thinkcondi.com

Also at NAB, Microsoft announced enhancements to products aimed at broadcasters.

Microsoft said 1.5 million people a day are downloading Silverlight. Adobe claims that more than 90 percent of Web users are already using the current version of the Flash Player.

The digital rights management, or DRM, software will work with streamed, progressive download, and downloadable media, and it can be extended by third-party software companies, Microsoft said.

Microsoft chose the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas to announce new customers for its Silverlight rich-media player and introduce software aimed at broadcasters.

New Silverlight customers include Madison Square Garden (MSG) Interactive, Chinese Web portal Tencent, Abertis Telecom, and Terra Networks Operations. Other notable recent customers include NBCOlympics.com and Yahoo Japan.

While they woo content producers, both companies are also battling over software developers. The millions of programmers trained in Microsoft’s .Net tools can write rich Internet applications with Silverlight. Adobe, too, is boosting up its tools investment around Web toolkits and Flex.

Microsoft is trying to make Silverlight the preferred medium to broadcast video on the Web–a challenge, given the resounding lead that Adobe Systems has with Flash.

It also detailed SilverlightDRM, a content protection system based on Microsoft’s PlayReady technology, which is set to be available later this year with Silverlight 2.

Microsoft also added features to its Interactive Media Manager application, which is built on SharePoint Server, including a Silverlight rough-cut video editor and an enhanced searchable media catalog.

Microsoft and Ascent Media Group have formed a partnership to automate the supply chain for the entertainment industry. It also said Microsoft executives will show off versions of its Dynamics packaged applications customized for the media customers at NAB.

Besides making data available for citizens, Kundra said, the federal government should be able to host space online where citizens can turn to each other for solutions to social problems, much as they do now on sites like Facebook.

Whether it’s to serve the public or government employees, Kundra said federal agencies should be embracing off-the-shelf technologies and formats like cloud computing that are ubiquitous in the private sector.

“We need to make sure that’s all that data that’s not private or restricted for national security reasons be made public,” he said.

(Credit:
CBS News)

Using off-the-shelf, as well as open-source technologies, Kundra said, could result in significant savings for the federal government, which typically spends about $71 billion in IT purchases.

Kundra promoted this concept in Washington, D.C., where he has served as the city’s chief technology officer since 2007. His office launched the D.C. Digital Public Square, a site that serves as a hub for government information like city crime data, but also provides applications for users to mash up that information on maps, timelines, and in other ways.

“CIO’s across agencies each have their own vision of where to go, and some are more successful in some areas than others,” he said. “This will give a sort of central direction. There are no big companies with a CIO that doesn’t report to the CEO.”

“One of the biggest ticket items in that $71 billion is the money the federal government spends on contracts, some that, frankly, haven’t performed very well, and there haven’t been consequences,” he said.

Kundra said his office is working on launching Data.gov, a site that would publish vast arrays of government data for public dissemination. Just as the Human Genome Project spurred new industry, other government data holds potential to fundamentally change the economy, he said.

He said he intends to accomplish all this by embracing off-the-shelf applications, cloud computing, open-source technology, and concepts that encourage citizens to self-organize on the Web.

The federal CIO will largely be responsible for coordinating the information technology operations across government agencies. But an additional part of his new job, Kundra told reporters Thursday, is “to ensure the public has access to information, and to rethink the way the public interacts with the government in an information economy.”

Bill Vass, the president of Sun Microsystems Federal, commended Kundra for suggesting the use of open source. Besides resulting in significant savings, Vass said, open-source technology could help the government improve its cybersecurity, reduce procurement time, and keep the government from getting locked into deals with single vendors.

President Obama’s new federal chief information officer has been charged with the daunting task of saving the government money while helping to institute the president’s vision for a Web 2.0 government. Vivek Kundra, appointed Thursday to the position that will report to the White House, says he can not only save the government money by embracing Web-based approaches, but potentially spur entirely new waves of economic development.

“You don’t need to hire consultants to build out all this infrastructure,” he said. “You just leverage what’s on the cloud itself, yet in the federal government, we don’t have a single platform that allows us to do that.”

While much has been made of the federal CTO Obama is expected to appoint, Vass said Kundra’s role of coordinating IT efforts across government agencies will be just as critical.

Washington, D.C.'s "tech czar" Vivek Kundra explaining how cell phones were to work during the presidential inauguration and what technology safety precautions were taken.

“You’ve got 140 million (Facebook) users that have been able to organize on issues and problems and create a movement so people can be heard,” he said.

No way, that’s tacky
Sure, it’s eco-conscious and convenient
Only in an unexpected pinch

“In the past, I never would have thought to use an electronic invitation, because I don’t know if it was as much of a formality as it was about brand awareness and being so protective over how the brand was portrayed,” said Celia Chen, a former luxury-brand event planner who now writes the blog Notes on a Party. “Image was so important: the paper stock, the font. We would have invitation designers, and we’d go through multiple edits.”

But if you look at the ultimate gauge of formal events–weddings–things are certainly changing in favor of the digital. “A large, not quite a quarter yet, but about 20 percent of our events are actually wedding-related,” Lorien Gabel said, saying that plenty of bachelor parties and bridal showers show up on Pingg.

Proponents of digital invitations admit that there are lingering reasons, beyond etiquette, that sometimes compel hosts to stick to paper invitations. Chen said that the occasional client would raise the question that e-mail invites might not make it past a spam filter, and added that others were concerned about how much of a splash an e-mail could possibly make in an age of clogged Outlook inboxes.

Chen has since started using Pingg, an invitation start-up geared toward a more discerning crowd. “There was a whole segment of event types that people just did not want to use electronic invitations for,” Pingg co-founder Lorien Gabel said of his rationale behind creating the company, which gives the option for hosts to accompany their digital invites with print versions for all or some of the guests. “I’d like to believe that because of how we do things you also get the aesthetic aspect of it, you don’t have to sacrifice it.”

“I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an example where (electronic wedding invitations) would be acceptable except when real life intervenes,” he added.

But “real life” gets in the way in more ways than we think, and people like Lowe may be in the minority soon. The eco-consciousness movement is encouraging us to cut down on unnecessary paper use, and tough economic conditions compel us to be thrifty. And when technology is able to cut down on hours of guest-list organization, the digital route is an obvious one–especially for a generation of young adults that has always used Google search in lieu of the Yellow Pages.

With the option of sending a pretty, well-designed electronic invitation now out there, they become more of a viable alternative for organizers of higher-end events who happen to be conscious of environmental impact, cost, or efficiency. “Not having to use paper is huge when you’re trying to be eco-conscious,” Celia Chen said. “It’s better for the environment, it’s cheaper if not free, and you’re collecting the majority of your RSVPs in a place where there’s no human error. People either hit ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘maybe,’ and it’ll download into a list.”

News.com Poll E-etiquette for weddings
Would you consider sending out electronic wedding invitations?

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Manners expert Lowe still isn’t convinced, saying that the chance to be economical isn’t enough to sway him. “There are always ways to do (paper invitations) in a cost-effective way,” he said. “You can get paper, print them yourself, hand-write them.” As for being environmentally friendly, “(that) point is actually quite well-taken because it does create quite a lot of paper waste. What might be interesting is to see if there are people or companies that come up with very low-impact ways of generating invitations that are either easily recyclable or directly reusable.”

But Lowe acknowledged that for efficiency’s sake, as well as to fit the culture of the digital age, sometimes there are reasons to try and bridge the gap. He suggested that for events like weddings and bar mitzvahs, organizers could send out an electronic “save-the-date” in advance that would allow guests to opt out of a paper invitation if they preferred the digital route.

Electronic wedding invitations aren’t exactly Adam Lowe’s cup of tea.

“If you really know your guests and you really know it’s a preference for them, I think that’s great,” Lowe said. “Absolutely times are changing, and what is appropriate changes.”

“At New York Fashion Week, you’ve got 12 days of shows and events and it’s highly, highly competitive,” Chen said. “If you don’t send out a paper invitation, (it doesn’t work). There’s something about it landing on someone’s desk and having it be tactile.”

As for invitations for wedding ceremonies themselves, Gabel said they’re creeping in. “I see a couple of them a day,” he observed.

But people are going digital, and Chen said that recipients have grown acclimated to it, especially as the younger generation grows up. “I think it’s generational,” she said. “People always wanted to speak to the hostess when they made a reservation at a restaurant. Now they just use OpenTable.” Indeed, a 25-year-old getting married in 2008 likely had an e-mail address before he or she had a driver’s license. Teenagers celebrating bar mitzvahs and Sweet 16s can’t remember a time when the Internet wasn’t everywhere.

As host of the popular Modern Manners Guy podcast, Lowe attempts to marry–pun completely intended–the culture of traditional etiquette with a digital world that increasingly threatens to subvert its longstanding norms. And he admits up front that he thinks using the likes of Evite and MyPunchbowl for formal occasions is “a terrible idea” for the most part; except when difficult circumstances demand it, as was the case when he received a digital wedding invitation recently. There was an illness in the groom’s family, and the date of the wedding had to be pushed up to the point where there was no longer a wide enough time frame to order formal paper invitations. “(They) changed to Evite for expedience’s sake,” Lowe explained.

Online invitation services like the InterActiveCorp-owned Evite, the Events application on Facebook, as well as smaller start-ups like Socializr and MyPunchbowl, are nothing new. They’ve more or less taken over the RSVP duties for backyard barbecues, Halloween parties, birthdays, and even holiday cocktail soirees. Paper invitations still reign at the upper echelon: weddings and high-end corporate events, as well as other formal occasions like bar mitzvahs, proms, and charity fundraisers. But at this point, there are only a few tenuous standards of etiquette that are keeping this relic of the analog age alive and kicking.

One of the biggest drawbacks to electronic invitations for an event planning veteran like Chen was that they were neither attractive nor customizable enough for upscale or formal events. Facebook invitations cannot be modified beyond the social network’s blue-and-white design, and Evite still pretty much relies on clip art. Though Evite still owns the lion’s share of the digital invitation market, with stats from Hitwise showing that its traffic far eclipses that of its smaller rivals combined, alternatives like MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Centerd, and Socializr offer different looks and feels for different kinds of events and hosts.

Apple has now cut deals to bring the iPhone to dozens of countries worldwide, but Japan’s cell phone-crazy market will be an interesting test for the company. Multimedia phones, mobile Internet browsing, and fast network connections are old hat to Japanese mobile phone buyers.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

SoftBank is the third largest carrier in Japan, behind NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. But DoCoMo and KDDI have has built networks based on the CDMA family of standards (used by Sprint and Verizon in the U.S.), while SoftBank’s network is based on the GSM family of standards currently used by the iPhone. Apple is expected to unveil a next-generation iPhone next week, but few expect the company to have a CDMA-version ready at this point in the
iPhone’s history. (Updated 11:30 a.m. PDT: I screwed this part up, DoCoMo’s network is indeed based on the GSM family of technologies.)

The last big whale out there for Apple is now China, which has a thriving underground iPhone market already. Talks between Apple and China Mobile, China’s largest carrier, have been reported as off-and-on for several months but there’s no deal in place.

Japan's SoftBank mobile will bring the iPhone to that country later this year.

The iPhone will make its official debut in Japan later this year on SoftBank’s mobile network, the company announced Wednesday.

SoftBank made the announcement in one of the shortest press releases I’ve ever seen. The entire text? “SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Japan later this year.” As such, we have no idea whether that means the 3G version will come directly to Japanese customers, but that would make sense given nature of the Japanese market.

(Credit:
Comedy Central)

This post was updated at 11:01 AM PT on Tuesday to clarify wording: television content from Viacom is almost exclusively handled by MTV Networks.

In an unexpected move, video site Hulu will be getting some political loudmouths just in time for the 2008 presidential election: Comedy Central’s late-night personalities Jon Stewart of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report.

We had to check and make sure the press release wasn’t a joke, but there are indeed full episodes from both programs available. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering Comedy Central parent company Viacom has not officially signed on to Hulu, which launched as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. and does not yet have any other major networks on board.

This bring’s Hulu’s count of programming content partners up to more than 70.

Yaaaay! Stephen Colbert on Hulu!

Additionally, later in June Hulu will start to add select programs from PBS: Nova, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, Wired Science, and potentially others.

But on the other hand, MTV Networks, the Viacom division that encompasses Comedy Central, has made some distribution deals, and both Stewart and Colbert were already available on the Web in one form or another. And Viacom had already made select content available to Hulu rival Joost, but now that the Joost hype has faded completely, experimenting with Hulu’s ad-supported distribution seems logical. Making the popular Comedy Central talk shows available could be the media conglomerate’s way of dipping a toe in the water.

I didn’t pay much attention to VirtualBox when Sun Microsystems first acquired Innotek, but RedMonk’s Michael Coté just posted an interview and demo of the software, and it’s very cool.

In a few clicks, you can see VirtualBox create a Vista instance and run it on the
Mac. There are many options for virtualization at this point, but I would expect Sun to make this its weapon of choice (versus Xen), since it owns it and can tweak it for Solaris.

VirtualBox is a free download available under the General Public License, or GPL.

On the Mac, I’m not sure it’s any better than Parallels, but it is open-source, which should be very appealing for many users.

There are a few things to note with this system. The first is that this is currently for the U.S. only, and your mileage (literally) may vary. The tool does not take into account any driving you’d do once at your destination, and city and highway mileage can be drastically different depending on the vehicle. Also, estimations are currently only one-way, which means you’ll need to double the price if you plan on coming back.

The tool has records for several types of vehicles, going back to 1999. If you’ve got an older vehicle or one that’s not on the list, you can manually plug in both how big your tank is and the general highway mileage. From there it can do the math and give you the magic number.

See also AAA’s Trip Gas Price finder, which is a little less exact with the pricing (but does round trips) and GasAddict.com which supports multiple stops but is the hardest of the bunch to use.

The other day I picked up a rental
car while visiting Los Angeles. In just a few days it ended up costing me well over the price of gas it would have taken to drive my own car there and back. A smart tool called CostToDrive would have helped me figure this out before I made the trip. It calculates how much a trip is going to cost you based on how far you’re traveling, combined with the fuel efficiency of your car and average price of gas. Assuming you have to fill up when your tank is about empty, it tells you precisely where to go to get the cheapest gallon too.

[via TechnoSpot via DownloadSquad]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

How much is your trip going to cost? Let CostToDrive.com do the math for you.

“Our goal, when the T-Mobile G1 becomes available in October, is to provide affordable, high-speed data service allowing customers to experience the full data capabilities of the device and our 3G network. At the same time, we have a responsibility to provide the best network experience for all of our customers so we reserve the right to temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of our customers who have excessive or disproportionate usage that interferes with our network performance or our ability to provide quality service to all of our customers.

We removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers.”

The company distributed a statement Wednesday saying that it has removed the 1GB “soft cap” that it planned to impose on the data usage of G1 owners starting next month when the device is released. The carrier had planned to throttle the data connection speed to a paltry 50Kbps for those who exceeded 1GB of data usage in a month, which isn’t that far-fetched for the early-adopter crowd.

That sounds to me like T-Mobile hasn’t given up on the idea of a soft cap altogether, but has decided that 1GB is perhaps a little too stingy. Which it is.

(Credit:
CNET)

Here’s the full statement:

T-Mobile has apparently rethought its 1GB soft limit on the data usage for its G1 phone, shown here.

T-Mobile has given its data usage cap proposed for the G1 Android phone a second thought.

Enterprises are now looking at us on a much larger, much more strategic scale. Something like 90 percent of the Fortune 2000 have JBoss somewhere in their organizations. JBoss is being used pretty much everywhere.

Additionally, though Red Hat has a very strong channel business, with around 60 percent of our revenue coming through the channel, it quickly became apparent that Red Hat’s existing RHEL channel wasn’t right for selling JBoss. So we’ve beefed up our channel to work better with the type of partners that make sense to middleware, particularly system integrators.

Muzilla: Exactly. Seven years ago you’d see CIOs awash in a number of different operating systems, but then IT organizations decided to consolidate into just a few systems, and the second alternative to whatever the dominant proprietary product tended to be open source. That strategic platform is RHEL in operating systems, and is becoming JBoss in middleware. Maybe soon it will also be an open-source CRM system, ECM system, etc.

Craig Muzilla,
vice president,
Red Hat

However, in an interview Wednesday with Craig Muzilla, vice president of the Red Hat middleware business line, it became clear that JBoss–which includes all of Red Hat’s middleware product line, including MetaMatrix–has finally come into its own at Red Hat. I had been hearing from different corners of Red Hat, as well as from Red Hat’s competitors, that JBoss has been on a massive growth boom of late–rumors that Muzilla was happy to confirm.

Asay: Can you give me an update on Red Hat’s middleware business?

In fact, in recognition of the need for greater understanding of and expertise in systems integration, we acquired Amentra, a leading JBoss systems integrator, earlier this year. Amentra gives us a core competency to be much more solutions driven, which has been a key to our rapidly growing JBoss business.

That’s the near-term vision for JBoss Application Server. Our philosophy for our next release is choice and flexibility. If you want to use Spring as a Java framework with JBoss, you will be able to do that. If you want to use our own complete stack, you can do that, too. It’s up to the customer to decide, not us.

Muzilla: Certainly people expect JBoss to be a growth engine for Red Hat. We’ll continue to focus on growing this core mission of Red Hat. As [Red Hat CEO] Jim Whitehurst has stated, we have barely scratched the surface in our infrastructure business. We see a lot of promise in RHEL and JBoss.

It sounds like an exciting time to be at Red Hat. Its operating systems business continues to thrive, while its middleware business heads into overdrive. Red Hat is putting itself into a position that it could move in a number of different directions (e.g., dramatically building out its middleware business, adding applications, etc.). Success does that for a company.

The big question for Red Hat going forward is how this JBoss success will alter Red Hat’s product priorities going forward. How long will Red Hat be content to be thought of as “that Linux vendor” when an ever-increasing percentage of its revenue derives from middleware?

Muzilla: Value is our primary competitive differentiator. Beyond that, we’re also driving significant innovation. We are technically superior in significant ways to our proprietary competition that they simply can’t match due to their closed-source code or their legacy code constraints. Is BEA rock solid? Sure. But it’s lacking in other attributes–value, flexibility, innovation–and this void is driving customers to look to Red Hat.

JBoss is growing at twice the rate of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Translation? Rocket, meet bat out of hell.

Asay: What’s your chief competitive weapon as you battle the big ecosystem vendors like Oracle that provide end-to-end software stacks?

commentary

Muzilla: We have a lot of commerce and transactional applications out there like Travelocity with which we work. We’re strong in hospitality, financial services, government, among others, and are also seeing some interesting point of sale applications. We span horizontally across many industries.

Asay: Given the success of Red Hat in its JBoss middleware business, does this suggest Red Hat should be focusing more there, or even further up the stack?

I’m sure this phenomenon isn’t isolated to Red Hat. We’re likely going to see other open-source software go through similar inflection points.

Muzilla: We’re now 26 months past the JBoss acquisition by Red Hat. Initially there were some hiccups, but we are now firing on all cylinders.

But now what is happening is that these organizations are looking at JBoss as a strategic platform, not simply a one-off. These conversations aren’t about, “Give us support for our small project.” The conversations are now, “If we’re considering using JBoss as a stratetgic platform, how can Red Hat help us with this?” Twenty-four months ago we weren’t having those converstions. Today, we are.

Asay: Fascinating. So just at the point that JBoss becomes old news in the media, it becomes hugely interesting business news to CIOs.

We’re at the front-end of that inflection point in our middleware business. JBoss started off as an organic, developer-driven phenomenon. We were used in departmental deployments.

This new architecture means your investment in JBoss is a long term one. Our core architecture is not dependent on any fashionable spec or language du jour: personalities can be plugged in and out, a la carte, you don’t have to make a bet on which API is “the” API you need, and then be locked in one of the few AS implementations that implement such API–possibly relying on weaker core middleware services.

Where it will end up is anyone’s guess. But for now, it’s great to see JBoss return to the industry as one of open source’s crown jewels, rather than the wreckage of a failed acquisition.

The result? Charlie Peters, our CFO, has disclosed that our middleware business is growing at twice the rate of our traditional RHEL operating system business.

Muzilla: For this I’d encourage you to read Sacha Labourey’s blog on the topic. He goes into a lot of detail. A hugely significant value that we’re providing in JBoss 5.0 is the ability to separate the base runtime from the middleware services from the API/programming layer. [Sacha writes:]

Asay: What about the near-term product roadmap? Anything in particular that’s coming down the pike soon?

While Red Hat initially tried to use its existing RHEL sales force to sell JBoss, we learned that we needed to do some things a little differently with JBoss. So now we have dedicated sales experts for JBoss. We also went through an extensive amount of training for Red Hat’s general sales team and others within Red Hat to ensure we were selling the value of JBoss.

Asay: Are there particular applications–proprietary or otherwise–that JBoss tends to get deployed alongside, similar to how Oracle was the early driver for much of Red Hat’s Linux business?

Our strategy is to focus on the application server and the application platform, but at the end of the day we need to have more components so that we have a full reference architecture. Our goal is to offer the best complete package for our customers. In some cases we may not have “The Best ESB” or some other individual component, but in terms of the overall package, we are the best.

It has been a little over two years since Red Hat acquired JBoss. Despite a relaxed public spin, rumors at the time, and for long afterwards, persisted that Red Hat didn’t understand middleware, had botched the integration of the JBoss employees and culture into Red Hat, and worse.

One significant new trend, however, is how we’re being considered within organizations where we’ve long played a relatively minor role. Five to six years ago in our Linux business, there was an inflection point when our RHEL adoption went from technical adoption of Linux to a more strategic decision to take a platform approach to RHEL. We became a platform standard within organizations.

JBoss AS 5.0 is the first release which will give us the ability to cleanly separate those three layers. The JBoss Microcontainer abstracts us from the runtime environment and our core enterprise services have been completely componentized and aspectized so they can be fully leveraged from any higher level framework/API/language.

Still, Illuminata analyst (and CNET contributor) Gordon Haff believes that Apple is unlikely to plunge back into the server market headlong after successfully pulling off the transition from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Apple appeared to be serious about the server market when it launched the Xserve earlier this decade, but has spent less and less time extolling the product over the last two or three years, he said.

Updated throughout at 4:55 p.m. PT with additional details and comment from IBM.

Mark Papermaster, until recently IBM’s vice president of microprocessor technology development, plans to join Apple in early November in a position that will see him working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in what IBM believes is an attempt to expand Apple’s presence in the markets for servers and chips for handheld devices, according to the copy of a lawsuit filed by IBM against Papermaster. IBM is suing Papermaster to prevent him from joining Apple and divulging trade secrets related to IBM’s Power chips and server products, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Apple's decision to hire Mark Papermaster away from IBM could mean that its Xserve lineup is taking on a more prominent role.

(Credit:
Apple)

Papermaster’s hire could signal Apple’s intentions to build out a cloud-computing infrastructure to support things like MobileMe, or future services along those lines. Dense-but-powerful blade servers are being eyed by many companies as they build out the data centers of the future, and if Apple ever wants to be a major player in the future of Internet-delivered services, it’s going to need a lot of computing power at its disposal. Papermaster’s expertise in system design–putting together the entire package of processor, chipset, and the rest of the guts that form a computer–could serve him well at a company that prides itself on soup-to-nuts design.

If Apple wants to continue its strategy of designing and building complete systems, hardware, software, and now chips for iPhone and iPod Touch, it’s going to need someone who can predict the future of chip design and advise Jobs and Apple’s executive team on how Apple can best take advantage of those trends. Papermaster, with a unique set of skills in the tech industry, might be just that guy. “They probably need somebody with an experience set that doesn’t exist at Apple today,” Haff said.

In the final reading, Papermaster’s hire might wind up as a partial solution to all those questions over what Apple should do with its pile of cash: give a chunk of it to IBM to make this case go away.

An Apple representative declined to comment on the lawsuit or confirm Papermaster’s pending employment with the company. IBM issued this statement: “Mr. Papermaster’s employment by Apple is a violation of his agreement with IBM against working for a competitor should he leave IBM. We will vigorously pursue this case in court.”

Papermaster’s expertise lies with the Power architecture, of which Don Dobberpuhl’s P.A. Semi team is also well-acquainted. The primary role for the Power architecture these days is in gaming consoles–all three major gaming consoles use a chip based on the Power architecture–but that doesn’t necessarily mean Apple has that goal in mind, either.

If Papermaster is able to successfully join Apple, he’ll be working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs “providing to Apple technical and strategic advice on a variety of issues,” according to IBM’s complaint. But which issues?

One of IBM’s top chip executives has agreed to join Apple as a senior executive, but he might have to fight off his former employer first.

Noncompete clauses are generally considered worth less than the paper they are printed on in California–Apple’s home state–but different states are more strict. Google and Microsoft fought much of their battle over whether the case would be tried in Washington state or California.

Papermaster has authored several papers on chip development at IBM, which of course used to make PowerPC processors for Apple before the company switched to Intel’s processors in 2005. IBM called Papermaster “IBM’s top expert in Power architecture and technology,” and his most recent position involved managing IBM’s blade server division.

It might take a fight in order to bring him on board, however. IBM’s decision to sue Papermaster hearkens back to the dispute between Google and Microsoft over Google’s decision to hire Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft to run Google’s research operation in China. The two parties eventually settled out of court.

As an extremely well-respected figure in the clubby world of chip design, Papermaster might also be stepping in to lead Apple’s chip design efforts. Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi earlier this year showed the company is very serious about chip design. Jobs told The New York Times that P.A. Semi would be used to build chips for the iPhone and
iPod Touch.

Apple’s Xserve servers haven’t exactly been a high priority over the last couple of years, as Apple has switched the
Mac to Intel’s processors and rolled out the
iPhone. But a spruced-up Xserve blade server could be a nice complement to the Mac if Apple ever gets serious about tackling the enterprise market.