DEMO: HP’s Phil McKinney explains company’s multibillion-dollar acquisition spree. Hewlett-Packard has been on a huge acquisition spree, spending almost $5 billion on companies such as Arcsight, Palm, Fortify and 3Par. It’s difficult to see any rhyme or reason to the collection of new assets. But Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer for HP’s Personal Systems Group, said today at the DEMO Fall 2010 conference that the aim is to create a one-stop shop for customers to buy complete systems that are already integrated and working together. “You integrate them and take the burden off the customers of doing that,” he said in a conversation with VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief and DEMO emcee Matt Marshall. “I understand what it takes to take disparate parts and stitch them together. It’s hard. HP also isn’t just acquiring companies so that they can stand by themselves and duplicate the work of other parts of HP.
Of course, HP isn’t quite doing that with its recent Palm acqusition. DEMO: Square’s Jack Dorsey on three lessons he learned from Twitter. What's next in mobile? Find out at MobileBeat, VentureBeat's 7th annual event on the future of mobile, on July 8-9 in San Francisco. Register now and save $400! Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey focused on his new mobile payments startup Square during a question-and-answer session this afternoon. But as he looked at how Square is navigating some of its initial challenges, he also looked backward, explaining three of the key lessons he learned from the early days of Twitter.
Dorsey was interviewed on-stage at DEMO Fall 2010, the technology launchpad conference co-produced by VentureBeat. San Francisco-based Square offers a small plastic reader that merchants can attach to their Android phones and iPhones, allowing them to process credit card payments. “I want to to make sure Square is known for its availability, it’s known for its trustworthiness, it’s known for its minimization of all the bad things that could happen with a payment network,” Dorsey said. [photo: Dean Takahashi] HP's WebOS slate confirmed for early 2011 | Web Crawler. SANTA CLARA, Calif. --Hewlett-Packard's rumored slate that will run off of Palm's WebOS is in fact coming in "early 2011" according to remarks from Phil McKinney, HP's vice president and chief technology officer for the company's personal systems group.
During an interview with VentureBeat's founder Matt Marshall as part of this year's Demo Fall conference, McKinney said that the WebOS-based version of the company's slate is well on track for its release early next year, but that HP is currently working hard to get its Windows 7-based slate out the door first. "There is a Windows 7 slate that is coming out, that will begin shipping by the end of the year," he said. "What we found with that slate is that it's the item that the enterprise users want. We have a number of customers in retail and health care that have specific Windows 7 applications, yet they want that portability.
" DEMO: Qualcomm Ventures doubles down on startups with its second startup competition. Qualcomm Ventures is kicking off its second annual QPrize competition today for the best startups in the wireless technology ecosystem. The communications giant will award $750,000 in total seed funding to the winners of the contest. The venture capital arm of Qualcomm made the announcement at the DEMO Fall 2010 conference today in Santa Clara, Calif.
It will formally announce the winner next spring at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference. The company will open the competition to entrepreneurs in North America, Europe, China, South Korea, India, and Israel. “We started this in early 2009 in the throes of the financial crisis, when there was a real need to give seed money for the best ideas,” said Nagraj Kashyap, vice president of Qualcomm Ventures in an interview. Kashyap said that games and social apps are very hot in the mobile market in the U.S. The aim is to help startups accelerate their technologies and get them to market quickly. DEMO: Yapper makes it easy for media publishers to build mobile apps. SachManya is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley.
After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.SachManya, a maker of mobile publishing tools, helps media companies create applications without writing any code. The startup is launching version 2.0 of its mobile app platform, called Yapper, today at DEMO. Using Yapper, short for Your App Maker, publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers can build a mobile app in just 30 minutes with a visual tool that shows what the app will look like as it’s created. The first version of Yapper focused primarily on republishing RSS feeds as iPhone apps, but Yapper 2.0 allows publishers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and BlackBerrys. With Yapper 2.0, users can also integrate new app features such as in-app purchases of digital content, push notifications, and user-generated content.
DEMO: Poynt adds location-based advertising tool for local businesses. Multiplied Media is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.Poynt, a location-based mobile search engine from Multiplied Media, today announced the launch of the Poynt Offer Engine, an advertising tool for local businesses to push promotions to potential customers nearby. Poynt, available on the iPhone, Android phones, and BlackBerrys, lets users search for services and products and provides results based on their location at the time of the search.
Upon launching the app, the users can choose from five categories: restaurants, movies, businesses, people and gas. From there, they can either automatically see what’s in their area or search for something specific. For local businesses, the company has set up a dashboard which allows them to manage their promotions and see how many mobile users are in their area in real-time. Maryrduan: Twitter has some interesti...
Tara Miller: #democon is nice, but my b... JD Lasica: "Mobile will change shoppi... VentureBeat: Never regret buying magent... VentureBeat: Qualcomm is announcing on... DEMOfall 2010: What's Tweeting? The DEMO Conference's Photostream. DEMO.com > DEMO Fall 2010. DEMOfall 2010: The Companies!