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And, in this case, ignore the hyperbole and pay close attention to what the signposts mean. If you’re looking for a silver lining to the ridiculous run-up in energy costs in the last year, this is it. The typical Fortune 500 company shells out a small fortune to jet its executives around the world each month: The World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that U.S. businesses spend some $179 billion on corporate travel annually.

(Credit:
Cisco)

Considering the scope of Cisco’s $10.4 billion in sales during the second quarter, this qualifies as relative chump change. The list price for the company’s typical telepresence configuration is $299,000. Also, there’s a difference between the way Cisco books orders and sales.

When it comes to various telepresence incarnations, we’re still talking about relatively few units at this stage and it’s unclear whether we’re on the cusp of a permanent or just temporary behavioral shift. Remember that after the Arab oil boycott in 1973, Americans began to embrace smaller, more gasoline-efficient automobiles. Unfortunately, that trend did not last long after prices at the pump returned to their historically cheap levels.

Tech CEOs tend to lay it on a bit thick when talking up the bright spots in their business, and Chambers naturally couldn’t resist seizing upon the telepresence statistics to proclaim video as “the killer app.” But that’s just John being John. No harm, no foul.

During Tuesday’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers mentioned in passing that orders of the company’s telepresence units were up 500 percent year over year.

John Chambers and Al Gore in telepresence mode.

In time, the system costs doubtless will come down–though obviously not to Kmart levels. But if energy prices suddenly plummet as fast as they climbed, might business buyers have a change of heart about investing in expensive teleconferencing systems? Their depth of conviction remains the $64,000 question.

Of course, Cisco’s not the only game in town. The roster of manufacturers offering comparable videoconferencing packages for conducting virtual meetings include the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, Tandberg, and Polycom. (Also, there’s IBM, which nearly a decade ago came out with Lotus Sametime, which merged Web videoconferencing with IM and audio-sharing capabilities.) The common idea of these and other similar products is to make participants in any virtual meeting appear and sound just as they might when attending a meeting in person.

Well, that didn’t take long. Barry Klawans, former CTO at JasperSoft, resigned from Jasper a month or so ago citing the need to unwind and spend time with his family.

…with relief!

Apparently, six weeks of that was all his family could stand, as he has joined Hyperic (on a part-time basis) to help with its JasperSoft integration. His kids are crying…

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Welcome back, Barry. If your kids are like mine, you’ll never leave us for long.

Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.

That could mean a few things: on one hand, an initial public offering, but on the other hand, Glam could have recruited him simply because it needs to make more money. With an advertising recession looming and talk of dot-com doom spreading all over the Web, Glam could just be getting down to business. For obvious reasons, a financial crisis isn’t the greatest time to go public; Glam is also rumored to have gone through a round of layoffs earlier this fall.

That said, Glam (and its colorful CEO, Samir Arora) is known for its audacity. The company first made its name as an ad network on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, before branching out into everything from eco-living to African-American lifestyle to the luxury market. It’s raised an astonishing amount of venture capital, has stocked its executive ranks with veterans of both print publishing and Silicon Valley, and was at the center of a rumored billion-dollar buyout offer.

But now it looks as if there’s one ex-Shutterfly executive who’s betting on the former.

Depending on whom you talked to, that buyout offer was either a fake rumor started internally to drum up Glam’s market value or a savvy pre-IPO move. And that’s the bipolar perception of Glam in both the tech and advertising sectors: some think it’s the future of the industry, whereas skeptics see it as a big, drawn-out case of pride before a fall.

Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.

“(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online,” Recht said in a release. “I’m looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the company’s continued upward trajectory.”

It works. I couldn't get my own screen grab. This one, which shows the first two lines of an IM chat evaporating, came from BigString's own site.

The service is free, and will be supported, presumably, by disappearing ads.

BigString just released “Self Destructing Instant Messaging,” a plug-in for AIM that lets you convert an ordinary IM discussion into one where the messages literally vanish from the screen moments after they are sent.

To initiate a self-destructing thread, you have to start from AOL’s IM client and install the BigString software add-on. Then, from within AIM, you get an option to “Go BigString,” which if the company were not so enamored of its branding, would say instead something useful, like “launch secret IM window.” At any rate, once you select this option, a browser window pops up on your computer, and the person at the other end of your chat is sent a URL to pop up a similar window. The two of you then have your IM talk in this browser-based chat. In the window, the messages vanish from the screen after a predetermined period of time (default is 10 seconds), and they cannot be copied from the screen nor even screen-grabbed before they go.

The tool is useful for terrorists, thieves, and child predators, not to mention teenagers, job-seekers doing their seeking from the office, paranoid government types, anyone in financial services or health care, and possibly reporters’ sources–just to make their jobs a little more difficult.

Despite the serious privacy the product adds to IM, the interface is overly cutesy. I would like to see an option for a more graphically-straightforward version of the evaporating e-mail.

You can, of course, take a picture of the screen to record your chats, or just write things down. But there’s no on-computer way to actually record a BigString IM conversation.

(Credit:
BigString)

The company is working on a Meebo-like Web-based client that will support several IM networks, but for now, as I said, you need to use the AIM client to initiate a secure chat with the product.

Oddly, the URL the product uses for its disappearing Web chats is not secure (https:), so I am not sure that chat contents cannot be intercepted en route. But at least you’ll know that no records of your IM are being kept on your PC.

(Credit:
CNET)

We’d still recommend the iMac if you’re looking for a serious all-in-one PC, but now that HP’s revamped TouchSmart is available in stores, we expect a few of you will take a chance on HP’s touch-sensitive design. If you do, stick it in the kitchen or some other place where you can walk up to it and use it like a home organization kiosk. You can do that with a corkboard or your refrigerator door as well, but most of those lack Web access and the ability to play MP3s.

HP’s TouchSmart all-in-one hits retail stores today.

So Dell appears committed to XPS laptops, even those that excel at gaming.

“We want to lead in this market. Simple, really. So that’s why we’re investing so much in the gaming systems of the future–we want those on an Alienware or XPS to reign supreme.”

Part of Dell’s statement takes issue with a Wall Street Journal report.

But the statement also takes issue with aspects of The Wall Street Journal report. “XPS gaming systems will remain an important part of our gaming product portfolio. We don’t plan an early phase-out of these systems, as the WSJ incorrectly stated, and in fact will continue to refresh them to keep them on the front edge of gaming,” Camden said.

“Dell XPS and Alienware are both great brands…and both will live on,” spokeswoman Anne Camden said in a blog. “But we are going to expand our focus on Alienware. We are going to invest like crazy in product development, design, and engineering to propel Alienware as the premier gaming brand in the future.”

Camden emphasized that XPS is a premium, cutting-edge brand–beyond just a game PC label. “XPS remains an important Dell brand with its heritage of premium performance…In the last year, XPS has expanded well beyond a gaming brand–look at the XPS One, our first entry into the all-in-one market, the XPS M1330, an industry leading ultraportable or the XPS 420 desktop, designed for multimedia activities.”

Dell issued a statement on Tuesday night, saying the XPS brand will live on but that more resources will go into Alienware.

Netflix has declined to say what caused the glitch, how many customers were affected, or what the total cost was to the company.

Netflix has extended an apology, in the form of a discount, to customers in the wake of an 11-hour site outage.

On Monday, the Web’s leading movie-rental service suffered its second extended outage in the past nine months. This time, the glitch led to customers receiving their DVDs a day late. For those who were inconvenienced, Netflix is crediting their account 5 percent.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused,” Netflix told customers via e-mail. “We will issue a (5 percent) credit to your account in the next few days.”

Last week, a group calling itself the Overdub Tampering Committee posted an online manifesto in which its anonymous members claim to have downloaded songs from various sources (Limewire, OiNK, The Pirate Bay, and so on), overdubbed extra parts, then re-uploaded them. The group claims that if you’re a frequent downloader of grey-market music from these types of sites, you’ve probably got one of their messed-up mashups on your hard drive.

Real or not, imagine if this type of remixing becomes a mainstream activity, with everybody posting their personal dubs to their blogs or social-networking home pages. Perhaps some enterprising artists will begin to sell track-separated versions of their work, a sort of raw material alongside their finished product.

Their tactics remind me of guerilla art from the likes of RTmark and Banksy, with one exception: they offer no proof of what they’ve done, leading some to suspect an elaborate hoax.

(Credit: Overdub Tampering Committee)

First, some perspective. Intel–not Nvidia or ATI–is the world’s largest supplier of graphics chips for PCs. The reason is simple. Intel-integrated graphics silicon is shipped in tens of millions of PCs every year. It’s a low-cost–and relatively low-performance–solution that many PC vendors opt for. But that doesn’t mean Intel is the premier supplier of sophisticated mainstream PC graphics technology. That distinction goes to Nvidia and ATI. Intel is a non-player. This is evidenced by the proliferation of Nvidia- and ATI-based graphics board reviews at enthusiast Web sites and the bigger role that graphics processors from these two companies play in handling increasingly complex visual applications.

And, as the Nvidia CEO has intimated, unless Intel responds aggressively, this could make Nvidia a direct Intel competitor in the future. Nvidia’s newest GeForce 9600 GT GPU rivals, at the very least, Intel chips in complexity. It has 64 stream processors–each individually clocked at 1625MHz–and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900MHz and contains more than 500 million transistors.

During a February earnings conference call, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, repeated one thing over and over: graphics are in and the central processor is out. There is some truth to this. And Intel’s plans for future silicon technology address this head on.

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the digital enterprise group at Intel, spelled out Intel’s strategies for future graphics technology on Monday. He addressed the higher-octane technology that will be built into future “Nehalem” processors and the highly sophisticated “Larrabee” chips that will be offered as “discrete” or standalone products.

To address this, Intel intends to boost integrated graphics performance in Nehalem processors and, for the first time, offer a discrete (standalone) graphics product for high-end markets. Both Nehalem and Larrabee are targeted at the 2009-2010 time frame.

This is where Larrabee comes in. Gelsinger said that Larrabee–a “many core” chip–will target Nvidia and AMD/ATI’s discrete graphics. “Obviously, if we’re going to be competing in the discrete graphics marketplace, we think we’re going to have to compete well…in terms of traditional benchmarks like 3D Mark,” he said, adding that Intel will support traditional graphics interfaces such as DirectX and OpenGL. A big potential plus: since Larrabee cores will be based on the Intel Architecture, developers who already write code for standard Intel microprocessors can develop for Larrabee without learning a completely new architecture.

But Gelsinger said there are definite limits to what can be done with integrated graphics because of the big power and transistor requirements for high-end discrete (standalone) graphics products. They have “a very different price point and die envelope and power envelope. Some of the (discrete) graphics chips alone are 150 watts. We build whole platforms for less (power) than that,” he said.

NvidiaGeForce 9600 GT boards: each Nvidia chip has over 500 million transistors.

Logistically, this will be accomplished by turning today’s three-chip CPU into a two-chip CPU, he said. That means moving the graphics silicon onto the same die with the main processor. More specifically, the part of the chipset referred to as the “north bridge” is going away. The north bridge contains the memory controller and graphics controller. Both of these components will be moved onto the CPU die. The other part of the chipset referred to as the “south bridge” will remain separate. This includes I/O related components.

So, how will Intel improve Nehalem integrated graphics? Not surprisingly, more transistors and more bandwidth, according to Gelsinger. “Largely, integrated graphics is as much die area as you can throw at it and as much memory bandwidth as you can give it,” Gelsinger said. “So, could we equal discrete graphics performance with integrated graphics? Of course.” Gelsinger went on to say that Intel will focus on “more transistor budget, leading-edge process technology, and more memory bandwidth dedicated to integrated graphics.”

(Credit:
Nvidia)

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It’s not just a question of cost that drives the US military to buy open source. Indeed, the biggest benefits come down to innovation and flexibility:

That is a massively important statement. We may be rapidly approaching the point when it will make little sense to buy proprietary software at all, given the tremendous benefits of open source.

Via John Scott’s Powdermonkey blog.

While some in private-sector industry drag their feet on open source, it’s instructive that arguably the most mission-critical systems in the world are being migrated to open source, namely, the US military’s systems.

…[T]he increasing scope and complexity of military software requirements encourages the use of open source. “If the project is of a sufficient scale, you cannot get there without an open source approach,” said Dewey Houck, a senior engineer at Boeing, the lead systems integrator for the Army’s FCS.

Some analysts tout open source software as one of the next great technology waves, comparable in its disruptive effects to personal computing and the Internet. That future is already partly here for the U.S. military, with programs such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) and organizations such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) using open technologies. Open source technologies are making inroads among Department of Defense acquisitions as a result of potential benefits such as low cost, flexibility of use and modification, and the lack of vendor lock-in.

Other benefits? The military cites several:

Granted, open source is being widely adopted throughout the private and public sectors. But it would be good to see more public commentary by private-sector CIOs on the benefits of open source. If the US military gets these kinds of benefits, surely a Citigroup or Nordstrom must derive huge benefits, too. Or should.