DELL COMMUNITY

Multi-Touch Comes to Dell's Studio 17

DELL-Anne C — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:50:00 GMT

As some may have seen in blog posts from sites like Electronista or SlashGear, Yesterday, we added a really cool option to the Studio 17—a multi-touch display. This is the first Dell laptop to offer a multi-touch display option. Some of you may not get excited at the thought of running your fingers all over your laptop’s screen (this is one of my husband’s pet peeves – Do.Not.Touch.My.Display), but I am here to tell you, once you start using multi-touch, it becomes second nature in how you interact with your PC.

For most people, the first introduction to touch was your neighborhood ATM machine. Today’s touch screens are much more sophisticated, able to handle multiple simultaneous touches (the Studio 17 is a true four-touch solution) and gestures, like pinch, drag, rotate and flick. I think you will be surprised at how quickly you will adapt to using touch when the opportunity presents its self. And as Ed Baig at USA Today discussed in a recent column, the arrival of Windows 7 with support for multi-touch in its DNA should accelerate the use of touch in PCs going forward

To help ensure using touch becomes second nature, we pre-install a suite of touch software applications on the Studio 17 with multi-touch display. For example the Dell Touch Zone lets your fingers do the walking to quickly locate touch applications and media content. You can edit photos or create slide shows or even flick favorite photos to Flickr.com, create music playlists, select, start and stop videos, and leave virtual sticky notes for family members. Note: Click on any of the images in my post to see a larger view, or to see more pictures click over to the Studio 17 Multi-touch set on Flickr.

Youngsters and the young at heart will enjoy doodling and finger painting with YouPaint by Cyberlink. This nifty program will get your creative juices going, with fun activities like coloring, stamping, or modifying favorite photos (It was amazing fun taking a favorite picture of my two dogs, outfitting them with stylish hats and introspective thought bubbles.)

For the truly imaginative, there is the TouchCam application also from Cyberlink, which allows you to add in all kinds of amazing video effects things while you are using your webcam. For example, add a hat to your image (reminds me of the day in the park in Mary Poppins), or celebrate with an animated confetti parade, frame your image in roses, or go incognito and use an avatar. And, you can capture and upload these Oscar-deserving efforts to YouTube for posterity.

As you’ll recall we unveiled the new and improved Studio 17 in conjunction with the launch of Intel’s mobile Core i7 quad core processors. It has an impressive 17.3-inch HD display and an excellent array of entertainment features, like JBL branded audio solution, which makes it an ideal choice for a desktop replacement. For those who don’t require the four-on-the-floor power of Core i7, we have expanded the processor selection to include Intel Pentium Dual Core and Core 2 Duo processors, and adjusted the starting price to $699.

For those of you who are interested in how the watch is made, yes, GottaBeMobile.com, we teamed with N-trig to add the multi-touch display option on the Studio 17. Their DuoSense dual-mode digitizer solution uses a highly accurate capacitive sensing system that delivers quick and responsive multi-touch capability – true hands on computing as they call it.

You may have gathered from this blog post that I might be a fan of multi-touch capability on the PC. I am. I anticipate that sooner rather than later one of my morning rituals will be scrolling through my local paper on a PC with a multi touch screen in my kitchen versus racing my husband for the sports section. For those of you who are interested in getting your hands on* a unique laptop, check out the Studio 17 with a multi-touch display, starting at $899. (Note: the multi-touch display will be available with Core i7 systems in a few weeks).

*Pun Intended

Dell Supports Goals of the Conflict Minerals Act of 2009

Gil_Casellas — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:15:00 GMT

Dell today commended U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott on the introduction of the Conflict Minerals Trade Act in the House of Representatives. Dell supports the goals of this bill and has long embraced transparency and procurement from a socially and environmentally responsible supply chain. We have also been encouraging industry dialogue in an effort to eradicate atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

It will take more than one company, more than one industry, to have an impact in the DRC. The power of a collective multi-industry push is the catalyst that will make the change possible. Dell is committed to working with other industries, the Government and non-governmental organizations to reach agreement on a solution to purchasing conflict-free minerals and to help implement this solution.

Minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold are used in numerous products including those in the aerospace, automotive, electronics and jewelry industries. These minerals are extracted from the DRC, and only a few other locations in the world. In our industry, the mining of these minerals takes place many layers before a final product is assembled, making it difficult, if not impossible, to trace the minerals' origins. It is easy for entire industries to abstain from thinking that this is their problem because of the indirect nature of minerals. But that is not the thinking we encourage of socially and environmentally responsible organizations. Rather, we must use our collective knowledge and resources to ensure that we co-operate and eradicate human rights violations in the DRC and that no layer of our supply chain contributes to these atrocities.

We will continue to lead the conversation, proactively seek solutions and encourage everyone who has a final product that contains these minerals to join us in this endeavor.

CFO Brian Gladden Discusses Dell Q3 Fiscal Year 2010 Performance

Robert L Williams — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:38:00 GMT

I am pleased to have Brian Gladden, Senior Vice President and CFO, join us on Dell Shares to provide his views on the third quarter, the economy, industry demand, and the Perot acquisition.

Dell announced third-quarter fiscal-year 2010 financial results on November 19^th. Dell reported improved business performance with revenue up 1% sequentially to $12.9 billion. EPS was $0.17 per share and operating expenses were down 10% versus Q3 last year. In addition, cash flow from operations was strong again at $801 million and $3.4 billion over the last four quarters, which is up 42 percent from the previous four quarters.

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I strongly encourage you to read the full press release and earnings presentation; and listen to our conference call that can be found on the investor relations web site. As always, we encourage you to ask questions or leave comments on Dell Shares.

Best,

Rob

Packaging in the Limelight

DELL-Michelle m — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It’s been a big week for packaging – and let’s face it, packaging doesn’t get many big weeks...

Amazon has taken its frustration-free packaging initiative to the next level by launching a certification program. If your product’s packaging is certified ‘frustration-free,” you know you the packaging is easy to open and recyclable. I thought this video demonstrated the concept pretty well.

You might have seen on sites like SlashGear that our Dell packaging engineers got to show their stuff this week, too, with the introduction of bamboo packaging. We’re using it to form the cushions that cradle our Inspiron Mini 10 and 10v inside a box made from 25 percent post-consumer material. You’ll see bamboo incorporated into more of our product packaging early next year, and our engineers are investigating other agricultural materials into our packaging portfolio.

I never thought I’d be one to get excited about packaging, but you have to hear Oliver Campbell, our lead packaging engineer, talk about it. His passion for this stuff is infectious (see Oliver herein the YouTube video in Todd Dwyer's post from last year). I can see why he's excited, especially when you look at what makes bamboo such a great alternative to the paper, foam and corrugate that’s often used for packaging.

It grows fast. Bamboo is among the fastest growing woody plants in the world. It can grow up to 24 inches per day and reaches full harvesting maturity in three to seven years, significantly faster than hardwoods.
It’s strong. How’s this for surprising? Bamboo’s tensile strength is similar to that of steel, so customers benefit from really strong packaging protecting their new computers in transit. (Bamboo’s strength is also a reason it’s often used for scaffolding in Asia).
It’s easy on the environment. Bamboo helps promote healthy soil. It has a deep root system that protect against land erosion, and when harvested correctly, it doesn’t require replanting after harvest.

Oliver and his team are also working hard to ensure all processes associated with the bamboo’s production meet the highest standards. For example, we source our bamboo from a forest that follows Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) principles and criteria, and the bamboo forest is located far away from pandas’ known habitats. See the map below (click on it to see a larger version):

The bamboo is processed mechanically, not chemically, and we’ve worked with our packaging provider to reclaim all the water used during processing. We’re also working with Unisource Global Services (UGS) to secure FSC-certification for the bamboo’s full chain of custody, from the forest to the manufacturing facilities (which are right there in China), and partnering with Unisource Global Services and Environmental Packaging International to certify the packaging for recycling.

So in summary, our bamboo packaging is good news for customers, products, pandas and the planet. You gotta admit... that’s kind of exciting.

A Quick Overview of Azure: What it is/Where its going

DELL-Barton G — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:43:00 GMT

I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.

Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering).

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Some of the topics Keith tackles

How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
Yesterday’s official commercial launch– tech preview no more.
Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
- Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
- When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
- Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.

Pau for now…

Solutions by Engineers for Engineers Discusses Things to Do Before You Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on VMware vSphere 4.0 Host Servers

DELL-Kong Y — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:28:00 GMT

I recently posted a Dell TechCenter wiki page on the default behavior of VMware vSphere 4.0 when you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. That behavior being to initiate the soft reboot process on the server even if the server is not in Maintenance Mode; and thereby, ungracefully rebooting all of your VMs on that server. The wiki page describes what you need to do to remedy the situation.

Tim Griffin on Dell's SMB Services Strategy

DELL-Kara K — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

While SMB customers are most familiar with Dell as a provider of warranty support services, many of our SMB customers turn to Dell for help managing their IT as well. In this vlog, Tim Griffin, VP of SMB Global Services talks about how Dell helps SMB customers by managing their IT so they can stay focused on managing their business.

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Disrupting Class: Challenging Tradition, Part 1

DELL-Adam G — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:33:00 GMT

This book that really challenged our view of how technology supports the learning environment. The book is titled Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen. Here is a link to an article about the book. In the book Christensen discusses why it has been so difficult for schools to change to a more student-centric approach to learning and how technology will support the change in the context of disruptive innovation.

The premise is based on the notion that we have tried to integrate technology into a system that is very resistant to change. The processes and structures of the system will only produce pockets of innovation with technology, but will not produce a total shift toward student-centric learning. The author believes that the shift will happen in two phases. The first phase will be to apply disruptive technologies in places where the alternative is nothing. For example, in schools that have students that want to take Latin, but the school lacks the resources, they can use online or distance learning to provide the instruction. The second phase will occur when 50% of all instruction is delivered online and is gives the student the ability to learn based on their dominant learning styles.

Here is where I am challenged – my view, up to this point, has been that we will reach a tipping point when the technology finally becomes ubiquitous and we can focus on learning. I guess my premise failed to account for the fact that the school systems that we work in will continue to support antiquated processes and structures.

Do you think we can truly get to a student-centric approach to learning if we don’t consider learning styles, change the present notion of schools (a building), and build the technology to support this approach?

Dell, DPC Latency, and You

DELL-John B — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:12:00 GMT

You may have seen some chatter recently about an audio issue on the Alienware M17x on Engadget, NotebookReview and Dell’s Community site. The discussions revolve around deferred procedure call (DPC) latency, and its affect on audio performance. We are aware of the issues customers are reporting, and are currently working to address them.

Some folks are using tools to measure DPC latency, and while measuring it is one thing, it may not actually cause performance issues. The few customers who have symptoms are reporting the following:

Audio stutters, clicks, pops, and drops
Frame drops while watching videos
Audio/Video desync during video playback

DPC latency is not an issue that is specific to Alienware or Dell. This is a complex problem to address, and there are no simple solutions. DPC latency can be caused by numerous issues including the system BIOS, a sound card or audio chipset, drivers, the operating system itself or a combination of those things.

We will continue to dig deeper into this. As we make progress on this issue, I'll report it here.

ATI Introduces One “Godzilla” of a Graphics Card

DELL-John B — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

If you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you’ve probably noticed the signs of an upcoming ATI graphics card, and you may have seen write-ups about the card here and here, but if there’s anything constant in the world of cutting-edge gaming hardware, it’s that things are constantly changing. When you’re in the industry, you almost become numb to it. The ever-increasing numbers in the spec sheets begin to blur into each other, and the changes almost begin to lose significance. Every once in awhile something appears on a spec sheet that brings everything back into perspective.

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine asked if I would like to write a blog about the ATI Radeon HD 5970, and I happily consented. She sent over the tech specs, and after asking our engineers a few questions about the card, I was still a little overwhelmed. Then I saw a little tidbit in the spec sheet that completely blew my mind:

• HD Gaming – 4 teraFLOPS deliver the graphics power you need to play the most demanding games at extreme HD resolutions with the settings cranked to the max.

To help explain why this was so mind-blowing, check out this recent story written by my friend Sylvie Barak. Just a few short months ago, customized PC manufacturers were making news by offering personal supercomputers with 4 teraFLOPS of processing power, and now? Now ATI has brought that much horsepower to bear upon the gaming world in one Godzilla of a graphics card. That’s 4 times the number crunching power of this supercomputer from 1997:

Even more impressive is that the Alienware Area-51 and the Area-51 ALX will have the option of carrying two of these amazing graphics cards, giving gamers a “quad-GPU” graphics solution I’ve been told will make “zombies come out of the screen in Left 4 Dead 2 that will eat your brains”.

For those interested in the rest of the spec sheet, here are a few numbers to munch on:

• 2 GPUs clocked at 725MHz

• 2GB of DDR5 Memory clocked at 1000MHz

• 256MB of memory data width

• 2048x1536 VGA resolution, 1920x1200 HDMI resolution, 2560x1600 DL DVI resolution

Numbers like these make me wonder if Ray Kurzweil may be on to something.

Patient Info Where and When It’s Needed: Bridging the Digital Divide in Healthcare

DELL-Craig S — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

There's been a lot of focus in healthcare on the need to digitize patient information using EMR so that healthcare providers can share information and better coordinate patient care. Digitizing patient info is the first step, making sure that hospital medical professionals have it when they are diagnosing and treating is patients is the next step.

Today, Dell is introducing a virtual desktop solution for healthcare that simplifies info access for hospital medical professionals and management for IT and helps improve info security, staff productivity and care quality. Early adopter Silver Cross Hospital has been able to reduce application updates to their 200 desktops from 80 hours to 20 minutes with MCC. Their medical professionals are also more productive. MCC has helped their medical professionals reclaim nearly 20,000 hours for patient care this year alone.

Dell continues to bridge the digital divide at healthcare's frontline to help the medical community harness the power of information for better patient care.

Listen to Jamie Coffin, vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, describe MCC's value to hospitals and let us know how we can continue to improve the value of IT for medical professionals.

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Talking about Gluster: Clustered Cloud Storage

DELL-Barton G — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:39:00 GMT

With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.

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Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:

Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.

Pau for now…

Adamo XPS Now Available on Dell.com

Lionel_Menchaca — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:10:00 GMT

If you're the kind of person who reads about laptops and mobile devices on the web, you've probably already seen some online reactions to Adamo XPS. In the initial post about the latest Adamo laptop, Michael Scheschuk addressed linked to some of the blog activity and provided an overview.

Today, Adamo XPS is available on Dell.com both in the US and in several countries around the world. In the US, the starting price is $1,799. Here are the default specs for that config (click on it to see a larger version).

To mark the occasion, Alex Gruzen, Dell's Sr. VP in the Consumer Product Group wanted to take a few minutes to share his insight into the product and Dell's goals behind it. Here's the video:

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Take a look at www.adamobydell.com/xps for more information. And if you want to see more images of the lastest Adamo, visit here on our Flickr page. I've added a few new pictures there. Click this page below to see Adamo XPS on Dell.com:

Let the Voting Begin – Dell Asks You to Vote in the Student Photography Contest

DELL-Bri B — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:24:00 GMT

Vote for your favorite student photo for a chance to win a Latitude 2100 notebook. Our first global student photography competition, Where Do You Like to Learn ended on Sunday with more than 200 entries from all around the world! On Monday, we selected our nine finalists, shown below. Our panel of Dell judges included Jason St Peter, a Dell employee and photography blogger and KerryatDell and I from the Education team. With so many fantastic student pictures, picking the top finalists was no easy task.

How to vote and be entered into the prize draw:

Voting is easy, simply post a comment to this blog and indicate the number of the photograph that you want to win (i.e. 'I vote for photo #6'). In addition to helping one student win a Latitude 2100 netbook, and a teacher win a tablet PC and projector, you will also be entered into a prize drawing for your very own Latitude 2100*!

Voting is open from November 19 - December 4, 2009, so pick your favorite photo (click on it below to see a larger image) and ask your friends to join the Edu4U community to vote! Only one vote per person will be counted, so help your favorite photo win the grand prize.

Vote #1

Vote #2

Vote #3

Vote #4

Vote #5

Vote #6

Vote #7

Vote #8

Vote #9

Author's Note: You may notice that there are 9 image finalists instead of 10. The reason for this is that since the time of the finalists being selected the 10th image has been withdrawn from the competition.

*Sweepstakes limited to residents of United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Click here to read full terms and conditions for this contest.

Dell Outlines HPC Strategy and Cray Partnership

DELL-Donnie B — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:12:00 GMT

Pushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable.

The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors, Windows 2008 HPC software stack, the Cray CX1-iWS provides a good starting point for engineers, scientists and researchers including R&D groups who need a scalable HPC cluster. The key points on how the Cray CX1-iWS extends and complements traditional workstations by providing an affordably-priced departmental or workgroup HPC hub are covered in my video.

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Adam of Oracle talks about Oracle VM and the Cloud

DELL-Barton G — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:19:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.

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Some of the topics Adam tackles:

Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?

Pau for now…

Dell Linux Engineering to participate in UDS-L (November 16-20)

DELL-Amit B — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I'd like to announce that Dell Linux Engineers will hit the road to Dallas, TX to participate in the upcoming Ubuntu Developers Summit for Lucid Lynx (UDS-L) from December 16 - 20 Correction: November 16 - 20.

Lucid Lynx is the code name for the upcoming release of Ubuntu, versioned 10.04. This is a significant release for Canonical and Dell as this it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) meaning it will be supported by Canonical for three years on the Desktop and five years on the Servers. UDS is the forum where the Ubuntu Linux Community Developers and System Integrators (like Dell) come together to discuss and hash out the feature roadmap for the next release of Ubuntu Linux. Issues that need fixing, features that need developing are all spec'd out, prioritized and based in this week-long marathon of discussions and brainstorms. At the end of the summit, the final Blueprints are published. These Blueprints are reflective of what to expect in the next release of Ubuntu Linux. This sort of "transparent" planning is what differentiates the open-source projects such as Ubuntu Linux from their "closed-source" counterparts.

Mario Limonciello will be hitting the road with me. We both work in the core Ubuntu Linux engineering team at Dell responsible for delivering Ubuntu Linux on various desktops, notebooks and netbooks globally. Making guest appearances on random days of the summit will be Doug Anson who works for the Office of the CTO responsible for architecture of Client Linux across Dell as well as John Hull who is the Engineering Manager for the Linux team at Dell.

I will be leading a plenary on "Preloading Ubuntu" on the second day of the summit right after lunch hour. In addition, we will all be participating in many different sessions that span across several different tracks such as Desktop, Kernel, QA, Community etc. So, come out and join us or remotely participate.

The Planet, from Hoster to Hoster & Cloud Provider

DELL-Barton G — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:13:00 GMT

At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet. Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.

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Some of the topics Rob tackles:

The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers. They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.

Pau for now…

Learning about Heroku – The Ruby PaaS Solution

DELL-Barton G — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:

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Some of the topics Oren tackles:

Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead

Pau for now…

Back from the Bay Area with a fist full of cloudy videos

DELL-Barton G — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:01:03 GMT

Last week I made the trek out of the Lone Star state and headed west to the Bay Area. I spent the first day in San Francisco where I took our sales folks through my cloud presentation and then had meetings with a few members of the press. Here is the outcome of a couple of those meetings:

Dell Eyes Cloud Computing — Information Week
Dell schools net ‘dolphins’ in ways of Microsoft ‘whale’ — The Register

Down on the Peninsula

From the city I headed down to Santa Clara and the Cloud Computing Expo. I don’t think I saw a single customer at the event but I did run into a bunch of interesting companies in attendance. With my trusty Flip Mino I even recorded a bunch of interviews that I will be rolling out in the days to come. Here’s the list

3Tera — Barry Lynn, CEO
Heroku — Oren Teich head of product
Oracle VM — Adam Hawley, Director of Product management
Gluster — Hitesh Cellani, CEO and Jack O’Brien head of marketing
The Planet — Rob Walters, director of product management
Stoneware — Rick German, CEO
Cloud Camp — Dave Nielsen, co-founder

Stay tuned.

A Zoho billboard in the San Jose airport, right in the heart of Google country.

Pau for now…

Hello… Dell’s Getting into the Smartphone Business

Lionel_Menchaca — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Today, I get to put the all the rumors to rest—Dell confirmed that we’re entering the smartphone business. These initial Mini 3 smartphones will roll out first in China and Brazil through partnerships with two of the world’s largest mobile operators: China Mobile and Claro.

So, why are we starting in China and Brazil? Besides size (China Mobile has over 500 million subscribers, and Claro serves more than 42 million), we have existing telecom partnerships with them. Back in April, we were the first to embed China Mobile’s technology into our Mini 10 netbook. And if you’ve been watching, you know Dell has agreements with lots of other providers like Vodafone in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. We’ve partnered with AT&T and Verizon in the United States to offer mobile broadband on different products, and we have agreements with other carriers in Asia.

Here's a picture of Michael Dell and João Cox, President of Claro, showing off the Mini 3 smartphone:

Our entry into the smartphone market is a way to extend the power of the Internet beyond netbooks, laptops and desktops into smaller products. Lots of options there.

The other thing can confirm is that the Mini 3 smartphones run Google’s Android platform. I’m pumped like a lot of others out there about where Android is heading. With Android, we’re designing these initial Mini 3 phones to provide power, flexibility and customization to both our customers and to carriers around the world.

I’ll let others blog about the details of the upcoming Mini 3 smartphones and Dell’s broader mobile strategy here on Direct2Dell soon. To see the first official pictures, take a look at the Mini 3 set on our Flickr page.

EDUCAUSE 09: Cloud Computing, LMS and Virtualization Created Buzz in Denver

DELL-John Mu — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:18:00 GMT

Last week brought sunshine and beautiful weather to Denver… Along with more than 3700 Higher Education IT professionals, in Denver to attend the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.

The conference buzzed with people talking about a few key topics:

- Cloud Computing: How will Higher Education leverage the trend towards Cloud Computing? Can Cloud Computing change the cost structure and mitigate complexity for Hi Ed IT? How do institutions manage thorny issues related to Cloud Computing- such as security, access, privacy, data ownership, and others? With Dell’s recent acquisition of Perot Systems, we’ll be looking for a compelling solution to meet Hi Ed customer needs for Cloud Computing and help answer some of these questions. Read the article in the November/December, 2009, edition of EDUCAUSE Review by Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Information Technology, Chief Information Officer for Indiana University, and professor of information systems in IU’s Kelly School of Business; and Shelton Waggener, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at the University of California, Berkley: Above-Campus Services: Shaping the Promise of Cloud Computing for Higher Education.

- The extension of the Dell and SunGard Higher Education partnership: We announced that we’ll be extending our partnership with SunGard, and even setting up a remote test center on-site at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. This test center will allow the two companies to expand upon the great work already underway at SunGard’s Open Digital Campus Test center, and accelerate the testing of Dell products, including EqualLogic storage, with SunGard’s Banner and PowerCampus software suites.

- The emergence of the Learning Management System as a mission critical application on campuses: How can colleges and universities make the best choice between the commercial and open source options for LMS? Dell partners extensively with Blackboard, and our partnership continues to grow, offering customers a scalable, reliable platform to run their LMS. In fact, Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers allowed Blackboard’s Managed Hosting™ service to provide 99.7% availability to more than 630 campuses worldwide. We’re also working with MoodleRooms to offer choices to our customers who are interested in deploying Moodle’s open source offering.

- Virtualizing the Desktop: The next big wave of virtualization in Hi Ed will take place in the desktop environment, as colleges and universities wrangle with the right way to share information and resources and information with their student population. Dell’s Flexible Computing solutions continue to emerge to help customers to help tackle this problem. It’s another great example of how we’ll be able to use our expertise to help solve the challenges facing our Hi Ed customers.

It was a productive week in Denver. I personally enjoyed the opportunity to meet with so many customers in such a short period of time. The EDUCAUSE conference never fails to deliver on its promise of insight, thought leadership and interaction with the Hi Ed IT community.

Dell Latitude Z: A deeper look for channel partners

DELL-Jeff J — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:49:11 GMT

It seems everyone is asking about the new Dell Latitude Z, especially channel partners. Here are a couple videos that will give you a closer look.

Dell's Inspiron Zino HD: The Little Box That Could

Lionel_Menchaca — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Those of you who read Direct2Dell pretty regularly know that I love to use PCs for their multimedia capabilities. Advancements in hardware performance and on the OS side have made it possible to enjoy HD-quality stuff throughout the house. Now, we're bringing that capability to customers worldwide into a small form factor with the Inspiron Zino HD. Next to the Studio Hybrid, it's the smallest PC form factor we've introduced in our history. It also brings a lot of the power efficiency of the Studio Hybrid and offers better performance.

Small form factors themselves are nothing new. But with the Inspiron Zino HD, we've worked to make a desktop that balances performance, size and price. In my view, this is the closest we've come to balancing all three in my 15 years here at Dell.

Update: I saw folks like Crave's Rich Brown were curious about performance Blu-ray performance. I'll work to pull together some details about CPU/ GPU performance on this little thing early next week. In the meantime, Jay Taylor has a pretty thorough review over at the AMD at Home Blog.

We offer a slew of color and design options: Flamingo Pink, Formula Red, Tangerine Orange, Plum Purple, True Blue, and Spring Green and Piano Black. Beyond that, we'll also offer Dell Design Studio-inspired designs as well. Take a look at this set on Dell's Flickr page if you want to see more.

The Inspiron Zino HD kicks things into high gear by adding more powerful processor (see image below) and graphic card options. It comes standard with an integrated version of AMD's Radeon HD 3200 solution, but customers who want the best HD experience should opt for upgrading to the discrete version of the ATI Mobility Radeon 4330.

The Zino HD also offers more expandability options--including DDR3 800MHz DDR2 RAM up to 8GB, an internal hard drive options up to 1TB. It also adds more external expandability through two E-SATA ports. Inspiron Zino HD customers can opt for an internal Blu-ray drive and can output it directly to an HDTV in the living room or elsewhere through HDMI. The Zinio HD can be ordered with two internal Wi-Fi network card options: the Dell 1397 card for 802.11b/g or the Dell 1520 card for 802.11b/g, and dual-band 802.11n. A 4-in-1 media card reader and integrated Gigabit Ethernet are both standard. Click on the image below to see a better view on the ports on the Inspiron Zino HD.

When outfitted with an upgraded processor the discrete graphics card option. the Zino HD is built for HD streaming. Streaming Netflix? Check. Watching Blu-ray movies in 1080p? Check. Besides that, this little box makes an awesome Windows 7 Media Center hub. We offer the Inspiron Zino HD with Vista Home Basic as the base operating system. But for anyone looking to use it as a Media Center Hub, I highly recommend upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium or Ultimate. If you watched video of Microsoft's Windows 7 launch event in New York might have caught the demo. Windows 7 is a media streaming beast.

Bottom line, if you're needing a small PC that can handle everything from the basics up through some pretty sophisticated HTPC kind of stuff, the I think the Inspiron Zino and the Zino HD are definitely worth a look.

More on Dell and the Windows 7 Upgrade Kits

Lionel_Menchaca — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:40:00 GMT

Recently, there's been some chatter in places like Ubergizmo about reported delays with the Windows 7 upgrade kits. Here's the deal: we're currently working through a backlog of orders for the English version of the OS and we hope to be caught up by the end of this week. The main reason for the delays is that there's lots of customers who want it. Even though we had planned for that, demand has exceeded our initial expectations.

I've already blogged about how the upgrade process should work, but I think the steps of the process are worth repeating here:

Determine system and Vista OS eligibility
Register your eligible system for the upgrade at https://win7.dell.com
Place your order for the version that you are eligible for (see table in the image below).
Once you successfully place your order, you can check the order status from the Windows 7 upgrade site at https://win7.dell.com

Remember that not all versions of Vista or XP qualify. Vista Home Basic is one such example. Some customers I've talked to purchased a qualifying system without a version of Vista that's eligible. Your eligibility ultimately depends on both the hardware and the version of Vista or XP you ordered along with the date your system was purchased. See this image from the eligibility page for more details on the corresponding OS version and what OSes are not eligible in the text below the table.

Note: Clicking on it will also bring you directly to it.

Some customers aren't able to complete the registration process (step #2 above) because their system is not in the database. We can fix this issue. See how to contact me down below.

Another common reasons for confusion is that registering your eligible system is only the first part of the process. You also have to place your order for Windows 7. In other words, registration alone does not initiate shipment of the kit. After registration, you have to log into your account at www.dell.com/windows7upgrade and order your kit. Once you've placed your order, you can also log into your account to view order status, shipping, and tracking information.

If you are having problems with any part of this process, I want to help you. Either comment on this post or contact me directly through sending me a private message or you can e-mail me here. Please share your service tag or order number, and let me know details about your specific situation. Posting your issue on the main Windows 7 Forum board is also an option.

Thank you for your patience during these first few weeks of the program. Beyond reaching out to me, here's some other places that might be helpful based on specific issues:

If you have problems registering a service tag:

Visit the Contact Dell site at http://www.dell.com/contactdell
After selecting your region, click the Contact Customer Service link

If you have forgotten your password or have a problem logging in:

Use the Forgot Password form and a new password will be sent to your e-mail account:
https://win7.dell.com/PasswordRecovery.aspx

If you have issues with lost shipments or receipt of damaged product:

Use the Contact Form at https://win7.dell.com/ContactLTG.aspx

For more information about installing or upgrading to Windows 7:

Visit http://support.dell.com/windows7

If you would like to check the shipping status of your order:

Visit the Windows 7 Upgrade website at www.dell.com/windows7upgrade and log into your account using the email address and password that you entered when you registered your system. Click on the "Order Status" link on the right. The order status, shipping, and tracking information will be displayed.

For all other questions and problems:

View our Frequently Asked Questions at https://win7.dell.com/FAQPage.aspx