Cisco to spend $830 million for e-mail security firm

Cisco Systems said Thursday it will pay $830 million in cash and stock for e-mail security company IronPort Systems.

IronPort, a privately held company based in San Bruno, Calif., is a leader in security technology that scans e-mail messages for spam and viruses. Its products are sold to large companies, including Cisco, which says it has used the IronPort product for three years. IronPort competes against security heavyweights such as McAfee and Secure Computing.

One of the IronPort's most important innovations is software that rates Web links in e-mail to better filter out junk messages, including those with links to malicious sites.

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Maker of flexible displays lands $100 million

Flexible-display technology developer Plastic Logic won more than $100 million in new funding to build a manufacturing facility as investors pushed the company to shift its business model away from a licensing strategy to manufacturing its own products.

Plastic's funding is among the largest deals in European venture capital history and is a huge jump in the company's capitalization schedule, as it raised a total of $42.3 million in previous funding.

The company expects to begin manufacturing display products midyear 2009, with products shipping by the end of the year.

The initial products will be standalone flexible active-matrix display units that include connectivity hardware and that are designed to be thin, light and robust, and capable of being used anywhere to provide a reading experience as close to paper as possible.

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A shotgun marriage for Blu-ray and HD DVD?

The key number in the battle between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps is 250,000.

That is the number of players for both formats that the Computer Electronics Association has said likely shipped in 2006, the first year of global sales. Earlier, the organization had anticipated 750,000 players would ship for the year.

Consumer fears about buying the wrong piece of equipment--combined with high prices and other factors--have crimped sales of the next-generation movie players and prompted the beginning of a thaw in the standards battle. Earlier this week, for instance, South Korea's LG Electronics formally announced it would release a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD player after months of flip-flopping on the issue. It plans to provide details on Sunday, the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

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Seagate thinks small with portable storage devices

Seagate wants to lighten the load for customers who need all their computer data with them--but not necessarily their computer.

At the Consumer Electronics Show next week, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based hard-drive maker will show off a new line of pocket-size portable storage devices called FreeAgent. Ranging in sizes of up to 750GB, the FreeAgent devices are designed to allow consumers to take the entire contents of their computers--photos, music files, videos, software applications, documents, e-mail, Internet links--with them. The FreeAgent devices contain a drive as well as a software stack to manage and encrypt files.

As a result, consumers won't have to take their notebooks with them, Seagate contends. They can plug a fully synchronized FreeAgent device into a terminal at an airport or a PC at a hotel and work from the same files and applications through VPN (virtual private network). Seagate says FreeAgent devices won't leave passwords or data traces on remote computers.

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Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is first to the mat with an announcement of a 1-terabyte hard disk drive. Industry analysts widely expected a 1TB drive to ship sometime in 2007; Hitachi grabbed a head start on the competition by announcing its drive today, just before the largest U.S. consumer electronics show starts next week.

According to Hitachi, the drive ships in the first quarter of 2007, and will cost $399--less than the price of two individual 500GB hard drives today. The drive, called the Deskstar 7K1000, will be shown this weekend in Las Vegas at the 2007 International CES, also known as the Consumer Electronics Show, as well as at the Storage Visions storage conference.

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