Will Google actually pay OEMs to use Android? That's what Wall Street analyst turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Gurly claims in his latest Above the Crowd blog.
Today's announcement by Macronix of a 256-Mbit serial NOR flash chip is interesting from a capabilities point of view, but leaves a number questions regarding market pull, interface standards and overall market size that makes me wonder who will follow Macronix to create a storm in this teacup? Or, will the connectivity of every embedded device change the landscape completely and push the odds more in Macronix's favor? From Macronix's point of view, the 256-Mbit introduction is an effort to secure the lion's share of what it expects will be a $2 billion market by 2014, up from $645 million today (figures from Web-Feet Research used by Macronix in its positioning presentation). That's a sizable chunk of change no matter where you sit. However, when put in perspective, it may be that Macronix's competitors have bigger opportunities to chase. I spoke with Web-Feet's CEO and founder, Alan Niebel. He said serial NOR is $654 million out of a total $5 billion NOR flash market ...
Thanks to a licensing deal with STMicroelectronics reported today, ARM is headed into set-top boxes, the home turf of the MIPS Technologies core. This is just the latest move in a cross-market processor mania.
Reports are out that English may have to share with other languages in Web addresses, giving way for urls to appear in simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew, among others.
