Yesterday Dell announced their new tablet. The technology media wrote about it, and it got some good buzz. The first thing that went through my mind was, how does this jive with their deal to re-sell Motion tablets? Are they competing now? Did Motion just lose a huge reseller?

As you can see from the picture, Dell’s new Latitude XT is actually a convertible. It looks kind of like a regular laptop, but then the screen spins around and lays down against the keyboard, screen up, so that you can use it as a tablet. They also announced that it will have "capacitive touch" which I guess means you can use the screen with your finger, kind of like an iPhone. With a motion tablet, you use a special stylus on the touch screen.

So it’s not really a direct competitor, since the Motion computer is an actual tablet, and not a convertible. You can buy a small external keyboard for it, and then it acts pretty much like a laptop too.

The biggest shocker was the price. It starts at $2499, so by the time you add enough RAM to run Vista and MS Office, plus other goodies you’re definitely talking about $4K for a decently working machine. Toshiba has had offerings in this market for a while, and they’re definitely more cost competitive. Dell has always had a reputation is a low cost provider because of their direct-to-consumer model, but these days buying Dell definitely means you’re paying a premium. Maybe people will call it the "Michael Dell Tax" the same way people used to complain about the premium for Apple equipment.

In our estimation, the headlines should have read "Dell Takes High Priced Convertible for a Spin."

FiveRuns announced a partnership today with California-based ELC Technologies. ELC claims to have the largest global team of dedicated Ruby on Rails developers. ELC has delivered Rails applications for such large corporations as Cisco, Buy.com, and MediaTrust. FiveRuns brings enterprise-class monitoring and management to Ruby applications.

“We have repeatedly demonstrated the value of Rails for business-critical
applications to the global companies we have as clients. However, one of the
greatest challenges our clients face is monitoring and maintaining Rails within
large-scale enterprise environments,” said Jonathan Siegel, founder and
president of ELC Technologies. “Working with FiveRuns will allow our clients to
easily manage their Rails deployments using FiveRuns’ tools — and to demonstrate
for themselves that Rails can deliver enterprise performance as well as
shortening time to deployment.”

Spiceworks, a rapidly growing innovator of ad-supported IT management software, today announced that they had hit the 200,000 user mark which doubles their user base in just six months. The company now has users in all 194 countries of the world. They also announced the release of version 2.0 of their product, as well as some new advertising partners. Continue reading →

Spiceworks, a rapidly growing innovator of ad-supported IT management software, today announced that they had hit the 200,000 user mark which doubles their user base in just six months. The company now has users in all 194 countries of the world. They also announced the release of version 2.0 of their product, as well as some new advertising partners.

Version 2 adds some significant features, such as windows event log monitoring, faster network discovery time on larger networks, product reviews and ratings from the Spiceworks community, and private messaging between members of the community. "Today we’ve achieved major milestones in terms of our product development life cycle, community growth, and the advertising partners we have on board," said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO. New advertising partners include Microsoft, Brother, Symantec, and Verio who join existing partners HP, McAfee, Netgear, and Sony (just to name a few).

For more information on Spiceworks you can read their Q&A Wednesday feature.

The UT Board of Regents voted Thursday to approve the creation of a $2M fund to help encourage commercial development of innovative ideas at all 15 UT System institutions. Grants will be given in amounts up to $50,000. The program is designed to complement other Texas economic development efforts; the Emerging Technology Fund (ETF) and the Texas Enterprise Fund.

While $2M total, and $50,000 per idea seems like a small amount for an institution with a multi billion dollar endowment, it’s generally the early stage seed money that is hard to come by. This might be just the right amount of money to get an idea from a lab in the UT System to a viable demo, beta test, or prototype. That is when more traditional means of investment can come into play.

Sailpoint Technologies announced a partnership today with leading accounting and consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. PWC will utilize Sailpoint’s Compliance IQ products in their delivery of consulting around identity and risk management. In a recent global security report from PWC, 78% of surveyed organizations state they do not continuously classify data and information assets by risk level, and SailPoint’s surveys show that a risk-based approach to identity management would be more effective. "Organizations who focus on a risk-based approach to solving the identity management challenge will realize greater value overall," said Jerry Lewis who is the national identity management leader for PWC.

In conjunction with today’s news about PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Sailpoint announced the next generation (version 2.0) of their Compliance IQ product. The new version contains enhanced capabilities in the definition of roles within organizations, support for business friendly descriptors for entitlement names, and workflow features to management the lifecycle of roles.