5.3 million in its second round of funding. Clutch has built a mobile wallet, shopping consumer app, and merchant platform. It stores cards and coupons, and also offers daily deals, trending products, shopping searches, price comparisons, and gifting features.  Safeguard Scientifics led the round for this Philadelphia-based company, with participation from previous investors Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Clutch also announced the acquisition of loyalty and gifting startup ProfitPoint.

Maxwell Health gets $2M to help employers manage their health plans

New York-based startup Maxwell Health just raised $2 million to help employers set up affordable health and wellness plans. It’s a particularly useful tool for entrepreneurs and small business owners, as Maxwell Health offers guidance on the various health insurance plans, financial benefits, spending accounts, life insurance, and payroll. The company raised its funding from Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Vaizra Investments, BoxGroup, and additional New York and Boston-based investors, including TiE Angels. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Blue Wireless sees green with $3.1M in funding

English company Blu Wireless has raised $3.1 million for its 60GHz wireless IP. Blu Wireless’s technology enables faster file transfers, wireless display, docking and streaming of HD media on a variety of devices. Qi3 Accelerator led this round, which represents a syndicate of London Business Angels private investors, including Wren Capital.

Socrative ponders $750K in seed financing

Socrative has raised $750K in seed financing from True Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel invests. The Boston-based startup offers a mobile and web-based student response system that helps teachers engage their students through educational exercise and games, via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Seagate invests in custom chip design firm eASIC

Storage giant Seagate has made a strategic equity investment in custom chip design firm eASIC. The companies didn’t disclose the amount of the deal. On top of the investment, both companies are exploring the chance to jointly develop custom chips for Seagate’s portfolio of solid state drives: the flash memory-based cards that are replacing hard disk drives in many computers. Read more on VentureBeat.

RecruitLoop follow its nose to $500K

RecruitLoop has raised half a million dollars for its platform that connects recruiters with employers. Employers can search for recruiters in its marketplace and hire them on an hourly basis, so they don’t have to pay commission for success fees. The company started out in Australia and has opened an office in San Francisco. The funding came from private investors in Australia, Singapore, the UAE, and Europe.


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Seagate disrupts cloud economics with storage that can cut infrastructure costs by 50%

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Seagate moves to the cloud

Seagate is launching a new cloud storage platform today that it says will fundamentally alter the economics for internet infrastructure.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based storage giant says that its Seagate Kinect Open Storage platform is a big leap in scalable storage for the enterprise. It simplifies data management, improves performance and scalability, and lowers the cost of owning cloud infrastructure by up to 50 percent.

“Our internal R&D teams have designed an unique, first-of-its-kind storage architecture to enable cheaper, more scalable object storage solutions that free up IT professionals from having to invest in hardware and software they don’t need— while empowering them with the most innovative storage technology available,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. “This technology optimizes storage solutions for a new era of cloud storage systems, while drastically reducing overall costs.”

The platform gets rid of the storage server tier of data centers by enabling applications to speak directly to the storage device. It reduces expenses associated with the acquisition, deployment, and support of hyperscale storage infrastructures. Companies can realize additional cost savings by reducing their hardware and cutting out power and cooling costs. 

Among the customers trying out the new technology is Yahoo.

“At Yahoo, we’re always looking for new ways to improve efficiency and simplicity of our infrastructure and we’re excited about Seagate’s Kinetic Open Storage platform. Industry has proven time and again that Ethernet always wins— seeing this down to the drive level is a fantastic optimization,” said Kevin Graham, principle storage architect, Yahoo Infrastructure Group. “To that point, we’ve been engaging with Seagate for the past several months on how we can leap ahead of the architectural status quo to provide the most efficient, reliable storage for our users.”

Seagate will launch a new applications programming interface (API) that it will make available under an open source license for connecting Ethernet with Seagate’s hard drives. Seagate said it has a lot of support from companies such as Dell, Basho Technologies, EVault, Huawei, Rackspace, Newisys, Supermicro, and SwiftStack.

“Seagate’s ambitious move into the storage platform space is a natural extension to their core storage business and their new Kinetic Open Storage platform is one that could redefine how data centers are architected going forward,” said, Laura DuBois program vice president IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions. “Implementing this technology will empower data centers with more scalable solutions at an industry-low TCO— driving change in the world of storage.”

 

Thin, fast, and big capacity: Seagate launches a little backup drive that can store 4 terabytes of data

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Seagate's Rocky Pimentel, president of customers and marketing.

Seagate is taking personal storage to new heights as it announces its Backup Plus Fast portable drive with 4 terabytes of data in a small black box. The box has twice the capacity and speed of existing external portable backup drives.

The storage giant is making the announcements at the 2014 International CES, the huge tech trade show this week in Las Vegas. Seagate is also announcing slimmer backup drives and an expansion of its data-rescue plan for consumers as well.

Based on my own calculations, the Seagate Backup Plus Fast drive can store about 68,000 hours of music, 1.24 million digital photos, 4,000 hours of digital video, or 2,000 hours of DVD movies. Seagate and industry sources estimate that data storage is growing at 50 percent a year thanks to the explosion of digital services. The demand for such devices is putting Seagate front and center with consumers in ways that it hasn’t been in the past.

Seagate Backup Plus Fast

Above: Seagate Backup Plus Fast.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“This is all about the mobile markets and getting in front of the consumer,” said Rocky Pimentel, the president of consumers and marketing at Seagate, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are at a crossroads in our role in storage. We are much more directly involved with consumers, and we have some consumers that can’t get enough storage.”

The new Seagate Backup Plus Fast drive has a superspeed universal serial bus (USB) 3.0 interface that can transfer data at 220 megabytes per second. It’s aimed at people like field photographers or mobile filmmakers looking to quickly back up a lot of files. It doesn’t need an external power supply and can fit in a camera bag or backpack. It measures 4.6 inches by 3.2 inches by 0.88 inches.

Seagate provides its Seagate Dashboard software that makes it easy to back up or share data with a single click. It also includes a free Seagate Mobile Backup app on iOS or Android to back up all of the pictures and videos from that device to a drive or a cloud service. That’s interesting because five years ago, Seagate didn’t even have an app. Now mobile apps are part of the core product.

Scott Horn, the vice president of global marketing for Seagate, said in an interview that the Backup Plus Fast drive, with a sturdy metal case, will appeal to creative professionals who are on the run. Jim Sugar, a National Geographic photographer, said he needs fast speed and large capacity to back up his digital photography and videos, whether they are still photos or time-lapse video or 4K video.

“These new products are all about playing well with mobile and the cloud,” Horn said.

The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast drive sells for $300 on Seagate’s own site.

Seagate Backup Plus Slim

Above: Seagate Backup Plus Slim.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

In a secondary announcement, Seagate also launched a new slimmer 2TB drive. The company previously launched the Seagate Backup Plus at CES a couple of years ago. Now it’s refreshing that lineup under the name Seagate Backup Plus Slim, which is ideal for backing up data either from your computer or your mobile phone.

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim has a svelte design and superspeed USB 3.0 interface for fast backup. It includes the Seagate Dashboard that makes it simple to back up data on a desktop, laptop, Android device, or iOS device. You can take the stored data on those devices and back them up to the drive or to a Seagate cloud service via a home network or a Wi-Fi connection. 

“Mobile devices account for the largest amount of captured video and photos today,” said Chris Chute, the research director for IDC’s Worldwide Digital Imaging Practice. “Seven out of every ten pictures captured in 2013 were taken with a smartphone. As a greater portion of our memories are captured by the handheld devices, it becomes increasingly more important that these files be backed up either to a cloud service or locally.”

The Slim drives are just 12.1 millimeters thick and come in red, blue, black, and silver cases. The cases are made to resist scratches and fingerprints. The Backup Plus Slim sells for $100 for 500GBs, $120 for 1TB, and $180 for 2TBs.

Lastly, Seagate announced that it has extended its Rescue Data Protection Plan to new retailers in the U.S. and Canada. Staples will provide the service in the U.S. while NCIX and Canada Computer will do so in Canada. The service helps customers recover files that have been damaged, lost, or destroyed. The cost of recovering data can often reach into thousands of dollars. The protection plan sells for $50 for a two-year plan for laptops and desktops. External drives start at $30 for a two-year plan.

Seagate has competitors like WD. But its biggest competition is still the failure of consumers to back up data. Roughly one in five people back up their data on a regular basis. That number is steadily increasing. Pimentel said that Seagate had hired a number of ex-Apple employees who will help the company with the design of a better experience that will make it easier to users to adopt.

“Their input will show up in our future products,” Pimentel said.

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Seagate launches a 2-terabyte game drive for Xbox consoles

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A 2-TB hard drive from Seagate for Xbox One

Seagate is announcing today it is launching a 2-terabyte hard disk drive for the Microsoft Xbox One and Xbox 360 video game consoles.

Making the announcement at the Gamescom fan show in Cologne, Germany, Seagate said it has created the new storage device specifically in mind for Xbox gamers. The machine could easily store data for more than 50 games, considering that most game installs take up 35 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes these days.

Seagate made a strategic marketing relationship with Microsoft, in part because Microsoft controls what external disk drives can be connected to an Xbox One or Xbox 360.

“With all of the new and amazing titles expected for this holiday season and a ton more games coming in the future, Xbox gamers will need even more storage and portability,” said Matt Kesselring, business development manager for Microsoft’s designed for Xbox partner program, in a statement. “Microsoft is privileged to be working with Seagate as our trusted partner for this important designed for Xbox peripheral.”

With the Seagate Game Drive for Xbox, you will no longer have to delete so many games from your console’s library. The disk uses a USB 3.0 connection, and it has a green top-case and black body, embossed with both the Xbox and Seagate logos.

“This exciting new collaboration with Microsoft Xbox is an important milestone for Seagate that will help us to reach a new audience which has an insatiable appetite for storage,” said Jeff Fochtman, senior director of product marketing for Seagate, in a statement. “There was a clearly defined need in this market for additional plug-and-play storage, and
Seagate is happy to be able to provide the solution.”

The drive will retail for $110 at GamesStop, Best Buy, Amazon, and other consumer electronic retailers worldwide.

 

Close-up of Seagate's 2-terabyte hard drive for Xbox One and Xbox 360

Above: Close-up of Seagate’s 2-terabyte hard drive for Xbox One and Xbox 360

Image Credit: Seagate
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