Yesterday, to much fanfare and resolute sentiment, HP announced a return to what made it a great company to begin with: poorly-named and generic computing devices tarted up to take on Dell. This year it’s the HP Envy SpectreXT, a thin and light that can’t officially be called an Ultrabook because that’s an Intel marketing term and these things sometimes run on AMD chips.

I think it’s important to point out the clear problems in the above statement: because Intel officially controls the “ultrabook” spec – including the pricing, screen size, speed, and physical size – manufacturers must toe the line when it comes to what can and cannot be sold under that rubric. In short, Intel’s own standards have so long stymied the OEM’s ability to innovate that, in the end, we’re all essentially buying Intel PCs no matter the brand or maker.

Why is this an important distinction? Because for years hardware has been stymied by ridiculous size standards. From the early “Windows” tablets – which had to follow Intel’s exacting guidelines – to today’s Ultrabooks, manufacturers can’t make a penny without kowtowing to Intel. What’s more, they don’t get any of Intel’s marketing might if they don’t produce at least one of a family of devices.

The same thing happens over at Microsoft. Remember when, in 2010, it seemed everyone was making one touchscreen PC? Sony? Dell? HP? Well it wasn’t because they were totally into touchscreen. It was because Microsoft wanted to push touchscreen Windows interaction onto the audience and they could use their might to force at least one SKU from each manufacturer.

Could HP fight back? Probably not. They make all their money on ink anyway, and hardware is a loss leader. In short, the PC industry is a perfect example of trickle-down economics.

There are obviously a number of smaller players who don’t toe the line, including Apple, but in general if you want to appear in the Best Buy circulars and get special bulk deals on chips and operating systems, you’d better be willing to go Ultrabook or Centrino or whatever other standard the binary star of Intel and Microsoft encourages makers to follow. The odds – and profit – are forever in Intel’s favor.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products and services from.

Not only do women make most of a family’s health decisions but 48% of graduating physicians are women and women compose 73% of medical and health services managers. As a healthtech startup, we think heavily about the importance of what I call the Family Chief Health & Wellness Officer (aka “Mom”). Avado is not unlike many startups in that we have two male co-founders.  We’d be fools to not figure out ways to bring the female perspective into our business.

A bootstrapped startup such as Avado has many challenges, but it also possesses some key advantages. I want to share one key advantage related to this topic. I think it may be one of the biggest untapped reservoirs of talent. The beauty of startups is results matter much more than rigid hiring practices. Big, dumb companies often have rules that preclude a huge category of the potential workforce from being tapped. It’s a category that I’m familiar with as my wife was previously a marketer at Apple and Microsoft, yet it’s likely neither would hire her right now as her time commitment with our kids during the day doesn’t allow her to show up during a normal work hours. However, we get the benefit because she is able to help us with our marketing in the windows of time she has.

Another thing dumb employers do is look at gaps in “normal” employment as a big drawback. Let me give you an example of a new member of our team that we are absolutely thrilled to have on board. Julie Braman is our new Managing Director of Innovation for Pharmaceutics and Biotech. She and I worked together when I was running Microsoft’s health business and she was the founder of another industry business – pharmaceutics. Julie chose to stay at home while her kids were growing up. As I know with my wife, that hardly means one’s brain shuts down. Rather, it brings an entirely new perspective the business can benefit from. In fact, perhaps the most important trend in healthcare and the focus of the recently rolled out Stage 2 of Meaningful Use is “Patient Engagement.” As a member of the “sandwich generation,” many former professionals turned stay-at-home moms not only have had responsibility for their children but many are also increasingly responsible for their parents’ health. This gives them a particularly unique perspective. Since patient engagement is our central focus, the perspective of a boomer female head of household is invaluable.

Having Julie join the team is a real win-win. She is able to jump back into a very meaty job without skipping a beat. For Avado, it’s a no-brainer. Julie was one of the pioneers in bringing pharmacists into active engagement in primary care practices while she was a practicing pharmacist at Group Health — this is a rapidly growing trend with the shortage of primary care physicians. Julie was also in Sales with pharma giant, Eli Lilly, so she understands that perspective as well. As Life Sciences has proven to be fertile ground for Avado, I couldn’t think of a better fit and I couldn’t care less that she’s been “out of the workforce.”

Julie is far from unique. Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and others have written about the lack of women in tech yet there is a group of tech veterans re-entering the workforce that are an untapped reservoir. While many of my female colleagues continued working full-time, there are a boatload of them who either worked part time or were full-time Chief Health & Wellness Officers. Their kids have grown up and they are ready to fully re-engage with the workforce. They worked for the defining companies of the 90′s such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others that were the Facebooks and Googles of their time. In other words, they were the cream of the crop then and they are the cream of the crop now. We feel lucky have them join our team and think other startups would be just as lucky if they learn how to engage this untapped reservoir of talent.

Related Articles:

What Pharma Can Learn From the Railroads and IBM

Aetna: The Company Scaring Its Competition And Delighting Startups

Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing (Part I of III)

It’s hard to believe we’re not stuck in some strange time warp, as it’s beginning to feel (again) like TV is the next hot thing. Well, really, web TV. For one, The Wall Street Journal today reported that Intel is rumored to be developing a web-based, pay-TV service and reportedly has been pitching media companies on creating a “virtual cable operator” that would offer TV channels to U.S. consumers in a “bundle similar to subscriptions sold by cable and satellite TV operators.” According to these reports, Intel will be offering its own set-top box to carry the service.

Regardless of the fact that the chip company has struggled with consumer-facing (and set-top) offerings, Intel’s purported service would join GoogleTV, AppleTV, and a host of other companies already offering set-top boxes like Roku and Boxee. Of course, as much as everyone ever many want a disruption of the current pay-TV model, Alex Cocotas’ chart shows that current cord-cutting attempts aren’t really having the desired effect.

Aereo, the New York-based startup backed by $20 million+ from IAC recently entered the fray with big plans to actually make a dent in this problem with a cloud-based service that streams over-the-air channels for just $12 a month. (You can read more background on the service here.) Of course, just like so many that have come before it, Aereo seems inherently subject to having to change its DVR-in-the-cloud model or to fighting it out with the networks in court. And now it’s countersuing.

Last week, a group of broadcasters, which includes Fox, Univision, and PBS filed two separate lawsuits against Aereo (with those two groups collectively representing most of the major media outlets in New York City), as well as an injunction based on the grounds of Copyright Act infringements, which if granted, would prevent Aereo from releasing its product on the market.

Shortly thereafter, Aereo released a statement saying, in short, that the broadcasters’ case did not have “any merit.” (Statement and more background here.) The interest in this case also prompted me to take a lengthy look at whether or not Aereo actually has any shot at winning this case. Despite many indications otherwise, I was hopeful.

Speaking at SXSW this weekend, Barry Diller, the Chairman and CEO of IAC (the principal investor in Aereo), made it clear that both he and Aereo expected the broadcast networks to resist, and that the issue would likely be resolved in court. (Obviously it would have been a huge mistake not to prepare for this end.) As reported by CNET, Diller said, “This is not some evil thing … This is absolutely predictable. Media companies have hegemony over broadcast TV and they want to protect it.”

Diller and Aereo are both of the mind that what they’re doing is completely legal — and not only that — they shouldn’t have to pay retransmission fees either. (Under their conception, this is because each customer would own their own antenna and thus have rights to free, publicly transmitted broadcasts of network TV.) Diller said that he’d recently met with reps from the networks in New York and told them:

I said to the broadcasters, ‘One thing that might happen is you’ll get more audience.’ They said, ‘That’s fine. Now pay us retransmission money.’ I said, ‘When you get Radio Shack to pay you some slice of their profit when they sell an aerial, we’ll pay you anything you like, but we’re not transmitting anything.’

Given the trajectory of this back-and-forth with the networks, the news today that Aereo has officially countersued is expected, but it’s further evidence that neither Diller nor Aereo will be backing down from the battle anytime soon. And given Diller’s penchant for mixing it up with traditional media, and his own cloud as a long-time media exec himself, there aren’t a whole lot of people better suited for this battle.

After all, with the growing interest among big tech companies (and the public) in this issue, it was either Aereo or someone else. Hey, maybe it could be Ora.tv and Larry King! (Probably not.) After writing this post, we heard from Carlos Nicholas Fernandes, the CEO of RecordTV.com, which launched a similar service in Singapore back in 2007. They were taken to court, lost at first, but eventually won against the state-owned broadcaster, MediaCorp in a landmark ruling.

That ruling formed the basis of Optus’ landmark victory in Australia, as it is referenced extensively in the judgement. (No idea what I’m talking about? More here.) The point is that Aereo’s case stands to be a big one. Given what’s at stake, this will probably take a long time to resolve, and could travel all the way up the high courts in appeals, etc. But, given the RecordTV and Optus decisions, there are certainly precedents working in favor of Aereo.

Aereo only filed one suit today, but a company spokesman said that the “second filing will happen in due course.” So, again, it’s clear, this battle is just heating up. Well, not only that, Diller and company want swift resolution, as the IAC CEO is already saying that he expects the service to be in 75 to 100 cities within a year. A bold statement even if it’s not likely to hold true; either way, all those wanna-be cord cutters out there should be paying attention.

Here’s Aereo’s official statement:

Aereo’s business rests on three very well established legal principles: the consumers’ right to access broadcast television, their right to record unique copies of broadcasts for personal use and their right to use remotely located equipment to make their private copies. We firmly believe that Aereo’s technology is lawful. We are confident in the legal process, and we look forward to a prompt resolution of these meritless lawsuits.

Lawsuit below:

We’ve already caught wind of the Lenovo K800 and Orange’s newly-announced Santa Clara but Intel CEO Paul Otellini isn’t content to leave their push into mobile at that.

Otellini has just announced that Intel has entered into partnerships with a handful of companies in hopes of solidifying their place in the smartphone market. Among those new partners are relative unknowns like Lava International, to major players like ZTE and Visa.

Lava’s first Intel-powered smartphone offering is dubbed the Xolo X900 (pictured left), which Intel seems to hope will give the company a stronger presence in the Indian market.

It’s a huge growth opportunity for Intel — Otellini noted that India’s smartphone market has recently tripled, and according to Lava International co-founder Vishal Sehgal, there’s a significant difference between India’s smartphone and feature phone customers. Otellini and Sehgal presumably hope to wow those Indian smartphone shoppers with a bit of horsepower, as the X900 sports a 1.6GHz Medfield chipset and a graphics processor running at over 400MHz.

ZTE will help Intel push into China with their own Medfield device, though Executive VP He Shiyou didn’t offer up any specifics beside a vague 2H 2012 release window. With these two new additions, Intel now has four smartphone manufacturers taking significant interest in their mobile platform, a far cry from their stance last year.

With that, of course, comes new chip offerings from Intel. First up, the current Z2460 chip will now be able to clock speeds of up to 2GHz, while the lineup has been filled out with new chips like the Z2580 chip and the Z2000. The Z2580 is said to double the performance of its predecessor, along with adding support for LTE. Meanwhile, the Z2000 is meant for lower-end handsets, clocking in at 1GHz.

Of course, it would be awfully short-sighted of Intel just to target OEMs. The smartphone market rookie needed something else to bolster their status as a contender, and to that end Otellini was joined by Visa President John Partridge to announce a multi-year partnership to bring mobile payments to smartphones that use Intel’s mobile platform. Intel’s current reference design packs support for Visa’s payWave contactless mobile payment system.

These new partnerships have added a bit of wind to Intel’s sails, and according to Otellini, their mobile future is looking bright. When asked what it would take for big hardware vendors like Samsung and LG to make the switch to Intel’s chips, he noted that the chips they have in production were enough to “light a fire” under them.

The next step in Intel’s ambition to become a central player in the mobile ecosystem is dovetailing with mobile carrier Orange’s strategy to grow its line of own-brand smartphones.

At MWC, the two are together announcing a new device, code-named “Santa Clara”, which will be Intel’s first handset for the European market, and the most ambitious own-branded device yet rolled out by Orange.

The phones will join a handful of other smartphones being built with Intel technology inside, including a confirmed device from Lenovo.

Orange says that the official name and price of its new device will be revealed later this year, when the phone actually comes to the market.

But for now here are some of the most notable things about it: it will run Android Gingerbread with plans to upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich; it’s in the vein of the slimmed-down/specced-up handsets we’ve seen coming from the likes of HTC, LG and others; and it will be looking to make a mark mainly by selling itself as an “affordable” smartphone — part of the growing trend that we are seeing to offer cheap, but still high-end, devices.

Orange’s deputy VP of devices, Patrick Remy, calls the plan a “democratization” of the smartphone trend, and its main aim is to target those who can only “afford the entry level of contract tariff plans.”

This is an important and probably smart move by the carrier, owned by France Telecom: Yes, Orange has operations in some of the more advanced mobile markets in the world, such as the UK and France, but it also has significant operations in emerging markets, too,  in regions like Africa.

Those are markets where cheap smartphones may be the only smartphones that will really sell for the near future. While the “Santa Clara” will initially be rolled out in the UK and France, if all goes well, Orange says that eventually it wants to extend that to the rest of its footprint.

Equally, low-end is where Orange actually has a chance to make a mark. With the number of high-end (read: pricey) devices coming from established players like Samsung and HTC, not to mention the many handsets we’re seeing from ambitious new entrants like ZTE and Huawei — all targeting a market that is in many instances dominated at the moment by Apple and its iPhone — where, exactly, does a carrier with ambitions to do more than just sell network time get a look in?

On the other hand, the track record so far with Orange’s own-branded handsets has been slow — but not a failure.

Orange has plugged away at making its own-branded devices for a decade already — starting with the very first-ever smartphone built on a Microsoft platform (the frustrating SPV, quietly made by HTC, and branded as Orange).

Then there was a fallow period of few devices until Android came along and breathed life into the idea again in 2010. In Q4 2011, the company said that across its footprint 15 percent of all the smartphones it sold were own-branded devices, up from 7 percent in Q4 2010: a sign that if Orange prices the devices right, and markets them the right way, it can get somewhere. Its target for 2012 is to grow that proportion by 20 percent more.

That is something that has encouraged it to take it one step further. Partnering with Gigabyte as the ODM, the “Santa Clara”, it says, will be a “high performance” device, despite the lower price.

Based on Intel’s smartphone reference design and powered by its Atom Z2460 processor, the device will support HSPA+ (no LTE in the UK and France yet) — also using Intel technology. The two companies claim this will give the phone impeccable battery life while maintaining fast performance. It will also offer HD video and audio support, and an eight-megapixel camera that can take quick bursts of snaps, speaking to the papparazzo in all of us.

Not only do Orange devices offer a route to the carrier getting a better return and margin per subscriber, but they also offer a way for Orange to push its other services — those that have been a challenge for Orange to promote on platforms like iOS and Android where so many competing services exist. These will include  quick links to Orange TV, Daily Motion (in which Orange has a 49 percent stake), Deezer (in France only), Orange’s film offers Orange Wednesdays, Your Orange and Orange Gestures.

Will that be enough to bring in the punters? I have to admit, the phone looks nice, but Murphy’s law did strike during my own time with it: we couldn’t get it to load a single page of the mobile web until just as I was about to leave my briefing.

A blip or a bigger issue of the device not quite ready for prime time? We’ll have to wait until later this year to see.

Motorola’s latest handsets have been pretty impressive. The Razr and Razr Maxx, in particular, are excellent handsets. But it would seem that the (almost) freshly acquired company has no intentions of resting on its laurels.

Rather than sticking with its usual OMAP-powered devices, Motorola has slapped an Intel Medfield chip on to this anonymous device. And lest we forget, Ice Cream Sandwich is finally coming along for the ride. (It sure does pay off to be under Google’s wing, doesn’t it?)

Based on the renders, it would appear that Motorola is also changing up its design language yet again. With the Razr, things took on more of a boxey look, but maintained the classic Moto hump along the back. However, this unnamed device is in more of a teardrop shape, nixing the hump altogether and instead getting thinner and thinner as we move down the phone.

Pocketnow reports that the big selling feature on this phone will be its camera, which should supposedly boast instant-on and 15 frame-per-second burst mode. That sounds delightful alongside Moto’s stellar camera app.

A new version of MotoBlur should also be in tow (undoubtedly smearing the beauty of ICS), and is expected to first debut at Mobile World Congress in a couple weeks.

Further details are sparse, but we’ll but sure to clue you in once we know more.

7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: Judge Lucy Koh says "This case is moving forward...this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss." That means the defendants' motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. Koh said she may dismiss some specific claims but the plaintiffs will be allowed to amend their complaint. She mentioned "It's hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy". Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the  agreements is as follows:

• January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm
• May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements
• 2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors
• April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements
• June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the defense argued against the conspiracy accusation and joint liability. It stated that plaintiffs don’t deserve compensation from companies they never worked for and that their employers didn’t have agreements with just because they were part of the so-called conspiracy.

The judge seemed somewhat sympathetic to this, and asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs maintained that the agreements were all interconnected.

Afterwards, The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, told me the plaintiffs were comfortable moving forward with their single, joint antitrust conspiracy complaint. The plaintiffs will file an amended complaint that removes any claims dismissed by the forthcoming judge’s statement.

Next, another Case Management Conference is set for April 18th, where that amended complaint from the plaintiff will be reviewed. On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

Following the hearing, Saveri gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

Intel is to buy “a significant number” of patents (approximately 190 patents and 170 patent applications) and video codec software from RealNetworks for a purchase price of $120 million. Under the terms of the deal, RealNetworks says it retains certain rights to continue to use the patents in current and future products.

Says RealNetworks president and CEO Thomas Nielsen:

“Selling these patents to Intel unlocks some of the substantial and unrealized value of RealNetworks assets. It represents an extraordinary opportunity for us to generate additional capital to boost investments in new businesses and markets while still protecting our existing business.”

In addition to the sale of the patents and software, RealNetworks and Intel agreed to collaborate on future support and development of the video codec software and ‘related products’.

Intel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash.

InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Intel saus the acquisition is designed to enhance Intel’s networking portfolio and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology as well as support the company’s vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. An ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected System Group said of the acquisition: “The technology and expertise from Qlogic provide important assets to provide the scalable system fabric needed to execute on this vision. Adding Qlogic’s InfiniBand product line to our networking portfolio will bring increased options and exceptional value to our datacenter customers.”

Next week a class-action civil lawsuit will be heard in San Jose to determine if Google, Apple, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Adobe, Intel, and Intuit conspired to eliminate competition for skilled labor. In anticipation of the hearing, TechCrunch has obtained evidence from the Department of Justice’s investigation in 2010 which was made public this evening for the first time. It appears to support the plaintiff’s case that the defendant companies tried to suppress employee compensation by entering into “no poach” agreements.

Previously, only the DOJ was privy to the evidence, so there was no way for the public to know whether the settlement came out the defendants’ fear they would lose. Now we know the C-level management at these companies did enter into anti-competitive agreements.

Below you can see the redacted Exhibit Joint Case Management Conference Statement attained from Pacer.org. Filed today, it contains evidence from the DOJ investigation pertinent to the upcoming civil case.

The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.

In one particularly juicy piece of evidence from May 2005, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen emailed Steve Jobs regarding “Recruitment of Apple Employees”. In the message, Adobe’s SVP for human resources writes “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”

Additionally, documents state that there is “strong evidence that the companies knew about the other express agreements, patterned their own agreements off of them, and operated them concurrently with the others to accomplish the same objective.”

For example, Lori McAdams of Pixar wrote an internal email to others at Pixar  in April 2007 stating, “I just got off the phone with Danielle Lambert [of Apple], and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

The defendants ask for the case to be dismissed, stating that the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy” and that these bilateral agreements were separate. The DOJ announced in September 2010 that it had settled with the companies, establishing that they would cease such illegal hiring practices, even though they never had to admit to wrongdoing. The DOJ currently has the right to check on the companies for compliance.

The plaintiffs seek damages for any salaried employee who worked for one of the defendants during a 4-year period in the late 2000s. That means a lot of Silicon Valley tech workers could receive a payout if the defendants lose or settle the case. The civil case will be heard by Judge Koh in San Jose starting January 26th, 2012, and we’ll have continuing updates on its progress.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock - Bioraven]

Intel knows a thing or two about technology and innovation. Hey, that’s why they hired Will.i.am as “director of creative innovation”. (Wink.) Really, in the same way that it’s catalyzed change in the computing industry (and helped bring modern microprocessing to life), in December Intel launched a platform designed to give young entrepreneurs the opportunity to bring their own innovative ideas to life.

Thus, the company launched “Intel Innovators” to be two things: First, it’s a platform built on top of Intel’s Facebook community that allows young entrepreneurs (specifically, 18 to 24-year-olds) in the U.S. to share their business ideas, grow a fanbase, and receive realtime feedback. Second, it’s essentially a pop-up accelerator — a program that offers $100,000 each month to the best ideas to come out of its Facebook community.

Finalists each month receive some cool Intel schwag (like Ultrabooks, etc.), and winners get Venture Lab training from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Not bad.

The program began taking submissions in November, launched its platform on December 1st, and Intel plans to run the program for three months, with rounds of judging and prizes at the end of each month. (The deadline for submitting ideas for the third round is January 16.) If Intel Innovators gets enough traction, it will likely be rolled out internationally later this year. And thus far the activity on its platform has been impressive, as the team told us that they’ve received hundreds of “high-quality” ideas for each round and have seen “hundreds of thousands of visits” to its Facebook platform over the last month.

So how does it works? Basically, young entrepreneurs can head over to the Facebook app, where they can submit their ideas for startups. Once approved, they enter the big pool. A selection committee (made up of professors, executives, and entrepreneurs) selects the 20 best ideas. Fans and entrepreneurs are given social capital (points) that they can invest in their favorite ideas.

The five that receive the most capital move onto the final round, where they do a live pitch to a panel of four judges (Chief Financial Officer of betaworks Joshua D. Auerbach, Managing Director Intel Capital’s Consumer Internet Sector Mike Buckley, SV Angel’s Topher Conway, and Collaborative Fund’s Craig Shapiro), who award their favorite idea with $50K. The top fan then gets to give the other $50K to their favorite finalist.

Interested in what kind of ideas the crowd favors? December’s winners included Alex Adelman, a 22 year-old from North Carolina for “Cosmic Cart”, a product tagging system that allows users to buy merchandise from any video online. And the second winner (chosen by the panelists) was 24-year-old Virgil Hare from Detroit for LoginWill, a social networking website where people can designate beneficiaries to receive all of their online login information in the event that they pass away. (More here.)

It’s a great program, although it does seem like they didn’t have to include the 18 to 24 age restriction. What about the rest of us? According to Intel, it’s illegal to award financial prizes to people under 18, so there’s that, and, really, they want to tap into tap into college-aged entrepreneurs — to help the young Mark Zuckerbergs of the world take a step forward. (And, hey, Mike would probably agree with the age cap, too.)

While I might balk at that suggestion, it’s hard to argue against giving young entrepreneurs a resource to bounce their ideas off each other and cash to jumpstart their business. Intel has always claimed it’s all about fueling innovation, and programs like this, its Global Challenge at UC Berkeley, and the AppUp Fund show Intel wants to put its money where its mouth is.

Entrepreneurs and their startups are, really, the engine of job creation. In the U.S., companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades and, over that time, accounted for all net new jobs created in the U.S. — this according to the White House.

What’s more, for a stagnant economy, keeping technology and manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is a must, and Intel is doing its part to help create them, and keep them here.

But now I want to see them turn Intel Innovators into a full-blown accelerator. The more, the better.

And for the young entrepreneurs reading, now is the time to submit your idea for a shot at $100K, as the program is currently accepting submissions for the next round — and is doing so until 12 p.m. EST on January 16. Check it out here.

Today at Intel’s CES 2012 Keynote, the firm announced a strategic partnership with Nuance. If you’ve forgotten, Nuance is a voice recognition company, so yelling at your new ultrabook may be a closer reality than you thought.

You’ll have voice commands for checking in on notifications, and the processing never has to go through the cloud since ultrabooks will provide enough processing power to begin with.

According to the Nuance boss, responses will be spoken back in natural language and the program will provide for up to nine different languages, including English, French, German Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, and Mandarin.

They also mentioned that the power is there to eventually enable real-time language translation.

In addition to some new form factors, Intel showed us some interesting new Windows 8 interface ideas. Keep in mind that these are proofs-of-concept rather than working devices, so they may or may not actually appear on the market.

The most interesting new UI demo was the Nikishki notebook, a clamshell with a big transparent trackpad below the keyboard. The trackpad works as a traditional trackpad and then “disables” when you press your palms on it to type. Then, when you close the laptop, some of the screen is visible and you are able to see and use the Windows 8 tiles available through the transparent portion.

This could trickle into the current Intel ecosystem (but it might not) but it was a very cool concept.

Another concept was a Kinect-like gesture control for laptops that lets you make gestures in the air to control the system.

It’s a bit goofy but, in addition to gyroscopic controls and the new Nuance voice controls, you’re looking at what amounts to a few new ways to control your PC.

Intel opened with that goofy guy from “Evolution of Dance,” which wasn’t very encouraging. However, things got better quickly.

Intel is coming down hard on the ultrabook this year, showing off a number of interesting 2+ GHz laptops with Intel processors that can do much more in a package the size of a Macbook Air. These new machines are slim, small, and based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture.

[We are streaming this press conference live right here]
The demos included a super-fast render of a cute photo sharing app including lots of hi-res photos stuffed into a slideshow as well as a clever demo involving a train going over a bridge. The bridge, made up of hundreds of individual parts, is blown up and each part rendered in real time using 50% the processing power of the current chipset, Sandy Bridge.

In addition, the new system allows for secure NFC connectivity. For example, you can “tap” your credit card on the laptop to make a purchase, provided you have NFC capabilities built-in. Each machine manages “correct” cards to ensure that your card won’t work if your card falls into the wrong hands.

Most important, this chipset allows for a much thinner machine. Most laptops go from 9.5mm to 6.5mm with socketless chips that are soldered right into the motherboard (something hackers will hate) as well as improved heat dispersion.

Intel is serious about ultrabooks. They’ve already announced a $300 million dollar investment to reduce the price of thin components and prices are all ready at a commodity price. Interestingly, I suspect that these laptops will become the de facto standard, eventually pushing the standard, inch-think laptop to the side. They couldn’t pull off netbooks, but I think the ultrabook is the new hotness.

Chip maker AMD this morning announced that it has recruited Rajan Naik to become part of its management team.

Formerly a senior engineer at the company’s main rival, Intel, Naik was most recently a partner in McKinsey & Company‘s Technology practice, where he worked for the past 11 years.

Naik, 40, will become senior vice president and chief strategy officer of AMD, where he will be responsible for helping out with strategy development, partnerships, M&A and investment decisions. He’ll report directly to AMD president and CEO Rory Read.

Naik has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in engineering from MIT.

His hiring follows that of AMD’s appointment of Mark Papermaster as senior vice president and CTO.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The Korea Times reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market.

LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset for CES 2011, but the device was ultimately scrapped. The reason for its premature demise? As the story goes, the device died because of it’s “lack of marketability.”

LG’s brass certainly thinks their Intel smartphone is viable — according to one of the Times’ executive sources, the device could be released as soon this March. Still, the original LG-Intel phone was pegged with a 2011 release date, so take those claims with a grain of salt for bow.

Hopefully LG’s second swing at an Intel-powered phone fares a little better — it’s said to run on Intel’s next-generation Medfield system-on-a-chip, and early tests have yielded some pretty impressive benchmarks when compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 SoCs.

Of course, the real competition is yet to come, as nearly every player in the mobile chipset market is hard at work on their next-generation platforms. Intel has a lot of brand recognition when it comes to PCs, but their lack of presence in the mobile market to date could mean that Medfield could drown in a sea of established ARM-based chipsets.

That’s why the partnership with LG is so critical — despite their handset division spending a few quarters in the red, LG is still the number two handset OEM in the U.S. Having a major hardware vendor taking a chance on their new platform could establish Intel as a real player in the mobile space, and right now Intel’s mobile efforts could use all the visibility they can get.

We’ve been waiting for Intel’s promised smartphone effort for a long, long time now. The few desultory pushes by the likes of Acer and niche OEMs has done little to dent the dominance of rival ARM, whose low-power chips have become an indispensable part of smartphone architecture.

Just last week, though, Intel gave a private showing of a smartphone prototype that appears to be more or less feature complete and ready to be established as the basis for a platform. The device was running Gingerbread (Android 2.3), but funnily enough actually resembles an ice cream sandwich.

The choice of OS is probably just indicative of the test environment; Intel has professed their interest in the newest version of Android, and will likely want their debut to involve it. Look at that phone, though, the similarity really is uncanny. Anandtech has a few more pictures like the one above.

In addition to showing off the reference design, which is just a starting place or example for manufacturers and may not be representative of future products, Intel showed some stats that indicated the new “Medfield” systems powering the phones was no slouch:

These are all Intel’s internal measurements, of course, and as you can see there are no model numbers or actual statistics shown. But we can probably trust the general indication that the Medfield platform is competitive with shipping devices running fairly new ARM and NVIDIA designs. MIT’s Technology Review also noted a few interesting features in their hands-on: a burst mode on the camera that shoots 10 full-size shots at 15 FPS (!), hardware acceleration of certain web and app tasks, and wireless casting of HD video to a TV. We know they have also invested in custom Android distributions, but none were present at the event.

Medfield is a die-shrink and redesign of Moorestown, a redesign of the Atom series, which as you remember was mostly found in netbooks. But although its pedigree might not sound like the best for mobile devices, it seems like Intel has truly focused on making the platform handset- and tablet-friendly.

Speaking of tablets, they also showed a reference design for a tablet:

No, not the most beautiful device we’ve ever seen, which is why it’s at the end of the article here. They showed it running Windows 8 in the slide deck but presumably it would run Android just as well.

Intel expects the first Medfield-based devices to be revealed in the first half of 2012, and hinted that we might see some at CES in January. We’ll be sure to drop by Intel’s booth to bring you pictures and video as soon as we can in that case.

There can be no doubt that Japan is the country of vending machines, and this newest model is perhaps the most advanced yet. Developed by Japan-based tech companies Sanden and Okaya (and Intel), this “vending machine 2.0″ features a 65-inch see-through display with full HD resolution as the biggest selling point.

When there are no potential customers around, the display shows a digital clock and various animations to attract people. Once a person is standing in front of the machine, a facial recognition system determines the gender and approximate age and serves up personalized ads.

Maker Sanden says the machine’s display can produce text, pictures or animations in HD quality.

The company commands a 30% global market share for vending machines and is also active in the US, meaning this prototype could also make its way over to North America one day.

This video, provided by Diginfo TV, shows how the vending machine works (in English):

Intel has just announced that its fourth quarter results are expected to fall below the company’s previous outlook because of hard disk drive supply shortages.

Intel now expects fourth quarter revenue to be around $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million, on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, which is $1 billion lower than the previous expectation of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

Intel explains that while sales of personal computers are expected to be up in the fourth quarter, the PC supply chain is reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases (this is where chip maker Intel is hurt) as a result of the hard disk drive supply shortages. So basically, PC makers aren’t making as many computers, which is cutting into Intel’s revenue when it comes to supplying chips to these device makers. Intel expects hard disk drive supply shortages to continue into the first quarter, followed by a rebuilding of microprocessor inventories as supplies of hard disk drives recover during the first half of 2012.

Intel just came off a strong third quarter, in which the company had its most profitable quarter ever.

Well, it looks like Intel is really putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to mobile. Intel’s global investment and M&A branch, Intel Capital, today officially announced the creation of its new “AppUp” Fund — a $100 million fund that will be used to invest in startups and enterprises developing apps and software tools for mobile devices and PCs.

At the Intel Capital Global Summit in Huntington Beach today, Intel also revealed that Urban Airship and 4tiitoo were the first two companies to receive investment from the AppUpp fund.

As we wrote last week, Urban Airship recently closed a $15.1 million series C round of financing, close on the heels of its acquisition of SimpleGeo, which was once referred to as the “Amazon Web Services” for location-based products. According to Urban Airship, Intel invested in the company’s Series C raise out of its new AppUp Fund; however, it seems that the investor wanted more, as Urban Airship today announced that it has entered into a business collaboration agreement with Intel Software and Services Group as well.

Essentially, this means that Intel’s software and services group will be licensing Urban Airship’s software to embed into Intel offerings, allowing developers to create smart, context-rich apps that take advantage of the startup’s core services, namely: Push notifications, in-app purchasing, subscriptions — and now, thanks to SimpleGeo — geo-location.

For Urban Airship, this is yet another interesting strategic move, as its collaboration with Intel will give it access to the Ultrabook, netbook, and tablet markets through enabling app developers to integrate their services.

Of course, not to be forgotten is the second recipient of Intel’s new mobile fund, 4tiitoo, a German OSV and tablet developer. 4tiitoo’s own “WeTab OS” is an operating system that is optimized for tablets and mobile devices and supports apps from multiple platforms and technologies, including Linux, Java, HTML5, Adobe AIR, Flash, and Android.

As one might guess, Intel said today that its new AppUp Fund is designed to advance innovation (read: mobile technologies) based on Intel architecture, specifically in digital media consumption, context-aware computing, and infrastructure apps. The end goal here is to ramp up development and build out the ecosystems surrounding Intel’s push into Ultrabooks and netbooks.

And to that point, the new AppUp Fund is a complement to Intel’s recently announced $300 million “Ultrabook Fund”, by which the company showed that it is making a big bet that Ultrabooks, the hybrid between laptops and tablets, will be the future of mobile computing.