Intel, Google, IBM Among The First To Join President Obama's "Startup America" Campaign

Today, President Obama announced the launch of Startup America, a national (public/private) initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. The core goals of Startup America are to increase the number of new high-growth firms that are creating economic growth, innovation, and quality jobs; celebrate and honor entrepreneurship as a core American value and source of competitive advantage; and inspire and empower an ever-greater diversity of communities and individuals to build great American companies.

Among the early companies to join the Startup America Partnership are familiar names Intel, IBM, Google, Facebook, HP and AOL co-founder Steve Case who will chair the partnership.

As part of this partnership, and in conjunction with its ongoing Invest in America initiative, Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization has pledged to invest another $200 million in American technology companies and joined the campaign’s board of advisors.

“Intel is dedicated to creating a culture of investment in the United States that supports American startups and the country’s future competitiveness,” said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president. “We are pleased to join the Administration in the effort to help new businesses succeed in the United States and consider this partnership an important opportunity to promote education, innovation and entrepreneurship to maintain a globally competitive economy.”


IBM will invest $150 million in 2011 to fund programs that promote entrepreneurs and new business opportunities in the United States. HP will be investing more than $4 million in 2011 in the HP Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs (HP LIFE). Facebook will be launching Startup Days, a series of events around the country that helps provide entrepreneurs with engineering and design support to build off the Facebook Platform. While Google is partnering with Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), a nonprofit that provides entrepreneurship education for at-risk high school students from low-income communities, to offer a number of NFTE’s lessons and curriculum plans to Bay Area students. And startup incubator TechStars is rolling out “The TechStars Network,” which encourages and promotes regional organizations that operate start-up accelerator programs with models similar to the incubator.


Goals of Startup America
Startup America will:

• Expand access to capital for high-growth startups throughout the country;
• Expand entrepreneurship education and mentorship programs that empower more Americans not just to get a job, but to create jobs;
• Strengthen commercialization of the about $148 billion in annual federally-funded research and development, which can generate innovative startups and entirely new industries;
• Identify and remove unnecessary barriers to high-growth startups; and
• Expand collaborations between large companies and startups.

Learn more:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Obama Administration Commitments
• Private Sector Commitments
• National Innovation Strategy
• State of the Union Address
• Small Business Jobs Act
• National Entrepreneurs’ Day
• Startup America Partnership website

Tech Giants Back Linux Form Linaro

Six major tech companies have decided to join forces to boost Linux forming Linaro - a Software foundations for an open digital world.

Linaro, backed by mega hitters ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, is a none profit organizations whose goal is to bring together the open source community and the electronics industry to work on key projects. The main focus will be delivering great tools utilizing Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS.

Linaro will work with the growing number of Linux distributions to create regular releases of optimized tools and foundation software that can be used widely by the industry, increasing compatibility across semiconductors from multiple suppliers. As a result, Linaro's resources and open source solutions will allow device manufacturers to speed up development time, improve performance and reduce engineering time spent on non-differentiating, low-level software. Linux distributions, open source and proprietary software projects will benefit from Linaro's investment, with more stable code becoming widely available as a common base for innovation.

To further its mission, Linaro aims to unite the open source engineering resources within its member firms with the broad open source community. Linaro engineers, leveraging their extensive embedded knowledge, will contribute to a wide range of open source projects covering areas such as tools, kernel, graphics and boot code. Linaro intends to work in partnership with the Linux Foundation to align on core operating principles.

The company's first release is planned for November 2010 and will provide performance optimizations for SoCs based on the ARM CortexTM-A processor family.

Read more in the full Linaro Press Release

"Roadrunner" Smashes Petaflop Barrier

IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have reportedly built the world's first petaflop supercomputer named Roadrunner. Roadrunner was specifically designed to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.



A petaflop is a measure of a computer s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

Scheduled for installation at Los Alamos in August, IBM says Roadrunner represents a breakthrough in hybrid computing, combining AMD microprocessors found in standard laptops and servers with the IBM Cell Broadband Engine chips that power Sony's PS3 gaming console. Roadrunner, consists of 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 12,960 Cell processors and 80 terabytes of memory, talk about a screaming gaming machine!

Roadrunner "will produce the largest supercomputer ever at 1.5 petaflops, three times faster than the current largest system," IBM chief engineer Donald Grice says in a video on Big Blue's Web site. "It's a hybrid architecture that will allow science at a scale that's never been allowed before."

CNN via the AP did a great job of putting the speed of the new machine in to layman's terms. "To put the computer's speed in perspective, if every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day."

IBM 'Racetrack' Nano-Magnetic Memory

IBM has announced that they are developing a new type of memory which will be faster than current hard drives and flash memory while offering about 100 times the storage capacity. Dubbed “Racetrack,” the technology is similar to flash memory in that it has no moving parts, which reduces the likelihood of mechanical malfunction. However, unlike flash memory, which can typically last 100,000 read-write cycles before problems emerge, "racetrack" can supposedly be endlessly rewritten with no wear and tear.

Using spintronics--the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge--a proof-of-concept shift register was recently demonstrated by IBM. The prototype encodes bits into the magnetic domain walls along the length of a silicon nanowire, or racetrack. IBM uses "massless motion" to move the magnetic domain walls along the nanowire for the storage and retrieval of information.



"We have now demonstrated a current-controlled, domain-wall, shift register which is the fundamental, underlying technology for racetrack memory," said Stuart Parkin of IBM's Almaden Research Center. "We use current pulses to move a series of domain walls along a nanowire, which is not possible to do with magnetic fields."

IBM stated tey hope to have a prototype ready within 2 to 4 years, with mass production possibly within 7 years.