July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple’s in the top 10 for the first time ever, Facebook hits the list, and Dell sells more than Google as Fortune Magazine released its Fortune 500 companies today, ranking the top 500 companies by global income.

Notable this year is Apple, with its whopping $156 billion in 2012 sales, jumping into the top 10 for the first time in its 37-year history. And Google, with its big $50 billion year, bulled its way up almost 20 spots to hit No. 55. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Facebook, which with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 made the list for the very first time at 487.

Ranking companies by income is a fairly arbitrary measure, since it reveals little about how much companies actually earn, but it does show scope and scale. A grain of salt is definitely indicated, however, as Google’s profits, for instance, are many multiples of Dell’s despite that Dell is ranked No. 51 and Google is No. 55.

Here are the 41 technology companies that Fortune included on its list.

• 6: Apple
• 15: HP
• 20: IBM
• 35: Microsoft
• 49: Amazon
• 51: Dell
• 54: Intel
• 55: Google
• 60: Cisco Systems
• 80: Oracle
• 131: Xerox
• 133: EMC
• 176: Computer Sciences
• 163: Jabil Circuit
• 194: Qualcomm
• 196: eBay
• 218: Texas Instruments
• 222: Western Digital
• 240: SAIC
• 267: CDW
• 270: Liberty Interactive
• 302: Applied Materials
• 304: Motorola Solutions
• 318: Micron Technology
• 326: Corning
• 327: Broadcom
• 352: Congnizant Technology Solutions
• 379: Symantec
• 408: NetApp
• 420: Sanmina
• 429: Harris
• 436: Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
• 441: NCR
• 473: Priceline.com
• 464: AMD
• 477: Avaya
• 482: Facebook
• 487: SanDisk
• 489: Pitney Bowes
• 494: Yahoo
• 499: CA Technologies

A couple of caveats:

I have not included telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, although a good argument can be made that they are now, primarily, technology companies, simply because Fortune did not classify them in any recognizable technology category. And I have included retailers like CDW and companies like Pitney Bowes, which Fortune classifies in categories like Computers, Office Equipment, and Information Technology Services.

One interesting note: While Facebook has the Fortune 500′s youngest CEO, Dole Food’s David Murdock, at 90 years old, is the Fortune 500′s oldest CEO.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

PC shipments fell off the proverbial cliff in the first quarter of 2013, according to IDC, with their biggest drop ever in recorded history.

That might sound a little melodramatic, given that the recorded history of PC shipments only goes back to 1994. But with a drop of 13.9 percent — almost double the expected 7.7 percent — to only 76.3 million units, the first quarter of 2013 has been a disaster for traditional PC manufacturers.

Even a new version of Windows, once a guaranteed shot in the arm for PC shipments, failed to stimulate demand. Quite the opposite.

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,” Bob O’Donnell, an IDC vice-president, said in a statement.

O’Donnell says that with its radical user interface changes, subtraction of the familiar Start button, and extra costs that come with Windows 8-equipped PCs that take advantage of its touch capabilities “have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices.”

Ouch.

In the U.S., this marks the tenth consecutive quarter of year-on-year declines, and quarterly shipments reached their lowest level since early 2006. Europe was down as well, and even growing China and the rest of the Asia Pacific region dropped 12.7 percent, the first double-digit decline in PC shipments there.

HP remains the top PC vendor globally, IDC said, but its shipments fell 23 percent year-over-year, and it was almost surpassed by Lenovo, which astonishingly had double-digit growth in a sinking market. Dell dropped 10 percent as well, and Acer, Asus, and Toshiba also dropped somewhat.

Even Apple, which has seen strong growth in recent years, particularly in laptops, had shipments decline 7.5 percent to 1.4 million.

IDC seems interested in blaming Windows 8, but the more likely culprit is surging sales of tablets, which some analysts are including in “PC” shipment numbers. In fact, some analysts believe that this year is the year tablet sales will outpace traditional PC sales, with quarterly sales of 55-60 million.

Given this quarter’s numbers, it looks like the crossover point could be as soon as the next three months. But whether that happens or not, big changes are in store for PC vendors:

“The industry is going through a critical crossroads, and strategic choices will have to be made as to how to compete with the proliferation of alternative devices and remain relevant to the consumer,” David Daoud, IDC Research Director, said in a statement. “Vendors will have to revisit their organizational structures and go-to-market strategies, as well as their supply chain, distribution, and product portfolios in the face of shrinking demand and looming consolidation.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

American business magnate Carl Icahn has signed a confidentiality agreement to review Dell‘s financial records and further evaluate the bid for a $24 billion leveraged buyout to take the company private.

With news circulating about Icahn’s involvement, Dell shares rose one percent this morning to $14.30.

The Dell privatization saga has experienced twists and turns with shareholders stepping up to fight the sale. Icahn announced last week he would buy six percent of the company.

The activist investor has sided with shareholders, including Southeastern Asset Management and T Rowe Price who opposed the terms of the deal, in arguing that the buyout “significantly undervalues” the world’s third largest computer maker.

A special committee on the board has said it would welcome Icahn’s input on the sale process.

In a letter to Dell’s board, Icahn took a stand against CEO Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Management’s plan to go private at $13.65 a share. He proposed instead that Dell pay shareholders a special dividend of $9 per share in a combination of cash on hand and additional debt.

Evercore Partners, a Dell advisor, has been running a “go shop” process. According to Bloomberg, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have both taken advantage of the buy-out talks in order to get a look at Dell’s books but are unlikely to make a bid.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Remember what Michael Dell said when he was asked back in 1997 — when Steve Jobs returned to Apple — what he’d do if he were Jobs?

“I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Time wounds all heels, I guess. Now Dell might just be finding himself in a roughly similar situation, as Dell Computer has fallen on hard times and high-flying financial vulture Carl Icahn has bought up to six percent of the company with a simple goal: cashing out.

According to CNBC, insiders familiar with the deal said that Icahn will oppose Dell’s leveraged buyout of his company and push for a significant one-time dividend to all shareholders.

Dell shares, which have languished in the $8 range for much of the last six months, are up to $14 this year in response to Dell’s buyout offer – which may include participation by Microsoft – and jumped up another two percent today on the news:

Source: Google Finance

Dell’s stock market value

Dell’s largest shareholder, which owns about 8.5 percent of the company, is reportedly against the buyout and may therefore find common cause with Icahn.

The company reported better-than-expected results in the last quarter of 2012, with $14.31 billion in sales, cash flow of $1.4 billion, and earnings of $0.40 per share.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dell‘s largest outside shareholder is gearing up for a fight against the company’s plans to go private.

Southeastern Asset Management, a Memphis-based firm, said in a regulatory filing today that it plans to fight the $24.4 billion sale to Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. The firm owns approximately 8.5 percent of the company’s shares, including options.

In a letter addressed to Dell’s board of directors, the firm makes the case that the buyout is too low, which is essentially robbing shareholders. The authors urge the board to explore alternative options, or face a long and protracted fight against the deal.

“Unfortunately, the proposed Silver Lake transaction falls significantly short of that, and instead appears to be an effort to acquire Dell at a substantial discount to intrinsic value at the expense of public shareholders,” the firm said.

The firm makes the case that Dell stock should be valued at up to $24 per share, rather than the $13.65 offer price. The authors point to Dell’s success with the small to medium sized business (SMB) market as a competitive advantage that has not been duly considered.

Southeastern put forward alternative moves that would return value to shareholders, including borrowing money to pay out a special dividend or a leveraged buyout to allow for limited trading of shares by public investors.

Southeastern Asset Management is run by Mason Hawkins and Staley Cates, both of whom oversee Southeastern’s Longleaf family of mutual funds. The Longleaf strategy is to basically buy and hold stakes in companies over long periods of time, especially those they believe are trading at discounts.

Hawkins has occasionally been regarded in the financial press occasionally as the Warren Buffett of mutual fund investing.

Related: Read our analysis of Dell’s privatization: a new era for old tech. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

10 messages per second to 1,000,000 live users on single, solitary server rack? That’s impressive by any standard, and that’s what Kaazing and Dell were able to achieve with living, dynamically updating webpages.

“Dell came to Kaazing … and asked if we could drive one message per second to one million users,” Kaazing executive vice president John Donnelly said in a statement. “We did just that and then some, achieving 10 messages per second to the same one million users.”

That’s on a single Dell PowerEdge R620 server rack using dual 3.3GHz quad core Xeon CPUs, 32GB of RAM, plus dual 10Gb Ethernet cards and four 1Gb Ethernet network ports.

Dell says that the system, which used TIBCO Enterprise Message Server, “can now support a higher number of users than ever before at speeds never before possible.”

In the old days, web browsers forced users to refresh entire web pages to update a single element are over. Modern web pages, however, enabled by modern web browsers, now allow dynamic updating of individual components. One such protocol is WebRTC (web real-time communication), but the Kaazing software uses the HTML5 WebSocket standard.

To achieve scalable live page element updating is a somewhat new challenge for web servers.

Live updating can create a great experience for end users, but it can also put a massive demand on web server software and hardware that were previously optimized for sending out complete pages every 15 to 50 seconds, but now are getting dozens of small update requests a second.

So 10 million messages per second is impressive. Also impressive is that the companies delivered them from server to client in an average 3.5 milliseconds each.

One little caveat: If you check out Dell’s online configurator for the PowerEdge R620, you’ll notice no 3.3GHz Xeon processors available. The top of the line orderable CPUS are 2.2GHz.

Update: Dell has updated its product ordering space and the new 3.3GHz processor is now available for order.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Windows 8 crashes 55 percent less and is 84 percent less frustrating than Windows 7, according to a new report.

PC optimization software Soluto helps over three million people in 182 countries get more out of their PCs. Along the way, the company learns a lot about what people do … and how their software works. Fortunately for us, the company shared that data a couple of days ago.

Here are some of the highlights:

European nations such as Hungary and Portugal are adopting Windows 8 quickly, with almost 9 percent adoption in Hungary and 5.29 percent in Portugal. China is also moving quickly, with more than seven percent of Windows users already on Microsoft’s new operating system. Americans, however, are adopting more of wait and see approach, with only 3.4 percent of Windows users updating.

In addition, with the touch-friendliness of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 8 is penetrating the tablet market much more effectively than Windows 7. For example, while less than two percent of Windows 7 machines are tablets, almost five percent of Windows 8 machines are, in fact, tablet computers — before Surface has really had a chance to make an impact yet.

Not actually a Windows 8 install disc

Interestingly, desktop use is also slightly higher, with almost 51 percent of Windows 8 installs being on a desktop PC, versus 48.5 percent of Windows 7 installs being on a laptop.

Some apps, Soluto found, crash less frequently on Windows 8.

That includes Google Drive, which is the most common app crash culprit on Windows 7, crashing for almost a third of all users (I guess companies can be great at everything). In Windows 8, however, Google Drive crashes for only one percent of users. TuneUp Utilities is another in the much-improved category, moving from crashing for 20 percent of its users on Windows 7 to five percent on Windows 8.

Some apps, of course, crash more on Windows 8. Facebook Video Calling, for instance, crashes at least once a month for a rather unlucky 13 percent of its users, compared to just one percent on Windows 7. And Apple’s iTunes software, often maligned for being bloated, crashes almost twice as much on Window 8.

Soluto also tracks PC brands that users have purchase. The top PC brands being used by Windows 8 early adopters are HP and Dell, with most than 30 percent of the market, followed in fourth and fifth spot by Asus and Acer:

1. 16.83% – HP
2. 14.65% – Dell
3. 10.71% – Gigabyte
4. 10.32% – Asus
5. 8.72% – Acer

One thing about crashing apps: Third-party developers don’t have a lock on them. Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer still crashes about the same amount on Windows 8 as it always has.

photo credit: gynti_46 via photopin cc, Robert Couse-Baker via photopin cc

DHE Media is taking a different approach to tablet publishing with its dINK platform. Instead of focusing on the design aspect of publishing for tablets, dINK lets companies approach publishing as an information workflow problem, allowing them to easily deliver relevant information to customers and their employees.

The platform also allows companies to easily turn tablets into kiosks, with all of the user permission controls and administrative features that go along with kiosks. Ultimately, dINK will allow anyone to create interactive kiosks using tablets.

The platform consists of the kiosk module, a story composer to easily plug in text, video or other media, and an HTML5-driven client for playing back content on any tablet. To monitor how users interact with tablet publications, dINK also offers a Smart Reporting module that keeps track of events and interactions, which is easily exportable to CRM and customer profiling systems.

DHE Media has already landed some large multinational enterprise customers, who are using the dINK platform for internal publishing, such as corporate newsletters and employee training manuals, and external publishing, such as magazines and brochures. The company competes with OnSwipe and Adobe, both of which focus more on the design elements of tablet publishing.

Founders Jan Dheedene, CEO, and Benoit Quirynen, CTO, have decades of experience in platform development and product innovation between them. The company currently has five employees, including the founders.

DHE Media was founded in 2010 and has received €850K in funding from two seed funds, as well as cash from the founders.

DHE Media is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Dell’s smartphone Mini 3i made its first appearance today in China at an event held by China Mobile, the large Chinese wireless carrier, which will distribute the phone.

Dell’s Mini 3i is one of a series of phones China Mobile is launching based on its OMS operating system, which uses Google’s Android operating system as its foundation. The move by China Mobile to base its phones on Android is a blow to Apple, which had sought for years to do a deal with the carrier.

Notably, the Mini 3i doesn’t support Wi-Fi or the Chinese standard WAPI. The phone has a 3 megapixel camera.
It is a 3.5-inch, 360 x 640 pixel device, and has a capacitive touchscreen. The device operates on 2G GSM (not 3G) and comes with microSD slot, Bluetooth, and 950mAh battery.

China Mobile rules China with more than a 70 percent market share, which helps guarantee distribution in what can be a tough market for foreigners to penetrate. Chinese consumers aren’t used to buying directly from the Web, and they’re not used to using credit cards — something that has hurt Dell’s PC sales growth in the country (Lenovo did much better with its wide distribution in stores). It appears Dell learned its lesson.

Dell’s new China phone made its appearance at an event to celebrate the opening of China Mobile’s application store, Mobile Market, which will support music, video, and app downloads to mobile phones from Dell, as well as from Nokia, Samsung and LG (Update: We reached out to China Mobile and it turns out that the report on the Mobile Market is wrong. Said a representative: “China Mobile has not officially announced Mobile Market and its plan yet, so we can not release related info to the public now.”).  No word on exactly when the Dell phone will ship, though.

[Photo credit: Mobile.163.com/Netease]