IT Buoy

Intel Kirk Skaugen Intel loves to talk about Moore’s Law, its co-founder’s famed maxim about how rapidly miniaturization improves semiconductors. The company also prides itself on setting the pace, underscoring the strategy recently by deploying its most tiny circuitry in microprocessors for mainstream PCs. Then there’s Itanium. The high-end microprocessor line, originally developed with help from Hewlett-Packard, uses an entirely different technology than the x86 chips that Intel popularized in desktop and laptop PCs and low-end servers. Itanium models have tended to lag the production processes used to manufacture other Intel chips, but the disparity seems particularly stark with the latest version. Tukwila, the code name for a long-delayed Itanium model introduced Monday, is being built using manufacturing technology that creates lines of circuitry with features rated at 65 nanometers, or billionths of meter. That’s two technology generations behind the 32-nanometer process used in Intel’s latest x86 chips; the company earlier this year announced a $7 billion plan to accelerate the conversion of its U.S. factories to 32-nanometer technology

TecSec, a closely held firm near Washington D.C., filed patent suits against IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and a host of other tech companies after recently settling one with Microsoft. Bloomberg News IBM, whose New York office is shown, is one of the major companies targeted in patent suits by TecSec. In a Feb. 5 complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia, the company says the defendants infringed on 11 U.S. patents related to core encryption technology that TecSec owns. The complaint alleges that defendants “have earned billions of dollars of revenue through the unauthorized use” of TecSec’s patented encryption technology as they manufactured and sold database management systems, application servers and processing systems. The suit extends to IBM’s DB2 and WebSphere Application Server, Oracle’s Application Server and Oracle Database System and Sun’s UltraSPARC processors

Jonathan Schwartz was one of the first CEOs to blog on a regular basis, and jumped early on many other tech trends. So it seems fitting that his final comment about leaving Sun Microsystem should come in a tweet. The contents of that message also are in character. Sun, it should remembered, burnished its reputation in the 1990s by selling computers to customers on Wall Street. Time is money there, so financial-services firm tend to pay up for hardware and software that can complete transactions and analytical chores in the shortest amount of time. Courtesy of Sun Jonathan Schwartz Wall Street experienced the recent meltdown sooner than other segments of the economy. So Sun’s business got hurt earlier in 2008 than some rivals, and seemed to fare even worse following Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition bid for the company in April. That transaction closed last week

It was not surprising to find Jeffrey Katzenberg in a good mood at the Consumer Electronics Show. After all, his DreamWorks Animation has bet the company on making movies in 3-D, and that technology is the talk of the show . But there’s another big reason. Associated Press Samsung Consumer Electronics President Tim Baxter, left, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose pose with 3-D glasses at the Samsung news conference at CES. With Internet-connected TV changing from pipe dream to reality, content companies like DreamWorks face a mind-bending shift — the possibility of direct interaction with customers. “It shuffles the table in a pretty profound way,” Mr. Katzenberg said in an interview.

Most public-opinion surveys seem to confirm what one would expect. But every once in a while there’s a paradox or two, as in some recent findings by Accenture in the area of technology services. The consulting firm discussed some of its research in advance of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which formally kicks off Jan. 7 in Las Vegas. For starters, service contracts associated with technology products might seem like an area that cash-strapped consumers might forego in tough economic times. Yet some 49% of the vendors surveyed by Accenture said consumers had increased purchases of new service contracts during the downturn; 22% said sales hadn’t changed, and 18% said sales had declined. (The remainder said they don’t offer service contracts). Realizing the need to keep customers happy, vendors have taken various steps to improve their service offerings to please customers, Accenture found