Daily Archives: April 11, 2008

EMC whisks Iomega away from Chinese suitor

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Iomega has dumped its Chinese fiancé and is running away with the richest man in the room. Yes, it’s EMC, which last month interrupted Iomega’s plans to marry a subsidiary of Great Wall Technology, with an unasked for and spurned offer of $178m.

EMC returned a few days later with more dough, about $213m cash, or $3.85 a share. All in all, not a bad price for a company that pulled in net income of just $10.1m in 2007. The upside for EMC is Iomega’s net revenues of $336.6m and more than $60m cash in hand.

So, Iomega knows how to sell but appears to have forgotten how to make money when selling. This is not a problem that EMC is familiar with. We suspect a lot of cost-saving “synergies” will be found.

Anyhow, offer no.2 was enough to get Iomega’s board talking. And today they said yes to the deal, which will see the company metamorphose into the bedrock of EMC’s new consumer/small business product division.

So what does EMC get for its money? A live consumer brand, yes, retail and small biz channels to market, yes, revenues, yes. Technology? We doubt that EMC’s particularly interested in Iomega’s technology – here is a company after all that is still best known for the Zip external drive (when did you last see one of those.) But Iomega is known at least for something. And it is interested enough in EMC technology to have bundled its partner’s backup software with all external hard drives since 2004.

Iomega shareholders should get their cash tender offers in two weeks or so. EMC says the deal will have no material impact for the full fiscal year, which just goes to show how bloody big it is. Iomega is paying off ExcelStor Great Wall Technology Limited with a $7.5m termination fee. The two had agreed to merge last December.

The acquisition is expected to close in June. In the meantime you can peek at the EMC victory statement.

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Wrath of the Lich King is in alpha

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We had some hints that this would happen soon and now WoW Insider has confirmed through anonymous sources that the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is in closed alpha status, and that various players are being invited to check it out, under a strict NDA.

Alpha is part of the software release life cycle — a software product in development goes from alpha status to beta status (sometimes including a “closed beta,” where a limited few are invited to preview and test the software, and an “open beta,”, where anyone can download and try out the beta), to “release candidates” and then “gold” (the final version, used to print the media to be available for sale). This doesn’t tell us anything about the timing of the expansion’s release (especially since Blizzard historically takes their time going through this cycle), but it does tell us that Wrath’s content is in a playable and mostly completed form — quests, game mechanics, and items are in, even if specific flavor text, names, and even textures are not.

We’ll keep an eye, as usual, on any other news we see coming out of Blizzard, through official or unofficial channels. Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion of World of Warcraft, is in alpha testing. The journey to Northrend has begun.

Update: A word to the wise: this is not an open beta, and any email or site that tells you to sign up for one is still scamming you. When open beta comes down, we’ll hear about it on Blizzard’s official site. This is just news that the next expansion has moved up a notch in its development, and that we’re one step closer to an official open beta.

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US war robots in Iraq ‘turned guns’ on fleshy comrades

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Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.

The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.

Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS* combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.

“The gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” he said.

Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began. Fahey didn’t say just how, but conceivably the rogue robots may have been suppressed with help from more trustworthy airborne kill machines, or perhaps prototype electropulse zap bombs.

No humans were hurt, but it seems that the struggle was sufficiently terrifying that it may be some time before American troops are ready to fight alongside robots again.

As Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again”. That said, it seems he expects to deploy a new and more trustworthy armed ground automaton within a year – perhaps the MAARS**, an upgraded SWORDS packing a heavier 7.62mm machine-gun and featuring improved safety features.

MAARS is also said by its makers to have “Transformer-like” abilities akin to those of Optimus Prime. Rather than being able to disguise itself as, say, a mobility scooter or a dessert trolley, the MAARS is actually only able to transform – with help from human allies – into a slightly different robot.

The Pop Mech analysts consider that the rattled GIs in Iraq are just being silly.

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Buffalo makes big noise over tiny terabyte NAS box

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NAS boxes generally too bulky for you? Then how about Buffalo’s new LinkStation Mini? Announced yesterday, the compact server packs in 1TB of storage capacity using a pair of RAID-configured 2.5in hard drives.

The 13.3 x 8.1 x 3.9cm device has a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back for network connectivity, and a USB port to allow users to hook up extra storage or a shared printer.

The $699 unit supports the usual SMB and FTP protocols for making files available to all or a select few, and HTTP and HTTPS for serving data in a web-wise way.

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World’s first 46-inch stereoscopic 3D TV from Hyundai on sale in Japan

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Filed under: Displays 3D baby, that’s what we want. Now it’s yours… if you live in Japan anyway. Introducing the world’s first 46-inch 3D stereoscopic television. Built by Hyundai, the 1,920 x 1,080 set is capable of grabbing BS11 3D broadcasts pumped by Nippon BS in Japan. The ¥498,000 (about $4,857) LCD brings 2x HDMI and 3x composite inputs (to name a few) and apparently works fine for traditional 2D broadcasts. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wear what appears to be 2-foot long, 3D glasses judging by the image provided above. Perhaps they’re meant as a radiation shield since the set is also the world’s first TV with built-in “nuclear reactor” according to the machine translated text. Be careful out there kids, it’s just television.[Via Impress] Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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T-1000 is a phone jammer, not a Terminator

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The T-1000 is a cellphone jammer that looks like an old-school cellphone. Much like how the T-1000 from Terminator 2 obliterated the Governator, the T-1000 cellphone jammer will obliterate cellphone signals. The T-1000 can block phone communication within a 3- to 10-foot area of effect. It’ll keep blocking up to 60 minutes per charge and it’s effective against a host of cellphone technologies: AMPS, CDMA, TDMA, PCS, GSM, DCS, Nextel, iDEN and 3G voice.

Now you can enjoy watching movies in silence with this little dandy in your pocket. If you want to be really obnoxious, pretend to talk on the phone while you’re using it, watching everyone around you shaking their phones and yelling, “Hello? HELLLLO?!”. It’s available for $240, but buy at your own risk because there’s a good chance using it would be totally illegal.

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