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Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion
We're firmly of the belief that SSDs are our future and Samsung would seem to agree. The Korean electronics giant has just announced that it's selling its hard disk drive-manufacturing arm to Seagate Technology for a neat $1.375 billion in equal measures of cash and stocks. As a result, Samsung Electronics will own approximately 9.6 percent of Seagate and get to nominate one new member to join Seagate's Board of Directors, while the two companies have further agreed to deepen their strategic relationship with related cross-licensing and supply stipulations. Samsung will provision Seagate's solid state drives with NAND flash memory, whereas Seagate will furnish Samsung's PCs and consumer electronics products with hard disk storage. The deal is expected to complete in full by year's end and you can read all about it in Seagate's press release after the break. [Thanks, Pavel]
Gold-dispensing 'Gold to Go' ATM is itself a gold-plated marvel
"Damn thing ate my dollar." "A dollar, you say?"
Kevin Rose demos Square payment system for iPhone
Digg's Kevin Rose is the newest investor in this Square iPhone payment system that we've been seeing lately, and as you can see above, he's demo'ed the unit for everyone over on YouTube. It works as we've heard: there's just an addon that you plug into the iPhone's headphone jack, and then an app takes information from the swiper, and transmits it out for an actual credit card payment, with a finger doing the signature. The app, as Kevin says, will even upload GPS information, so you can make sure that payments are happening in the right place. Unfortunately, what he doesn't mention is the actual price to get payments up and running. Square's website says that there's "no contracts, monthly fees, or hidden costs," but they've got to pay for the system somehow, so you'd expect there to be a fee for setup, for the accessory, and then a fee per charge through the system, but we haven't heard what any of those will end up being yet. Depending on how steep they are, this could be a gamechanger -- accepting payments anywhere, any time, with an online record and receipt for each one, no cash involved. Would be incredible for small business owners, and probably a lot of other sales folks, too.
iPhone credit card reader to be demoed at CES
Coming this CES (which is actually next week): a complete credit card transaction accessory and service for your iPhone. If this thing works as expected, you might actually see it in more than a few places (think: street vendors that will take credit card payments). A company called Mophie is planning to show off an add-on that works with an app to deliver credit card payments through Square, a payment service recently started up by Jack Dorsey, a Twitter alumni. This is one of a couple such systems that will be vying to fulfill the function (and probably take a few cents from each transaction for their troubles), but so far all we've really got is demos, no actual releases planned. But maybe we'll hear more at CES. There's all kinds of applications here -- a solid, working implementation of a service like this could end up being extremely popular for anybody that regularly needs to conduct transactions out in the field.
Microsoft's quarterly report confirms $500 million spent on Danger
We had heard that Microsoft threw down a cool half billion to acquire Danger earlier this year, but quite honestly, we found it a bit tough to believe. After all, analysts are saying that even Motorola is barely worth that much. Regardless of all that, the outfit's latest quarterly report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission affirms that it did indeed spend $500 million on Danger. That's a lot of jack, son.
Apple patents iTMS transaction service for iPhone
Joining Sony Ericsson in the growing list of cellphone-related patents unearthed today, it appears that Apple is doing a good bit of work behind the scenes to ensure that future iPhone users will be able to access and purchase tunes (and video?) from the iTunes Store. Apple's recently filed "Configuration of a computing device in a secure manner" patent lays out in a good bit of detail how users of a mobile device (wireless iPod?) could access the iTMS and perform "transactions." It goes on to speak of "digital signatures" that would presumably have to be validated before any unexpected downloads took place, and it also pictures a handset (props to Nokia candybars of days past) communicating with an actual PC, which then contacts the "content and commerce" servers on the other side of the wire. In other details, there's photo evidence that some sort of downloadable upgrades / expansions could be available, probably referring to future firmware updates that could be initiated through the iTunes application. Granted, the whole mess of legal jargon is a bit hard for the layman to truly grasp, and it seems that Apple was simply throwing out as many vague words and possibilities to encompass anything that actually gets decided, but be sure to hit the read link anyway for more textual confusion and pictorial delight.
