http://live.pirillo.com - There were people waiting up to seven hours in my live chat room today. I FINALLY have gotten an Optimus Maximus keyboard, courtesy of ThinkGeek. I am completely stoked, since I've wanted this thing for like... EVER. I managed to let it sit on my desk all day, and build anticipation. People in chat ended up being as impatient and excited as I was for the unboxing. Less

acquisitions, startups, Hardware Rebecca Zacks wrote: The government business unit of Nantero—a Woburn, MA-based startup developing a carbon-nanotube-based form of computer memory it calls NRAM—has been acquired by Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT) for an undisclosed sum. Under the terms of the deal, some 30 Nantero employees will join Lockheed Martin, as will Brent Segal, the startup’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer. Neil profiled Nantero back in March. Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

http://live.pirillo.com - You may not be able to see me very well at the beginning of this video. However, once I start the music, my cool new hardware visualizer starts flashing LED lights around the room. Then look out.. you'll see me in neon! Less

Robotics, Hardware, IRobot Wade Roush wrote: The last time I saw a Negotiator robot was in a federal courtroom in Boston, where Jameel Ahed—the founder and CEO of Robotic FX and the defendant in an intellectual-property-theft lawsuit brought by his former employer, iRobot—was driving the nimble little device around the judge’s bench via remote control. Robotic FX lost that suit last December, and as part of the settlement agreement, the Chicago, IL-based startup closed down and handed over some of its assets to iRobot—including the plans for the Negotiator, a tank-treaded device that can climb stairs and carry equipment such as video cameras and hazardous-materials sensors. Now the controversial robot is about to be reborn, as a full-fledged iRobot product that will be available by the end of the year to police, fire departments and other agencies that need an inexpensive reconnaissance device for dangerous situations. Even before Robotic FX went out of business, iRobot’s allegations about misappropriated trade secrets had cost the tiny startup a $280 million contract to deliver some 3,000 bomb-detecting robots to the United States Army—a contract that was later awarded to iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). This was always the real payoff desired by the Bedford, MA-based robot maker, which had argued in court that Ahed had stolen elements of the design of its Packbot tactical robot, including methods for making the all-important treads, upon leaving the company in 2002. But it’s an interesting footnote to the case that by selling a few hundred Negotiators—which will be priced at about $20,000 apiece—iRobot may now be able to earn back the $2.9 million it spent on the Robotic FX lawsuit, and then some. iRobot’s version of the Negotiator “is very much the design that came over as an asset in the settlement,” says Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division. “The difference is that we have taken the robot, which was based on our design and our mobility but was being made, frankly, in a very crude production facility, and we have professionalized the quality, reliability, and manufacturing.” Ahed and a small group of employees had assembled their version of the robot in a basement space under Ahed’s father’s dental practice; iRobot, by contrast, is building the Negotiator at its engineering and manufacturing facilities in Mysore, India, outside Bangalore. …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

wireless, RFID, Hardware Wade Roush wrote: Last week we wrote about ThingMagic’s compact new RFID reader, Astra, which is designed to fit into small spaces such as office ceilings, allowing more kinds of organizations to use RFID technology to track tagged items. This week ThingMagic is bringing out an additional set of products intended to help organizations experiment with RFID technology. It’s a trio of “development kits” that include all the hardware and software engineers need to write and read RFID tags. The kits, which are available from a ThingMagic web storefront that opened today, cost $1,495 and include one of the company’s three embedded RFID reader modules along with a chassis, connectors, antenna cable, power converter, and other hardware. The kits also come with ThingMagic’s RFID firmware (which is the same for all three reader modules) and sample RFID tags. Up to now, RFID technology has been deployed mainly in warehouses and retail locations, where it’s used to keep track of tagged packages and products. The point of the kits is to help potential ThingMagic customers and partners come up with new applications of RFID technology, moving toward the “Internet of things” envisioned by ThingMagic’s founders. They could use the development kits, for example, to build and test prototype devices that contain embedded RFID readers, the way ThingMagic itself has worked with Ford Motor Company and DeWalt to put RFID readers in the beds of Ford 150 trucks, where they scan for tagged construction tools. Many ThingMagic customers and business partners are “eager to explore, research and develop embedded and mobile RFID solutions that require small form factors and low power requirements,” ThingMagic CTO and co-founder Yael Maguire said in a statement. “The development kits include everything they need to experiment with, design and develop RFID applications that meet these needs.” Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Peter’s On the Show - Audio Comments- Random Chat - Who does Peter look like? -I like the Jonas Brothers Thanks to Mevio SuperPanel and Nature’s Cure for sponsoring this episode. This week’s Nature’s Cure Question of the Week is ‘If you followed your dreams and became famous one day, what would you be famous for?’ -Win a Canon Digital Camera or an iPod Shuffle Take the Mevio Superpanel Survey and win Prizes! Music: All Time Low Jamiroquai – <321MARTiNA Less

Computing, Hardware, cloud computing Wade Roush wrote: When I pulled up to 35 McGrath Highway in Somerville, just a couple of doors down from Sav-Mor Liquors, all I found was a squat, brown, windowless concrete building and an unpaved parking lot. It was a hot day in mid-July, and I was searching for a new data center company with the geeky name [2N+1] (the brackets are part of the name). But there was very little about this old building, wedged between the McGrath overpass on one side and weed-lined railroad tracks on the other, that looked high-tech. But in the computing world, I reminded myself, data centers are about as unsexy as it gets. They aren’t about software—the flashy Web-based games, social networking and media-sharing services, or business systems we often write about here. They aren’t even about the hardware that runs the software—the gleaming, blinking racks of blade servers from the likes of HP or EMC. Data centers simply provide space, electricity, cooling, and connectivity for that hardware. They are, in other words, the technology behind the technology behind the technology; as long as the power is on, nobody notices them. The less flash, the better. Which is why I concluded that I must be in the right place. I stepped over some construction detritus, went in the unmarked door, and met two of the founders and principals at [2N+1], Vincent Bono and Will Locandro. They showed me into the conference room. As it turned out, this was one of the only finished spaces in the five-story building. But the flurry of remodeling would soon be over, Bono assured me. “We are 30 days from launch, and we have customers ready to move in on day 31, literally,” he said. The construction didn’t faze me, since I was visiting [2N+1] to find out what it takes to put together a brand-new data center—or, to be more exact, a “colocation center” (also known as a “carrier hotel”) where multiple companies that have run out of room or power in their own facilities put their extra server, network, and storage gear. Though I’ve been writing about information technology for a decade, this is one corner of the business I’ve never really explored. I’ve been wanting to fill that gap recently—in part because data centers are now at the heart of so many companies’ IT infrastructures, and in part because the idea of “cloud computing,” or trusting computing jobs to far-away resources that are administered like utilities, is catching on so fast. But there’s also another, more personal reason: our recent experience with hosting provider The Planet, which suffered a huge electrical explosion on May 31 at its main data center in Houston, where Xconomy’s own servers are located. We got through the crisis okay, but it left me wondering how the heck data centers work, anyway, and what can be done to make them more reliable. Bono and Locandro seemed pretty qualified to educate me. Not only do both gentlemen have a long history working for local infrastructure providers—Bono as a network and data center designer for data centers HarvardNet and Boston Datacenters and fiber network operator Global NAPs, Locandro doing sales and business development at Cabletron, Riverstone Networks, and Enterasys—but they’d just spent months retrofitting this hulking pre-computer-age building for up to 22,000 square feet of server equipment, largely on their own dime. The most important thing about the former furniture factory, Bono and Locandro explained to me right away, isn’t the fact that it’s virtually fireproof, or that its steel-reinforced concrete construction can support bone-crushing loads of 400 pounds per square foot on the upper floors and 2,500 pounds on the lower floors, or that it has its own 15,000-gallon diesel fuel tank, big enough to keep backup generators running for four days. No, the most important thing about it is its location. The neighborhood may look inauspicious to passers-by, but it turns out that underneath those weedy railroad tracks runs a valuable resource—fiberoptic cable. “Here’s Boston and here’s Cambridge,” says Locandro, gesturing at a map. “Pretty much every ounce of fiber between the two cities runs down these tracks.” That enables [2N+1] to tap into fibers owned by every major network provider, making its facility carrier-neutral—which appeals to customers who may already have a contract with the likes of Verizon, Qwest, Lightower, Cogent, or Level3. Just across the tracks, moreover, is a facility owned by NSTAR, the Boston area’s largest electrical utility. “There is a lot more that goes into looking for a location than just finding a big, empty, concrete building,” says Bono. “Not only do you have to be proximate to fiberoptic resources for multiple carriers, but you need to …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

On This Episode: Daddy Butler- Audio Comments- Emo is Banned in Russia- Eco Girl Talk Thanks to eMusic and Nature’s Cure for sponsoring this episode. This week’s Nature’s Cure Question of the Week is ‘What is your nickname and how did you get it?” Submit your question and you could win a Canon Digital Camera or an iPod Shuffle! Get 35 songs for free! Go to emusic.com/emogirl. If you cancel before 14 days, you get to keep all 35 tracks for free! Music: Blue October - Metric- Mansions – <321MARTiNA Less

cloud computing, IT, software as a service Irving Wladawsky-Berger wrote: Cloud computing continues to be a very hot subject. I recently participated in Xconomy’s conference on “The Promise and Reality of Cloud Computing,” and it was clear from the discussion that something big and profound seems to be going on, although we are not totally sure what it is yet. Some of us feel that cloud computing may very well be The Next Big Thing—one of those massive changes that the IT industry goes through from time to time that really shake things up—like the advent of personal computers in the 1980s and the Web in the next decade. Others—a minority in this meeting—feel that this is the IT industry engaged in one of its periodic hype cycles. Nicholas Carr nicely framed the historical shift to cloud computing in his keynote, which was based on his recent book, The Big Switch . Carr first talked about the evolution of power plants in the 19th century. In the early days, companies usually generated their own power with steam engines and dynamos. But with the rise of highly sophisticated, professionally run electric utilities, companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid. IT, said Carr, is the next great technology that is going through a similar transformation. Many IT capabilities, now handled in a distributed way, will be centralized in highly industrialized, efficient, scalable data centers—Clouds—which should free companies to invest in innovation where it really matters to their business. Nick acknowledged that IT clouds are quite different in nature from electricity—more complex and diverse in the services they offer. So it is too early to tell how IT clouds will evolve. My personal feeling is that there will be a variety of providers of cloud services—from new companies that specialize in innovative services aimed at particular industries, to enterprises that take advantage of those processes and services they are really good at—e.g., payments in banking, logistics in shipping, reservations in transportation—and start new businesses that service their own needs as well as those of others in the marketplace. This is already happening. IT organizations will have to become much more professional, disciplined and efficient in their management of data centers, including energy usage. The data center is undergoing a phase of industrialization similar to what happened in manufacturing twenty years ago. If you stay behind, your management costs and quality of service will not be competitive. At the conference, there was quite a bit of discussion about the relationship of cloud computing to computing-on-demand offerings, such as Amazon Web Services, and software-as-a-service application platforms, such as Salesforce.com. Some have said that this spells the death of software. I prefer to think of what is happening as the long-needed evolution of application software to something that is far more usable by humans. When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology—as is mostly the case with Clouds—the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity. Most people want to deal with an application or a service, not software. We want those applications and services to be as intuitive as possible, and we want to have to know only as much as we need in order to use them. We don’t want to have to worry about extraneous error messages we don’t understand or new software releases we don’t know what to do with. We want a quality experience, as we do with other things in work and life we enjoy using. Most of us would agree that while computers have been very useful, using them has been far from satisfying—sort of like what driving a car must have been like a hundred years ago. They got us to where we wanted to go, but they also kept breaking down and required constant attention. This is far from the death of software. In fact, it will take lots of innovative software to make computers and computing applications usable, let alone enjoyable to use The more intelligent we want them to be—that is, intuitive, exhibiting common sense and not making us have to constantly take care of them—the more smart software it will take. But with cloud computing, our expectation is that all that software will be virtualized or hidden from us and taken care of by systems and/or professionals that are somewhere else—out there in The Cloud. In my own presentation, following Nick Carr, I also framed cloud computing in sort of historical terms. First, I think of what is going on with IT as a kind of Cambrian Explosion, which is the period over 500 million years ago when the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude, giving rise to both more complex animals and a far greater diversity of organisms. This was at least partly due to the fact that the cell had been perfected and standardized over the preceding billion years, so evolution could now focus its energies in using these essentially commoditized cells in far more complex and diverse ways. Looking at the Cambrian Explosion as a metaphor, we can think of digital components as following the path of cells in biology. In its first few decades, the IT industry spent a considerable fraction of its energies developing the basic components. But now that they are essentially standardized, commoditized and good enough for most purposes, we are seeing both the emergence of massively scalable systems—i.e., cloud data centers—as well as …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

http://live.pirillo.com - If any of you subscribe to CPU magazine, you know I'm a monthly columnist. I've become a huge user advocate. I even recently suggested that the hardware and software industry adopt an operating system that isn't Windows... in order to benefit Windows. More competition on the desktop is good for everyone. Less

Roundup, deals, VC Rebecca Zacks wrote: I’m running out of “green” jokes to use in headlines describing the steady march of cash toward Evergreen Solar’s coffers. The latest example of that, plus a surprising number and variety of venture financings and other deals for one summer week, below. —Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) announced yet another large, long-term order for the photovoltaic solar panels it manufactures. This one—worth $1.2 billion—brings the Marlborough, MA-based firm’s total contractual backlog to nearly $3 billion. —Burlington, MA-based NeoSaej, whose MoneyAisle.com site lets lenders compete for banking customers, completed a new round of financing worth over $7 million. The new funding brings its total financing to more than $10.5 million. Boston-based Wellington Management led the deal, which was joined by Stata Venture Partners II and NeoNet. —MIT spinoff ThingMagic of Cambridge, MA, raised $9.5 million in a Series B funding round that included Tudor Ventures, The Exxel Group, Morningside Technology Ventures, and .406 Ventures. ThingMagic makes hardware and software for reading RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. —Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of RNAi-based drugs, raised $8.4 million more, bringing its first-round venture financing to a total of $21.4 million. New investor Abingworth and existing investors Oxford Bioscience Partners and Skyline Ventures participated in the financing. —Collegium Pharmaceutical, a specialty drugmaker in Cumberland, RI, closed a fourth round of venture financing worth $20 million. Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Ventures led the deal and existing inventors Boston Millennia Partners and Westfield Capital Management participated as well. —Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) of Cambridge, MA, and Swiss pharma giant Novartis (NYSE: NVS) extended their RNAi collaboration—worth up to $700 million to Alnylam—through October 2009. —Wakonda Technologies, a Rochester Institute of Technology spinoff that’s moving from New York state to Medford, MA, announced it has raised $9.5 million in a Series A venture round from the likes of Advanced Technology Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, and Applied Ventures. Wakonda is developing cheaper, more efficient photovoltaic cells. —Bluefin Robotics of Cambridge, MA, inked a deal to provide its Spray Glider autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to Horizon Marine of Marion, MA; the agreement, as well as a pending Navy contract for glider-type AUVs, signals the growing competition between Bluefin, Bedford, MA’s iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT, and Falmouth, MA-based Webb Research—now part of Teledyne Technologies (NYSE: TDY)—in the AUV space. —Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) forged an alliance with South Plainfield, NJ-based PTC Therapeutics. Genzyme will pay $100 million in up front and as much as $337 million more in milestone payments for the right to co-develop and co-market a PTC drug being developed as a treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and, potentially, a host of other genetic diseases. —Molecular diagnostics firm BG Medicine of Waltham, MA, raised $40 million in a Series D financing round. New investors Legg Mason Capital Management, GE Asset Management, and SMALLCAP World Fund joined the round, as did existing investors Flagship Ventures, Gilde Healthcare Partners, Humana, and Stelios Papadopoulos. —Bermuda-based Tyco International acquired Cambridge, MA-based Intellivid—a maker of software for analyzing security-camera video—for an undisclosed sum. —Peptimmune, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of treatments for autoimmune diseases, raised $8.9 million in a second close of its Series D financing. The deal was led by New Enterprise Associates, MPM Capital, Hunt Ventures, Boston Medical Investors, and Silicon Valley Bank Capital. —ConnectEDU of Boston, MA acquired Chicago’s PrepHeadquarters for an undisclosed sum. Both firms offer online tools for high school students and their parents and counselors. Comments (1) | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

Audio Comments Galore! - TV - Asia trip - Word of the day: pecksniffian- Eco Girl Talk - Thanks to Mevio SuperPanel and Nature’s Cure for sponsoring this episode. This week’s Nature’s Cure Question of the Week is ‘What is your favorite lazy summer day activity?’ -Win a Canon Digital Camera or an iPod Shuffle Take the Mevio Superpanel Survey and win Prizes! Music: Mayday Parade Paramore The K.G.B. Less

Author: Gardenfork Added: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:39:41 -0800Duration: 238 Hardware stores are like therapy for me. Today we visit The Crest Hardware Art Show; a hardware store that is hosting an art show in Williamsburg Brooklyn. If you like, be sure to comment, rate and favorite and visit http://www.green-house.tv for more! Distributed by Tubemogul. Less

If you use Ableton Live or other DAW software you know how MIDI controllers are essential for manipulating those on-screen knobs and faders. Now wouldn't you know, a project called SenseSurface is aiming to completely change that with technology that lets you literally attach a knob onto your computer screen and control an app! The devices use an X/Y matrix on the backside of a typical laptop display coupled with custom designed movement sensors. Supposedly it'll be out for under $100 and it won't mess up your laptop screen. It's also multi-touch so the amount of knobs your packing depends on the size of your laptop's screen. Imagine just showing up to a gig with a tablet PC and these knobs! Check it out in action below: via Engadget Less

Storage, Hardware, Software Wade Roush wrote: As Bob observed in a March story, EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based networked storage giant, is very good at acquiring companies whose technologies fit with its existing offerings. But isn’t so well known for actually melding those technologies into new products. VMware (NYSE: VMW), for example, was acquired almost five years ago, in December 2003, but still functions as an almost completely separate company with its own line of software for virtualizing data centers. Today, however, three EMC subsidiaries announced that they’re throwing their lots together—at least when it comes to data backup products for consumer and small businesses. The three units are Walnut Creek, CA-based Dantz Development Corporation (acquired by EMC in 2004), makers of Retrospect backup software for Windows and Macintosh computers; Utah-based Mozy (acquired last September), which offers online backup services for consumers and businesses; and San Diego-based Iomega (acquired in April), which makes external hard drives. The organizations said that starting this summer, new portable and desktop hard drives from Iomega will come with instructions on how to download a free version of Retrospect Express that also helps buyers sign up for the free or premium versions of Mozy’s online service. All of which means that PC users who buy Iomega external drives will be able to arrange cloud-based data backup at the same time that they’re setting up automatic local backups of their PCs’ primary hard drives. According to EMC, it’s the first time local and remote data backup have been integrated in a single product offering. “It’s a seamless customer experience at this point,” says Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Mozy. “When a customer goes to install Retrospect Express, they’re given the option to back up online using Mozy, and we’ve done the integration work to pass information from the Retrospect setup screens to Mozy.” That means, in effect, that PC owners can specify in one step which parts of their hard drives should be backed up regularly; the Retrospect and Mozy software will then make local and off-site copies automatically.  Mozy provides up to 2 gigabytes of online storage free, and charges $4.95 per month for unlimited storage. Fairbanks says the project to combine the Iomega, Retrospect, and Mozy products became a high priority for EMC as soon as the Iomega acquisition was completed. “This was a very strategic decision made by senior executives, involving working teams who identified great synergies between the products,” says Fairbanks. “If you think about it, the target audiences are very well aligned.” EMC reasoned, in other words, that anyone who cares enough about their data to buy an external hard drive from Iomega is probably also cautious enough to spring for a second level of off-site protection from Mozy. “Mozy has about 750,000 customers, and many of them also have USB hard drives protecting their data—but they recognize that if their external hard drive failed or if, heaven forbid, their house or their business were to burn down or have some natural disaster, they would completely lose that data,” says Fairbanks. “The cost and efficiency [of online backup] has become such that customers are taking a look at both options now.” Among the first products to include the new software bundle will be Iomega’s bestselling 500-gigabyte and 1-terabyte desktop hard drives, which are available from online retailers now and are expected to be on shelves at Best Buy before the end of July. The bundle will be rolled out with the full line of Iomega external hard drives over the next two months, according to EMC. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

VC, funding, startups Erik Mellgren wrote: Two local venture firms, Flybridge Capital Parners and General Catalyst Partners, have joined forces with Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, and invested in Boston University spin-off Sand 9, a start-up founded in 2006 to develop “nano-mechanical resonators” for wireless devices. Flybridge led the $8 Million A series round. A resonator can be regarded as kind of timekeeper, a very exact clock that makes sure that the circuits in devices such as cell phones, GPS receivers and wireless routers work on the right frequencies. Today’s resonators are based on quartz crystals, just as in most wristwatches, and are fairly big. Instead, Sand9 has developed a technology that can shrink the resonators to nanoscale dimensions, according to the company’s technical founder, BU physics professor Raj Mohanty. “We can do these components on a much smaller scale and then use them to build switches, filters, mixers and similar components,” says Mohanty. “And as we do them in silicon, it is possible to integrate them with CMOS electronics on the same chip.” CMOS, for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, is the leading technique used to build microelectronics. Much of the initial development of Sand 9’s devices has been carried out at Mohanty’s lab at BU during the last six years, with support from the National Science Foundation. He expects that the company’s first products will be ready for market some time during 2009. As part of the funding, Flybridge general Partner David Aronoff will join Sand  9’s board of directors. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

acquisitions, deals, Hardware Gregory T. Huang wrote: Last month we reported that Seattle-based Impinj, a prominent maker of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies, had sold off its memory business to focus on its core RFID products. Now the company has announced that it is acquiring Intel’s RFID business, which specializes in making chips for smaller-size applications like handheld readers. It’s a “huge step for Impinj,” said CEO William Colleran in a statement. Although financial terms were not disclosed, the deal sends RFID chips and patents, a handful of employees, and a couple dozen new customers worldwide to Impinj, in exchange for Intel gaining an unnamed equity stake in the startup. Intel’s chips fill a clear need for Impinj, which focuses on the ultra-high-frequency band: they allow the company to sell RFID hardware not only for high-performance stationary devices (at gates, tollbooths, border crossings, and check-out lanes, say), but also for smaller, faster, and cheaper readers that can be carried around warehouses and stores or embedded in vehicles for keeping track of supplies, tools, or products. Starting this fall, for instance, new Ford trucks will have an option for a built-in RFID reader. “For a while now, Intel has been looking for the right home for this product line. There’s a lot of satisfaction to see this business graduate,” says Kerry Krause, marketing director of Intel’s RFID business, based in Portland, OR, and now with Impinj. The deal “puts Impinj in a terrific position,” he adds, because it opens up “a much broader range of applications and a broader worldwide customer base.” Krause cites a list of new customers that includes ThingMagic in Cambridge, MA, Alien Technology in Morgan Hill, CA, South Korea-based Samsung and Ceyon, and Sense Technology and Hopela in China—with a couple dozen more customers in the works. I remember covering RFID technologies five years ago, back when Gillette and Wal-Mart were just starting to buy into the tracking-tag approach, and I’ve been wondering how the industry has been doing. According to Krause, the main hurdles to adoption—such as agreeing on international standards and getting the right hardware—have largely been overcome. And startups like Impinj have been cashing in. Since 2000, Impinj has raised more than $100 million in venture funding from the likes of Arch Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Polaris Venture Partners. With today’s deal, the company is clearly positioning itself to be the RFID market leader in chips, readers, and other hardware—at least for now. Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal, speculates that Impinj might eventually get out of the RFID reader business and just sell the chips, once the market takes off. But that will be another two to three years or more, he says, because end users are still figuring out the physics and economics of RFID tags and readers. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

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Hardware, acquisitions, deals Gregory T. Huang wrote: Seattle-based Impinj, a maker of radio-frequency identification systems, has announced that it has sold its nonvolatile-memory intellectual property business to California-based Virage Logic for $5.2 million. Impinj will focus on its core business, which is developing RFID tags, readers, software, and antennas, while Virage Logic has hired the 30-odd Impinj employees who work on nonvolatile memory. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less