Put together an august company of ‘A’ List Bloggers like Robert Scoble and the folks from Engadget. Mix in a luxury suite at the Bellagio, open 24 hours a day and upload speeds over 2MB per second, and you have the prescription for a very interesting afternoon. And this is sure to become a main operating hub for our coverage, if for reasons of upload speed alone. Aggregate is 20MB of bandwidth up, 60MB down.
John Furrier at Podtech – along with Robert Scoble – is the host of the Bloghaus, and it is funded by Seagate.
Just listening to the chatter that revolved around an interview with Bill Gates that was conducted by Robert Scoble – asking a question on Global Warming. Seemed that Scoble was on a plane with John Edwards, and every time that the topic of global warming was mentioned, the crowd’s reaction pointed to a hot button issue (no pun intended). SO – Mr Scoble asked a simple question: Since Microsoft software is deployed on a lion’s share of the 650 million PC’s on this planet, how about some effort to reduce the power consumption of Windows PC’s by a patch from MS that would reduce the power – say maybe 5% ? Even one or two percentage points would be substantial.
Bill Gates was not amused - not sure if he was expecting an ambush of some sort, but he failed to answer the question.
It’s a question that should be asked again.
The Gates keynote will be streamed into the Bloghaus – so instead of queueing for two hours – the line is forming now, at 4:00PM for a 6:30 presentation we will watch from here – and take in some of the commentary along the lines.
Buzz Bruggeman from ActionWords is here – and I had to let him know that – just like Tivo – you do not realize that you need it until you use it for a few weeks. The sixty day free trial is the introduction to a highly productive tool. Mac version in the works and can’t get here too soon.
Andru Edwards from Gear Live is here – a fellow Techpodcast member and Gnomedexer. There’s a chance that he may be mentioned in the Gates Keynote tonight, on the ipTV front.
The Seagate presentation – and thanks to them for hosting this great facility – covered some of their new products.
Trends ? still at 750 GB – no 1TB capacity drive introduced, at present . But it has to be in the works.
The more interesting trends though, were not related to storage. Products will trend, over time, to commodities and disk storage capacity has been there for a long time.
What’s left ? Making the transition to treating the product as a Fashion item - or positioning it as a solution to a larger problem.
Seagate is moving on both fronts.
Across the board, there is a cool redesign into a slim brown package (brown apparently being the new cool color, superseding grey or chrome or in prehistoric times, putty). What they do add, however, is an orange glow to indicate the drive is powered – gently pulsing when data is being read or being written to the drive… actually looks much nicer than the photo shows.
The more significant feature was the recognition of the importance of storage in our lives with the storage of photographs and videos. Seagate has positioned itself as a key partner in the overall solution of backup –
There are two key things that they announced: A partnership with Snapfish to autosync materials from the local drive to Snapfish servers, and more importantly a free (for six months) 500GB online storage with the purchase of each drive