On Monday Dell announced plans to acquire Wyse Technology, a California company ranked #1 in thin client unit shipment volume (4Q, 2011).  To date Wyse has shipped more than 20 million units worldwide and has over 200 million people interacting with its products each day. This acquisition will expand Dell's reach into the desktop virtualization market and provide great synergy with Dell's existing enterprise solutions and services.

At issue is the fact that LEDs are low voltage, DC devices that do not inherently work well with dimmer circuits originally designed for 120VAC incandescent light bulbs.  Cirrus is working with a major LED lighting manufacturer that will use its controller chips in a new generation of LED bulbs. Cirrus expects to ship between 5 million and 10 million LED controller chips this year.

It occurs to me that the Cirrus controller may also find its way into embedded applications that want to take advantage of the efficiencies offered by LEDs while still delivering dimmer functionality.

Margery Conner reports in EDN that Cree has announced new LEDs that deliver better than double the lumens/Watt ... and twice the lumens /dollar of existing LEDs.  My guess is that this will move LEDs into embedded applications where they have never been used before.  Good work Cree!

On February 3, 2012 EE|Times Confidential featured an article titled: ARM Mulls Non-Volatile Memory IP acquisition.  Considering ARM's position in the smart phone and tablet markets this announcement by Warren East (CEO of ARM) is of potential interest to a wide swath of the computer industry ... so I clicked on the link to read more ... only to find out that I'll have to pay EE|Times $4.99 to read the full story. 

I've been a subscriber of EE|Times for 40+ years ... but evidently that counts for nothing in the new economy of things.  I understand information has value ... but $4.99 seems a bit much for one article.  For that same $4.99 I can download an app that turns my iPhone into a portable oscilloscope.  (You can check out the oScope App by Alexander Wiltschko at http://www.alexspixels.com.)

At the end of the day I'm left to wonder if the guys in print media don't actually deserve the sad state they're in.  The successful companies I have worked for over the years always spent a lot of time figuring out how to deliver something of value.  Perhaps UMB should hire some marketing guys from the technology sector to help them figure out what business they're in. 

I don't know how many folks coughed up the $4.99 to read the full story, but at least one of them was not pleased with the exchange.  In the comment section "ainzwerth" suggested that "This was not worth 5 dollars."  I couldn't agree more.

This week EmbeddedDIRT added a LinkedIn Group, EmbeddedDIRT.com as well as a new Facebook Page, also EmbeddedDIRT.com. 

The LinkedIn group enables people to connect one-on-one in a more professional environment. And the Facebook page makes it easier for members to post their observations and comments for all to see ... as well as to conduct informal polls of the embedded community.  If you are an engineer, manager or marketer involved in embedded computing, you are invited to join the EmbeddedDIRT.com LinkedIn Group and to "Like" the EmbeddedDIRT.com Facebook Page.  And you are also invited to follow EmbeddedDIRT on Twitter @EmbeddedDIRT.