The company was founded in September 2009, and it spent three and half years – to April 2013 – writing code running on Linux before its first product reached general availability. Founder Doron Kempel bankrolled it for the first year and then went to VCs for A, B and C-rounds of funding with some $101m raised in total.It has sold its Omnicube kit for five quarters now, and has 260 partners worldwide, being a 100 per cent channel company.Competitor Nutanix has reached a $200m revenue run-rate in its eleventh quarter of shipping products. Kempel said: We'll get to a $200 million run rate in our eighth quarter.But Dell has struck an OEM deal with Nutanix. Will Simplivity be able to keep up?
Kempel said customers like the fact that as soon as data hits an Omnicube it is deduped and compressed and stays that way forever in the Omnicube universe, including replication to other Omnicubes. Rehydration only happens when it exits Simplivity's domain. Customers have achieved 20:1 and even 30:1 data reduction ratios; that's Kempel's claim.The dedupe and compression is carried out by a PCIe accelerator card, with an FPGA and NVRAM on it, with two exceptions; running Omnicube software on a laptop or as a virtual machine in the Amazon cloud. Then the dedupe and compression is done by software.Only one VMware admin person is needed to manage a customer's set of Omnicubes, wherever they are deployed, which, Kempel says, radically cuts management costs.Simplivity's headcount was 100 people in August 2013, 200 people in February 2014, 300 in June 2014 and is 350 now, in August. There are about 140 engineers and 120 sales heads, with as many field people in EMEA as there are in the US. Altogether there are some 60 employees in the EMEA region.
Reaching a $200m run-rate eight quarters after first shipping means achieving a $50m quarter. Kempel founded data deduper Diligent with Moshe Yanai, and sold it to IBM for about $200m, so I wouldn't bet against him.Dodgy USB chargers are in the news again in Australia, with stationery giant Officeworks recalling a charger on safety grounds.The recall comes six weeks after the death of a Sydney woman, Sheryl Aldeguer, was attributed to an unsafe charger.At the time Rod Stowe, the Fair Trading Commissioner in the Australian State of New South Wales (NSW), said “a young woman wearing headphones and holding her laptop was found dead with burns on her ears and chest, in an apparent electrocution”.In the latest safety warning, Officeworks has told NSW Fair Trading the chargers were at risk of overheating and melting, after an incident was reported to the company.The recall covers devices with product number MS10071223, sold between July 19, 2013 and August 2, 2014, and Officeworks told Fair Trading that around 3,400 devices were sold nationally, with approximately 1,050 in NSW.
The company is having devices tested and assessed. Customers who have the chargers should contact Officeworks on 1300 633 423.NSW Fair Trading states that Officeworks is also liaising with Energy Safe Victoria about the product.Since the June incident, the NSW regulator says it's issued 17 penalty notices over dodgy USB chargers, and has inspected 2,124 items at 1,166 outlets. +Comment Apple's most popular products are set to vanish from Chinese officials' boardrooms after the People's Republic reportedly struck them off the official procurement list.Ten gizmos including the iPad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro can no longer be purchased for use by the Chinese state bureaucracy, Bloomberg reported unnamed officials who'd read the document as saying.Although its accuracy has not yet been officially confirmed, the list appeared to show that Chinese bureaucrats can still purchase products built by Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo.This run-down of officially sanctioned suppliers is usually produced by the National Development and Reform Commission in partnership with the Ministry of Finance. It will not be updated until January 2015, meaning that Apple could miss out on a huge chunk of potential revenue.
This means that no iThings will be bought by any of China's government ministries or local outposts. Neither will a single member of the many departments of the Communist Party be allowed to worship at the altar of Apple (or the latest model of this altar, if you want to be accurate).Currently, there has been no official admission of this policy from China and the list of companies deemed worthy of a place on the procurement list has not been made public.The latest one-inch-punch aimed at Apple is the latest in a list of blows the firm has suffered in China. A recent report on state-sponsored TV alleged the iPhone's tracking system was a threat to national security. It's little wonder Beijing feels threatened, after leaks from rogue NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden revealed that the US was hellbent on spying on pretty much everyone, pretty much all of the time.China: Microsoft raids are not over yet
The State Administration for Industry and Commerce also raided Microsoft and Accenture offices in Beijing, Liaoning, Fujian and Hubei as part of an antitrust investigation.
Although Chinese government has been reticent about Apple, it has published blow-by-blow accounts of the Microsoft anti-trust case on official websites, including this ominous warning from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC):Microsoft should strictly abide by Chinese laws and may not interfere in any way hinder investigation of the case, to ensure an objective and impartial investigation of the case.The Chinese do not seem to have made the same kind of public demands of Apple, at least not yet. Interestingly, State organs aren't particularly keen on telling the world about their plans anyway, judging by the fact some parts of its websites haven't been updated for more than five years.The SAIC's English-language news section, which is helpfully translated as Activities and Speeches, remains untouched since 2007, when Zhou Bohua, secretary of the Party Leadership Group, creepily told units at all levels to follow the guidance of the Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of the Three Represents to implement the scientific development concept and the strategy of building a harmonious socialist society.What that means, he goes on to say, is that all businesses need to help ensure other firms stick to the letter of the law.
Efforts should be made to... crack down on illegal acts to create a standardized, orderly, harmonious and civilized market and social environment, and accelerate the building of sound social morality by giving priority to launching a campaign to promote ideological progress among the public, he roared.Once ensconced at the local boozer, I was extremely pleasantly surprised. Admittedly the connection took a little longer to establish, but the app connected to the camera just as simply as it did when on the same network – albeit with a slower frame rate, around 2.5fps.As well as the plugCAM iOS and Android apps, there's a Windows PC one too, which can be found on the Brite View support pages. With this installed you can set up triggers for motion detection, with alarms, emails and either snapshots or video recordings, as well as scheduled recording between certain hours. So, if you're able to dedicate a PC to doing the recording, then the plugCAM desktop app offers an easy to configure approach for more comprehensive monitoring.
There are cheaper IP cameras available, but if you want something up that's uncomplicated to configure – especially if you're monitoring somewhere or someone who's not technical – then I reckon this is a pretty decent option, and about as simple to set up as you can get.Naturally, alternatives exist and if IFA is anything to go by – the consumer electronics-fest in Berlin last week – then we’ll have plenty more to choose from soon. At the event, D-Link showed its myD-Link Home Monitor cameras, which go on sale next month.The mydlink Home system relies on Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections, rather than HomePlug, but like the Solwise unit, promise painless configuration of remote access via D Link's cloud services.Another announcement at IFA came from Withings – the makers of the smart bathroom scales and various health monitoring gadgets. The Withings Home combines an HD W-Fi camera (with iOS support, but not Android), with temperature and humidity sensors, and even detection of volatile organic compounds.
The unit on show at IFA also was being demonstrated using its Ethernet port which Withings doesn’t mention in any of its blurb. It also features a loudspeaker and has two mics for noise cancellation enabling two-way conversations to be conducted using the device.Available soon, at £170, it's pricey, but at least looks far more home-friendly than many of the alternatives. The extra monitoring functions will likely appeal to those who fret about more than just burglary.Certainly the products coming on stream this year are looking less complicated to configure and, like Google Glass seem destined to bring the Big Brother into the home and beyond. Indeed, you may already be tracking your cat, the humidity of your tomatoes, keeping an eye on the garage, or using a black box as a back seat driver. So tell us about the monitoring tech you're using – or want to see – in the comments. It’s a bit of a cheat: the B had the extra GPIO too, but they were routed to other parts of the board and left unattached to header pins. They’ve now been corralled to extend the original two rows of GPIO pins, which retain their numbering and functionality. The upshot is that the extra pins won’t prevent existing add-ons being used: just slot them onto the first 26 pins on the board and use them as before.