Tune in today (August 30)  as we kick off our wall-to-wall coverage of VMWorld 2010, live from SiliconAngle’s “The Cube” (see below) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

Last April, Dave Donatelli shocked the storage world by defecting from EMC to join HP. EMC's savvy lawyers locked him into his non-compete for a year. What a difference a year makes.... At the time of Donatelli's move, I wrote: So HP just put a storage person in charge of servers and networking. Finally, HP makes a management move that acknowledges storage spending accounts for half of people’s hardware budgets! But there’s more to this chess match than storage and HP just moved a pawn on the board. The question is what can the Rook now see that it couldn’t before? It's becoming more clear. Donatelli wasn't hired just because he's a storage guy. There's a bigger picture that involves building out what folks in the Wikibon commun

The first set of videos is from the game called Harvest and it is no wonder Microsoft has put its foot down when it comes to the handset specs. [Cross-posted at Winextra]

For all the talk of dramatic change in the smartphone landscape over the last two or three years, they pale in comparison to the impact of what's next: The shift from circuit-switched voice to VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. This has been talked about for 10 years, but the stars are finally aligning to hit with full force right now. Here is why: The average U.S. smartphone monthly bill is approximately $100, plus tax. Of this $100, approximately 2/3 goes to an unlimited voice plan, and the other third to a broadband data fee for service ranging from 2 gig to unlimited. Think about this for a moment. All the excitement of new and old apps alike, ranging from email to simple Web browsing to Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox, Twitter and

Much of the tech blogosphere is all a Twitter today over a discovery by Mary Jo Foley of a single image screenshot of Internet Explorer 9. This is the image making the rounds and subsequently taken down from the Russian Microsoft site where Mary Jo discovered it. Now I am not suggesting that this isn’t what we will see come September 15th with Microsoft releases the beta of IE 9 but there are a couple of things about it that suggest to me that this isn’t the final version as many might think. The first point to make about this image is that it could be from an older internal build being used at Microsoft. The reasoning behind this is, as Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear pointed out; with the help of some commenters at CNET, the Bing im

As part of our continuous coverage of the Dell, 3PAR, and now HP, I've done some digging around over the past week talking with dozens of sources on this deal.  We've been all over this 3PAR story and I broke the news that Frank Quattrone was leading the M&A for 3Par. 3PAR is apparently giving Dell three business days to negotiate an amendment to its merger offer.  Dell had offered $1.15bn for the firm but the deal was countered by HP.  3PAR's board is now evaluating the HP offer. According to public filing with the SEC, 3PAR intends to engage in discussions with HP regarding its unsolicited acquisition proposal, and share non-public information with HP regarding 3PAR, in order to more fully evaluate HPs proposal. Is t

HP today submitted a proposal to 3PAR to acquire the company for $24 a share, a 33% premium over the offer Dell made last week. This puts the value of 3PAR at nearly $1.6B today -- whereas the company’s valuation had never come anywhere close to approaching $1B prior to Dell’s offer. Interestingly, in June, 3PAR’s CEO Dave Scott in a Q&A session with analysts that I attended specifically stated that one of the reasons in his opinion that 3PAR had not been pursued by potential acquirers at this point in time was that companies were afraid to start a bidding war and lose. While self-serving, I thought this perspective was interesting and it seems to be playing out on the main business stage this week. In a conference call today, H

Wednesday evening BroadVision launched the Clearvale SecondFloor speaker series focused on thought leaders in enterprise 2.0. Clearvale is BroadVision's name for its collaborative enterprise platform. Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter consulting group, was interviewed by Pehong Chen, CEO of BroadVision. The event was video recorded by Sina.com, the Chinese Internet giant, on the second floor of BroadVision HQ in Redwood City. The series is the creation of Giovanni Rodriguez, CMO of BroadVision. Here are some notes from the evening: - Charlene Li spoke about her new book Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead. - She spoke about her upbringing in Detroit as the daughter of parents from Taiwan and Hong

Recently, Clearspring Technologies [disclosure: I used to work there.] publicly announced its new direction as an audience buying platform, leveraging the widespread distribution of its AddThis social sharing tool to aggregate intent-oriented data from keyword searches performed by web users (AddThis accomplishes this by capturing search query information contained in the referring URL string when a visitor lands on a web page where the tool is embedded). Search re-targeting has become a big driver in the growth of data-augmented display ad campaigns this year as advertisers look to find consumers that exhibit particular characteristics across the web versus targeting visitors to a particular website based on traditional geographic and demo

Today, someone on Twitter sent me a DM that he was sad I have had to get a restraining order and therefore do not feel comfortable making any geolocation profiles I have public. This was in response to my many public tweets attempting to warn people that publishing your location to perfect strangers simply is not a very good idea. He felt sad that I was “denied a sense of community”. Like I don’t get to play any Reindeer Games and everyone else does. NO. I love the movie “Usual Suspects”. In the film, Kevin Spacey’s character gives a speech about how the greatest trick the devil ever did was to convince you he didn’t exist. This is exactly how I feel about people who don’t get why privacy is still an issue with social net