Bye Bye Netbooks: Dell Kills The Mini 10 As It Shifts Focus To “Thin And Powerful”

Once upon a time netbooks ruled the land. But with the rise of tablets and miniaturization of traditional x86 CPUs, the mini notebooks are quietly dying. The latest victim is the Dell Mini. Liliputing discovered by way of MyDellMini.com that the products are no longer listed on Dell.com. They’re dead, my friends, and it seems ultrabooks and similar products are to blame.

Dell is reportedly shifting focus away from the inexpensive notebooks. A company spokesperson confirmed with The Verge that the product line is indeed finished and Dell doesn’t have plans to release products on future Intel platforms. Instead, Dell will focus on “thin and powerful” notebooks, a not so subtle nod towards ultrabooks even though that description can fit a few of the company’s current notebook lines.

Both Intel and AMD are focusing heavily on CPU platforms that allow for ultrathin notebooks. Some will be as thin as the MacBook Air, the ultrabooks, but still others will be relatively thin while not fitting within the traditional definition of an ultrabook.

But with Dell’s inexpensive Mini line gone, it leaves a curious space open at the low-end of Dell’s product line. Other company’s like Acer previously stated that it was cutting a drastic amount of product lines in an effort to tighten up profit margins and the like. Either Dell is looking to do the same, or, and this is completely reasonable, the company is a prepping a product such as a tablet able to live comfortably in the Mini’s previous $300 – $400 price point. CES is less than a month away. Dell might have thrown away the Mini to clear room in the fridge for a more tasty treat.

Simple Plan - Jet Lag All Version

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Happy New Year 2012

Microsoft Launches So.cl As A Social Network For Students

Microsoft is officially launching So.cl, the social networking service it teased back in July. And it turns out, it’s not meant to be Microsoft’s version of Facebook, but a social networking service for students built on top of Facebook. The service is launching out of Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs division, and is still being dubbed “experimental.”

Today, students at the the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University are being allowed to use the service, with other schools being added in the future.

According to a post on Microsoft Research, So.cl has been designed for students studying social media “to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate,” which, indeed, sounds very experimental. Students are able to post photos, video and text and share those posts with others. They also can seek out students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals.

Users can follow people, set up feeds and search (powered by Bing). Search results can be shared with others, in an effort to make the most searched content go viral. So.cl also builds on the content-aggregation project Montage that enables authoring of a visual collage of images, videos, and stories. In So.cl, users can quickly assemble content from a variety of sources to build pages about particular interests.

The “connecting around interests” path that So.cl is taking makes sense. Interest-based social networking is an emerging trend seen in a number of social startups these days. Companies believe that the only way to compete with Facebook is to develop a service that connects you with people you don’t know, but would want to know, instead of with real-world friends, as Facebook does. Most startups, however, attempt to start from scratch, asking you to sign up and join their own standalone destination website. So.cl, meanwhile, simply asks you to “sign in” with Facebook. It’s essentially a Facebook app.

Unfortunately, if you attempt to sign in yourself, So.cl reports being “over capacity.”

In November, several screenshots of the network leaked, which showed a network focused on collaborative consumption, not communication. It had video-sharing, for example, but you chatted with others watching the video with you through a chatroom, not via direct messages with the other person. Now we know that Microsoft is calling this feature a “video party,” where students get together to watch videos on the network.

This focus on interest-based networking was by design. This is not Microsoft’s version of Facebook. Says Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs, “we expect people to continue using their favorite social network and search tools,” (in other words, Facebook), “and we hope that, by experimenting with how search and social networking can be combined, more people experiment with tools we already take for granted.”

Cloud Storage Platform Box.net Ramps Up Security For The Enterprise; Debuts Partnership With Intel

Cloud storage platform Box.net is ramping up security today, announcing a new set of tools and access controls for the enterprise. In addition, Box is also announcing a product integration with Intel to deliver additional protections for users and increased admin capabilities for IT managers.

In general, Box has made controls more granular. Now when users share any links on the storage platform, users can limit who can view a file or folder to only users within a company domain or to collaborators within a specific folder. Users can structure this so that these security controls only extend to individual files or to entire folders of content.

While Box has always offered a features that allowed admins to track each Box login from a new browser, you can now track logins from mobile devices, desktops via Box Sync as well as via custom apps using Box APIs. IT admins can now limit the number of devices an employee can access from the same user ID.

Box is also announcing a new relationship with Intel that includes integrations to simplify how IT administrators manage user permissions and group access through Single Sign-On (SSO) and authentication. For example, Box is working with Intel to streamline secure access to Box using credentials managed by Intel’s Expressway Cloud Access 360. Administrators can use ECA 360 to automatically provision Box accounts, leverage existing identity repositories and enable federated SSO to Box.

And Box customers using ECA 360 who want a more intense user identity verification can take advantage of 2-factor authentication available with ECA 360 and configure the system to challenge users to enter a one-time password, which is delivered separately via a smart phone or cell.

Additionally, Box Business Account customers now have access to an additional 500GB of storage capacity, for a total of 1TB of cloud storage at no additional cost. Box Enterprise Account customers receive an unlimited amount of data storage.

Rampung up security for the cloud storage platform should only help Box add additional Fortune 500 and enterprise customers. Already, provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500 with 100,000 businesses using Box’s service (250,000 new users are joining each month).

New Data From Pando Offers A Glimpse Into The Massive Global Growth Of Freemium Gaming

Well, it looks like hardcore gamers would like to have a word with you, social and casual gamers. Yes, the stories in the media of late have been all about Rovio’s Angry Birds skyrocketing past half a billion downloads, or Zynga and its ilk overtaking social games. Both casual and social games have been growing like gangbusters, but the latest data from Pando Networks reveals some fairly serious growth in the free-to-play gaming industry across the globe.

Free-to-play games, just another way of saying “freemium games” are, to clear up any confusion, any game that is free to download and monetized by in-game purchases. Today, in mobile and web apps (and really the consumer web), we are seeing the coming of age of the freemium model and, as a result, advertisers and developers are being forced to find new ways to create revenue and monetize their games, whether that be by way of mobile advertising, virtual goods, avatars, in-game rewards, or incentivized installs.

Today’s data from Pando Networks, a game delivery network for free-to play massively-multiplayer-online (MMO) games, is showing that free-to-play games are growing exponentially, right alongside their casual and social game bretheren. For example, the company’s data shows that the number of gamers downloading free games has grown 450 percent from 2009 to 2011, as more than 38 million people will download an online game using Pando in 2011 — and over 70 million people have downloaded free games since 2009. (And that’s not including the 11+ million playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.)

Again, this hockey-stick growth has resulted from an industry-wide transition from a paid to freemium model, as can be seen in online gaming by the likes of both Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and WoW, which have both taken to the land of the free — along with newer, popular games like League of Legends (by Riot).

And, in case it still needs hammering home, the explosive growth in free-to-play games is far from an American-only phenomenon. According to Pando, from October 2009 to October 2011, downloads in the U.S. have grown from 4.8 million to 12.6 million (an increase of 162 percent), while Latin America has seen downloads increase by 595 percent, compared to the U.K., where growth has shot up by a whopping 1025 percent.

Furthermore, developing nations like Turkey are gobbling up an increasingly significant share of downloads, considering over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free-to-play games today sits over 5 million — an increase of 534 percent since 2010 (and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population).

As Turkey’s infrastructure and connectivity continues to expand, the country’s freemium gaming market has exploded right in tandem, and currently shows no sign of slowing down. Surely, this is a great sign for freemium games and the international gaming market, but it does make on worry about Turkey’s overall productivity. Here’s to hoping GDP doesn’t slip at the hands of widespread MMO gaming adoption.

Compared to the size of population, Turkey certainly has one of the fastest growing freemium gaming markets, compared to, say, France, which has seen its freemium gamers grow from 139K in 2009 to 2.6 million in 2011, and Poland, which grew from 145L to 1.5 million over the same period. While it’s been clear for some time now the extent to which mobile and online platforms are being used by the ever-increasing gaming population in Asia, there hasn’t yet been such a clear picture of the extent to which the freemium model is being adopted in other global regions.

And, again, turning to other sources, Pando’s data also seems to be clearly in support of PopCap’s November study (via Informations Solutions Group) of the growing social gaming market in the U.S. and the U.K., which found that more than 118 million people now play social games once per week, and 81 million people play at least once a day (which is 68 percent of all social gamers). Of course, that’s nice, but what’s really important is that today 31 million players have purchase in-game currency, up 86 percent from the previous year.

Not only that, but Flurry blogged back in September that freemium games are leading all of the app revenue models in the iOS and Android app economies, as they now account for more than 65 percent of app revenue.

So, to sum up, in the event that you’ve missed out on the last two years of gaming trends, it seems that freemium has not only fully arrived, but it’s here to stay, it’s taken over your home, and it’s raising your kids.