Intel processor hits 2 teraflops
Intel Corp. demonstrated its fastest multi-core processor yet at the Spring Intel Development Forum (IDF) in Beijing this month, an 80-core processor that hit a speedy 2 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) in a demonstration. Intel CTO Justin Rattner showed off the latest example of the company’s Terascale technology, a research effort aimed at keeping Intel processors at the cutting edge of speed. The point of the chips is to push into new technology frontiers. Not only are they speedy, but they are designed to use as little power as possible and better manage heat. Such speedy chips could be used for processing-intensive work, such as military or scientific research, weather modeling, in the financial markets or in mining and exploration. The company has no plans to bring the chips to market.
CRM for Google out of beta testing
A customer relationship management tool designed to work with Google Apps is out of beta testing and available to the public, the makers of the product announced this month. CRM for Google, made by Etelos, is an attempt to integrate the functionality of a full-scale CRM system with the user interfaces of both Google Apps and Google personalized home pages, the vendor says. The beta version was released in late February, just after Google unveiled the enterprise version of Google Apps, a set of communication and collaboration tools. Etelos says more than 1,500 businesses requested beta accounts. The version released this month includes a marketing tool kit, contact management with customizable contact forms, task management, call scheduling and sales prospect tracking. There are also add-on modules such as blog publishing, an e-commerce catalog management and podcasting. There are three price levels. The personal edition is free; the professional edition allowing multiple users to share tasks and projects is US$12 per user per month; and the enterprise edition giving users the ability to customize the application and select what type of data storage environment they will use costs US$40 per user per month. Etelos is also in beta testing with a product called The Outlook Thing, which integrates Outlook contacts with CRM based on the Google home page or Google Apps.
Vonage admits it has no workaround
Vonage Holdings Corp. has acknowledged it has no workaround for technology that was found to infringe Verizon Communications Inc. patents and does not know if one is feasible. The disclosure came this month when the Voice over IP service provider made public additional information from an April 6 filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The filing requests a permanent stay on the injunction issued March 23 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which would prevent Vonage from signing up new customers. The appeals court granted Vonage a temporary stay the same day. Vonage has said it was developing workarounds, or other ways of accomplishing the same tasks, to steer clear of the technology that it has been found to be infringing. The company is still working on those techniques, a spokeswoman said.
Man pleads guilty in P-to-P crackdown
A man from Columbus, Ga. has pleaded guilty to two felonies related to distribution of copyright materials over a peer-to-peer network, the U.S. Department of Justice announced this month. The plea of Sam Kuonen, 24, is the fifth in a series of convictions arising from the DOJ’s Operation D-Elite, an ongoing crackdown against the distribution of movies, software, games and music over P-to-P networks using the BitTorrent file-sharing technology. Kuonen was charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement. He faces up to five years in prison and a US$250,000 fine, the DOJ said. He faces sentencing July 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.
Reducing AJAX programming headaches
Bungee Labs announced a new on-demand service that is designed to allow Web developers to quickly build rich Internet applications and then use Bungee’s grid to host the applications. Bungee Connect can increase developer productivity by reducing programming complexity and by providing easy access to Web services APIs from companies like Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. to build new applications, Bungee said. The service, which Bungee describes as an “on-demand development environment,” allows developers to build and test applications for free and to access application components that other developers have made publicly available. Available in beta next month, the tool supports Web services integration to build rich Internet applications.