Globalization & Converging Technologies – the time is ripe for Innovation Outsourcing without Borders

Having the right approach to globalization will define successful leadership in 2010. While financial institutions toppled in 2009, new industries were born. While industry incumbents struggled to survive, new entrants thrived. It’s in the sharp corners of when industries and economies turn that new leaders emerge. Today’s leaders understand the importance of globalization. Globalization is one of the fundamental laws of business. If business were physics, then globalization would be its gravity. The best products and services will be sought out, bought, and consumed by people all over the world, especially since comparative product information is now essentially available to anyone, at anytime and anywhere. And successful products and services will be produced globally to be the most optimally cost efficient and with the highest global utility. Now more than ever before — the time is right for innovation outsourcing without borders.

Companies need to enable flexibility in their product development processes to accommodate market-specific customizations. And companies need to get more value out of R&D spending, and tap the best minds on the planet to create [Continue Reading...]

OpenCL – First tremors of an industry revolution

In December 2008, the Khronos Consortium announced ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification for parallel programming. Six months prior to that, all the major processor vendors had been vigorously questioning, redesigning and improving the draft specification contributed by none other than Apple the consumer device manufacturer. Many asked, why would Apple be interested in investing in such low level technology in the first place, and then donating it away for free? The answer – to be in front line to benefit from the eventual demise of Moore’s law.

Ever since Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore published his infamous concept in the mid-sixties, Moore’s law has been used to predict the long-term evolution of exponential increase of transistor counts in integrated circuits. The trend of doubling the transistor count every two years has been maintained from 1970’s all the way into new millennia. However, even Moore himself recognizes that the Law has it’s end on the horizon – in ten to twenty years, the size of the transistor is approaching the size of an atom. Even before that barrier, the more ruthless laws of economics will interfere. The sheer cost of designing [Continue Reading...]

Outlook for multimedia and graphics expertise in Barcelona and beyond

Every year the Mobile World Congress is filled with excitement and great expectations, industry gossips and trends – who will be in and who’s out. The MWC is without doubt one of the greatest opportunities to network and understand where the mobile industry and your clients are heading towards.  Millions of rows have already been written in the media about the digital world extending to mobile, and the need of operators to redefine the fundamentals of their businesses. Capability, differentiation, performance, scalability, cost efficiency, user experience, are all familiar key words for any company striving for successful products or services.

This year’s show marked an important entry for Symbio as a new challenger in the emerging markets of converged technologies. Symbio’s offering and expertise in mobile and user experience driven multimedia and graphic technologies [Continue Reading...]

Taiwan Tech Independence. Not from China nor America. From Microsoft.

Blogger Dana Blankenhorn recently interviewed Symbio’s CEO, Jacob Hsu and posted this entry on SmartPlanet.com, a CBS Interactive blog.  Here’s a copy of his post -

This summer Taiwan will declare its independence.

Not from China. Not from America.

From Microsoft.

Symbio CEO Jacob Hsu has been working with Taiwanese OEMs for 10 years and says they are finally ready to kick off the traces and become their own brands.

This surprised me. I was at last year’s CompuTex show, in Taiwan, looking for Linux, and it just wasn’t there.

While many of the Taiwanese businesspeople I talked with expressed a desire to go outside the Microsoft orbit, every booth featured Windows gear, usually with Intel chips.

But Android, the mobile operating system Google has built on top of Linux, is [Continue Reading...]

Flash before my eyes…

With the recent fuss over Apple’s arguably revolutionary iPad not supporting Flash, perhaps it’s time to reflect a bit on the future of Flash in general. According to a certain Mr. Steve Jobs, Flash will probably die out and the world will move on to HTML5. But do we agree with Steve?

For most of us, Flash is familiar at least from web ad banners. They usually display fairly simple vector graphics animations and possibly a link to some web site. Nowadays, all this can be achieved using HTML5, by utilizing the Canvas element. The smarter ads probably provide some sort of interaction, which, again, is completely doable with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Another, today perhaps more relevant use case for Flash is video. Some of us spend half of our working days in YouTube, or so I’ve heard. This alone would be a good reason for Flash to survive, unless video, too, wasn’t supported by HTML5. YouTube already has an experimental support for HTML5, so [Continue Reading...]