Business Tech

Upstart Boston-Power is within months of having its long-lasting batteries shipped in notebook PCs, as it eyes expansion into portable power packs and electric cars.

The three-year-old company says its Sonata batteries are able to recharge to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes, versus two hours to get to 90 percent charge in conventional notebook batteries. And Boston-Power's batteries can be recharged 1,000 times, versus 150 in today's laptops, according to founder and CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud.

Boston-Power founder and CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud holding a Sonata lithium-ion battery cell.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

I caught up with Lampe-Onnerud on Tuesday at the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy in Boston. Ironically, we bumped into each other at a water cooler where I was doing what so many of us laptop toters are stuck doing: plugging into a free outlet because my battery was dying.

Lampe-Onnerud says that the arrival of Sonata batteries will mean a completely different user experience, allowing people to go all day without having to carry cords and search out public power outlets.

Hewlett Packard last year said it has tested Boston-Power's batteries.

Without mentioning HP by name, Lampe-Onnerud said Boston-Power expects to announce its first customer soon. A company representative on Wednesday said that Sonata-powered laptops will be available early next year. Lampe-Onnerud added that the company is working with smaller laptop providers as well.

The company, which has raised $70 million, has a technology roadmap to improve further on performance. In its labs, it has batteries able to recharge 1,400 times.

Next year, it intends to release a portable power source for recharging consumer electronics, either through USB or through a small solar panel, Lampe-Onnerud said.

In two years, it expects to have a product for plug-in electric cars, she added. "The specifications for laptops and electric cars are remarkable close," she said.

There isn't one single technology that improves Boston-Power's performance and makes then safer. The company has redesigned the battery pack to have fewer cells and made a number of manufacturing improvements, Lampe-Onnerud explained.

She argued that the Sonata batteries are "clean technology" because they are more energy efficient. The company also seeks to use less harmful reactive chemicals and no heavy metals.

To manufacture its batteries--a significant business challenge for any new battery company--Boston-Power has set up factories in Taiwan and China.

Salesforce.com announced Thursday a 43 percent increase in third-quarter revenue, beating Wall Street's expectations.

Shares of Salesforce.com rose about 11 percent in after-hours trading to $25.30 a share. It closed the regular trading session at $22.83 a share, up nearly 4 percent.

In the period ending October 31, revenue reached $276 million, fueled by growth in the company's subscription and support business. Wall Street had been expecting Salesforce.com to generate $273.5 million, according to analysts' estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters.

The online customer relationship management (CRM) software developer posted net income of $10.1 million, or 8 cents a share, for the quarter, up from $6.5 million a year ago. That beat analysts' expectations of 7 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

"In the third quarter, we continued to add customers at the same record level we did last quarter, at a time when the traditional enterprise software world was retrenching," Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, said in a statement.

Indeed. Enterprise software applications giant SAP shook the industry to the core, when it issued its third-quarter results, posting a decline in profits and yanking its projections of how it would perform for the rest of the year.

Salesforce.com, however, issued its fiscal fourth-quarter 2009 guidance for Wall Street, as well as its expectations for fiscal year 2010. The online customer relationship management software developer projected its fourth-quarter revenue will fall short of analysts' current expectations.

The company expects to generate $284 million to $285 million in revenue for the quarter. That's below Wall Street's current forecast of $289.4 million, according to Thomson Reuters. And the CRM developer anticipates earning 6 cents to 7 cents a share.

The company anticipates it will post revenue of $1.35 billion to $1.36 billion for the full fiscal year of 2010.

Updated at 1:37 p.m. PT with comments from earnings call.

Dell on Thursday reported third-quarter profit of $727 million, or 37 cents per share, and revenue of $15.16 billion.

Profits were down 5 percent from the same quarter a year ago, though earnings per share improved 9 percent. Revenue was down 3 percent.

"We expect the short term to stay challenging," says Dell CFO Brian Gladden.

(Credit: Dell)

Most analysts had been anticipating earnings of 32 cents per share and $16.3 billion in sales.

A year ago, Dell earned $766 million, or 34 cents per share, on $15.65 billion in sales.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden said on a call with reporters Thursday that the company is "pleased" with its performance during the quarter, "especially against the backdrop of the global economic environment."

Looking to the future, Gladden said Dell continues to see a slowing in demand "almost all" of its businesses. "We expect the short term to stay challenging," he said, but refused to provide any additional commentary on what Dell expects for the fourth quarter or for next year.

He did say that the company would make plans on the expectation of tightening IT budgets in the next year.

Some bright spots for Dell included its global consumer business, which saw a 10 percent improvement in profits and shipments that rose by one-third.

Dell was also able to reduce its costs further than expected. The company previously said it had met its goal of reducing employee headcount by 8,900--Gladden said Dell actually cut 10,800 positions.

The company said delaying or canceling any planned products was not part of its cost-cutting measures. Earlier there had been reports Dell had delayed the debut of a music player product until after the holiday season.

Regarding Netbooks, Gladden described the product category as a "complementary" business, and said that market response for its new Inspiron Mini products as been positive. So far, he said, Netbooks haven't affected the demand for any of its other products.

On a separate call later Thursday with investors, chief executive Michael Dell said that including 3G capability in its Netbooks has been well-received and that the company is working on signing up more wireless carriers to carry the Mini Inspiron. So far the company has partnered with European carrier Vodafone.

Dell has been battling to get its costs under control as part of a broad turnaround plan. The company will continue to look at ways to get the costs of its products down, including reviewing its supply chain and manufacturing process.

Dell shares rose 5 percent to $10.30 in after-hours trading.

There's not a lot of good news about the PC industry lately.

Gartner is predicting that IT spending will be down, and Intel says it sees significantly lower demand for its chips. Now add to that iSuppli's doom-and-gloom prediction that PC shipments will rise only 4.3 percent in 2009, and 7.1 percent in 2010.

It's a pretty dramatic change from what the industry analyst company had previously forecast: shipments rising 11.9 percent next year, and 9.4 percent in 2010.

The PC market has been growing at rates of at least 10 percent per year for the past six years, but all that will change because of the severity of the current economic situation, iSuppli said Thursday.

The credit crunch that has already done in the likes of Circuit City, will continue to affect large PC makers, component suppliers, as well as consumers, the people who buy these PCs.

"The result of the financial turmoil is less money to spend, and often that money is itself more expensive," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst of computer platforms for iSuppli. "With less money to spend, application markets, like PCs, have been impacted."

Despite the dreary picture iSuppli paints, Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC supplier, says its third-quarter revenue is expected to improve 19 percent over the same quarter's results a year ago.

With the overall economy slumping, the tech industry is taking its fair share of hits. We'll keep updating the chart below as news of company changes comes in. See our complete coverage of how the tech sector is faring here: Tracking the tech downturn.

Know of a layoff not listed here? Let us know on this form or e-mail us.

See also: The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring.

Akamai Technologies announced Wednesday that it's cutting 7 percent of its workforce, as the Web content delivery company pares back its costs.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai expects to cut 110 positions in the fourth quarter, a move that is anticipated to result in a $4 million restructuring charge.

"We have not changed our business outlook," J.D. Sherman, Akamai CEO, said in a statement. "However, we want to ensure that we can keep investing for growth even in the current economic climate."

The Web content delivery company also expects to lose approximately $2.5 million in income from subleasing some of its facilities.

Hewlett-Packard just showed its cards early, revealing Monday that next week it's going to inform its investors of some pretty impressive revenue gains during the third quarter.

That comes despite the faltering economy and increasingly ominous signs that when it comes to tech, this recession will hit the PC market the hardest. As we reported here earlier, HP is certainly well-positioned to weather a downturn, while rival Dell is still in the midst of a turnaround, and is on slightly shakier ground.

Is Dell's turnaround moving breezily, or does the company face stiff headwinds?

(Credit: Dell)

Judging by analyst predictions and industry reports, Dell's earnings won't be nearly as impressive. Both UBS and Bernstein Research put out analyst reports saying they expect Dell to report revenue below expectations, but for earnings to be about what they (and the rest of Wall Street) expected, at 32 cents per share. UBS expects third-quarter revenues of $16.5 billion, while the Wall Street consensus is $16.4 billion.

Dell will report its earnings after the close of the markets Thursday. Here's what we'll be looking for when founder and chief executive Michael Dell and CFO Brian Gladden get on the phone to discuss third-quarter results with company investors.

• Margins. The company's operating margins are key, according to Bernstein analyst A.M. Sacconaghi, because it's had the most direct recent impact on Dell's stock.

The third-quarter operating margin should be an improvement over the previous quarter, analysts believe because Dell has been less aggressive about competing on price this quarter, especially in Europe. Also, the company finally shed the last of the jobs slated for elimination more than a year ago, and component pricing was more favorable during the quarter as well.

However, Dell has also continued to expand its retail presence and build up its business in international markets, both things that come with lower margin expectations.

• Netbooks. There's still concern over profitability in the consumer product segment. During a recent earnings call, Dell said its relatively new consumer business wouldn't improve in that regard until the second half of 2009.

Dell's Mini 9: Welcome to the Netbook craze.

(Credit: Dell)

However, the company has embraced the PC industry's latest obsession: Netbooks. Both the Inspiron Mini 9 and Mini 12 were announced this year, though only the Mini 9 will have shipped to customers during the quarter.

Though Dell probably won't tell us exactly how many Netbooks it's sold, we can anticipate the company will at least bring it up to demonstrate to investors it's embracing what they will say is a whole new product category with a lot of potential. (In reality, it's not clear whether Netbooks are simply cannibalizing the budget notebook category.)

• Cost cutting. Though it recently finished the 10 percent staff cuts it promised in 2007, both UBS and Bernstein analysts say they see room for further layoffs to trim even more costs. Dell earlier this month told employees it was instituting a hiring freeze, dismissing contract employees, and offering voluntary unpaid leave. If that's not enough, further headcount reductions are at least conceivable.

• The economy. The company said in September it was already seeing "softness" in IT spending in the U.S. and Western Europe. IDC issued a report last week forecasting just 2.6-percent growth in corporate technology budgets worldwide.

Though Dell has not offered forward-looking guidance to investors for the last several quarters (and is expected to continue the tradition), investors will likely hammer Gladden and/or Dell with questions about how the faltering economic environment is going to affect the PC makers' outlook for the critical fourth-quarter holiday season and into next year.

Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.

Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.

The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.

The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for other SSDs," the company said.

Samsung did not mention random write performance, however. Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles' heel of solid-state drives.

Getting this 256GB SSD in a notebook "is analogous to having a 15,000-(revolutions-per-minute) drive, without all of its size, noise, power, and heating drawbacks," Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement.

The 256GB SSD boosts data transfer when large multimedia files are simultaneously read and stored. "It can store 25 high-definition movies in just 21 minutes, a significant advancement over a 7,200rpm hard disk drive (HDD), which takes about 70 minutes," the company said in a statement.

The drive's performance is derived from a new single-platform design consisting of a chip controller, NAND flash, and special drive firmware developed by Samsung. "This single platform is designed to easily adapt to Samsung's 40-(nanometer) class NAND flash memory," according to the company.

It consumes 1.1 watts of power, versus 2 or more watts for a comparable HDD. Similar in weight to a 128GB SSD, at 81 grams, the 2.5-inch multilevel cell 256GB SSD has the same 9.5-millimeter drive thickness.

Samsung's 256GB SSD is also available with optional proprietary encryption programming that provides full-disk encryption, a key feature for some corporate users.

Pricing was not immediately available.

A clash is brewing as PC and cell phone chip suppliers vie for new designs that fall outside traditional product categories, an analyst said in a research note Wednesday.

Asus 10-inch Eee PC 1000

(Credit: Asus)

Doug Freedman, a chip analyst at AmTech Research, said the "line between cell phones and PCs is clearly blurring" and that consequently "PC and cell phone food chains will battle for market share in these new classes of devices." He calls this the "big bang between PCs and handsets."

This will happen as more tweener products emerge. "New product categories such as Netbooks, MIDs (mobile Internet devices), and smartphones all lie in the spectrum between the traditional PC and handset product categories," he wrote. "Cell phones are increasing in screen sizes, computational power and capabilities, while PCs are seeing declines in screen sizes and increases in connectivity."

This may present problems for chip suppliers as they rush to build inventory for these newfangled devices, resulting in an oversupply for device categories that don't succeed. "It's a safe bet that we'll end up with losers," he said in an interview. Moreover, there will be lower-than-expected gross margins (a crucial indicator of profitability) for some of the chips that go into these products, according to Freedman.

While the Netbook is considered a successful tweener product, it exemplifies a category that may be facing a reality check as the novelty wears off, resulting in an oversupply problem, he said. Intel says it has seen strong demand for the Atom processor on the back of the popularity of Netbooks but there are signs that demand has started to ebb, according to Freedman. This has resulted in cancellations from device makers for chips that go into Netbooks, Freedman said.

Netbooks have been popular because of their novel design--what is essentially a very small, very-low-cost (below $500) laptop, a category that hasn't existed to date. Ultra-small laptops (such as the MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege) have traditionally commanded a very stiff premium, typically going for more than $1,500.

Contrary to what Intel has been saying, Freedman wrote in the research note that the "initial generation Netbook solutions may not succeed in emerging/low income markets as users find feature and performance sacrifice in Netbooks (i.e. 5- to 8-inch screens) unacceptable for a networked family."

He added that Intel will also continue to be challenged by cannibalization of Netbooks: that is, Netbooks will take market share from traditional notebooks.

Down the road, Freedman writes, "we do not expect the PC and handset to converge into a single 'holy grail' device." PC and cell phone makers will continue to build devices that try to bridge the gap. Apple's iPhone is an example of a device at one end of the spectrum, while the 10-inch Asus Eee PC Netbook addresses the other end.

"We expect most users to continue to require two devices: one large form factor device and one small form factor device," he said in the note.

Things just got a lot more complicated for Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chairman and "chief lizard wrangler."

Gone are the days when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the sole rival for Mozilla's Firefox. A new open-source browser, Google Chrome, has come to town, and it's from the company that provided $66 million of the Mozilla Foundation's $75 million in 2007 revenue.

Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker

(Credit: Mozilla)

There are other browser alternatives--Opera and Safari, for example--but Chrome is likely to catch on with the same techno-savvy, early-adopter, Google-proficient crowd that's been so passionate about Firefox. Baker, though, isn't worried.

For one thing, she argues, Mozilla gets its Google revenue from shared advertising revenue generated when people use Mozilla's built-in Google search abilities. In other words, Mozilla is just another advertising partner--a status Google was willing to extend to a far greater competitor, Yahoo, though, of course, Google backed away from that deal when threatened with a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit.

For another, she doesn't feel threatened by Chrome's market share. That's not to say she's complacent about it, though. I asked her opinion about Google, Chrome, the new HTML version 5, the future of the Web, and other matters on Tuesday. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: Mozilla pulled in $75 million in 2007. How significant is that figure?
Baker: It's a significant number to us. It's about what we expected. We're happy with it. It's an amount of money that allows us to be sustainable, plus has some savings. And it's generated in way that allows us flexibility and freedom.

It's only a 12 percent increase over Mozilla's 2006 revenue, which had grown faster. Surely, there are more users doing more searches. Why is the growth rate tapering off?
Baker: As in many cases, there's (effectively) a discount with bulk and volume. With volume, you often get paid less per unit. The revenue per search isn't linear.

Mozilla gets paid by Google for the browser search box and the start page, both of which default to Google, correct?
Baker: That's correct. But the one thing most people forget is, we have an arrangement not just with Google but also with Yahoo. The combination of Google's market share and the default piece means the vast majority (of Mozilla revenue) comes from Google. We also get a small amount of revenue from Amazon.

Is the revenue based on Firefox downloads? Search queries?
Baker: It's analogous to what you see on Web sites with Google AdSense (in which other sites show Google ads, and Google shares the resulting revenue when people click on those ads). It's a mechanism for ad distribution.

So Mozilla is funded by ad revenue?
Baker: That's right. It's not the AdSense program, but it's from ad revenue.

Are you concerned the revenue will dry up, now that Google has Chrome?
Baker: We're careful, and we watch. But are we particularly worried? No. We expect Chrome to have some amount of market share, but we don't expect it to balloon. Our market share continues to grow, and we expect it to be healthy. The relationship between Google and Mozilla is good, in a business sense, for both organizations.

What effect has Chrome had on Firefox development?
Baker: It hasn't changed the way we work--our open-source and community way. Google is full of very smart people and more resources than the rest of us could imagine. We expect to see interesting and innovative things come out of Google and Chrome. We hope so. Good ideas move around in the browser world. New things showing in Chrome can benefit all of us. One thing about Mozilla is, we do not have the not-invented-here syndrome.

Has it changed your thinking? Google has touted Chrome's JavaScript performance, for example. Has it lit a fire under your developers?
Baker: The JavaScript fire has been lit anyway. I'd say we've been increasing our focus on performance for some time. JavaScript performance...is equal or better than Chrome. We've seen an across-the-board change over the last six to eight months. That was in the works already.

There are some interesting things in Chrome. Everybody seems to have private-browsing features, so we will as well. We're not as convinced that this is as helpful, but it's certainly something that people are looking for.

Chrome has vanishing market share, compared to Internet Explorer. How do you view your competition with Microsoft?
Competition with Microsoft is a bit different. There's no question (that Internet Explorer) as a product is improving. Thank goodness. If 70 (percent) of the world were still using IE 6, it would be much worse world for all of us.

It still does not remotely approach Firefox as a product, and we don't expect IE to challenge Firefox supremacy as the technical innovator in the near-term time frame. We do hope to see IE standards compliance and its modern features improved. The single biggest problem now in moving the Web forward is having to deal with people using back versions of IE.

What are Mozilla's spending priorities in the future?
Baker: We have a few. The mobile space is one. Innovation is another--how to promote innovation that's not locked up in a single proprietary stack. We're not taking about giant amounts of money (but rather) experiments to find out what's important and interesting.

There are some educational and research initiatives on which we'll be increasing our focus in the next year. And there are some initiatives we're looking at in the (Mozilla) labs space. Synchronizing data, not just Foxmarks data (such as bookmarks and passwords) but other data as well. That could require investments. Also, there are technologies to move the Web forward. We're looking carefully at video.

Firefox 3.1 has support for the Ogg video format.
Baker: Exactly.

Is the time line to release Firefox 3.1 in early 2009?
Baker: Yes, that's our plan.

What comes after that?
Baker: We're looking at Fennec releases (a version of Firefox for mobile devices) and at some of the things coming out of Mozilla Labs, like synchronization of services. Will that end up as a project? Were not sure. We're also looking at Thunderbird (Mozilla's open-source e-mail software). Thunderbird 3 should be shipping in the first half of 2009, (bringing) add-ons and ecosystem opportunities there.

And, of course, there's more work on Firefox. The role of Firefox is to display the Web as the Web moves forward. We also think we're in the early stages of graphics and video, and what people do with it.

What do you think of HTML 5, the next version of the standard for displaying Web pages? Will it solve the world's problems?
Baker: We're eager to see it happen. It's certainly not the panacea miracle cure, but it's important. We've spent a lot of time trying to move beyond HTML 4. We have the same issues (as earlier HTML versions) of getting it implemented in browsers.

Because it's a large specification, it's likely that only portions will get implemented. What if some browser isn't going to implement something in HTML 5, what are we doing to do to move the Web forward?