A capital set of investments
Innovation does not stop during economic slowdowns," declared Intel Capital chairman, Arvind Sodhani, as the chipmaker's venture capital arm poured about $25 million into seven new investments.
Only two of the seven were US based firms - Los Angeles based Active Storage which makes RAID offerings for firms who use Apple hardware, and Joyent, a Sausalito, California based cloud computing company which claims to help customers develop, deploy and manage Web applications and sites.
The rest of Intel Capital's investment cash went to Asia and the Middle East with money going to firms from Korea, Taipei, Japan, China and Dubai.
Intel Capital's Korean investment goes to Cheon-Ahn City based Crucialtec which makes input devices based on optical technology, perhaps akin to Intel's efforts with its own Light Peak technology.
In Taiwan, the investment branch is focusing its attention of Taipei based Gudeng Precision Industrial, a semiconductor front-end equipment manufacturer which purports to be the world's leading photomask and wafer handling provider.
Tokyo is home to Intel Capital's third Asian investment, V-Cube, which makes and markets Web-based videoconferencing systems, much like the ones Cisco seems so keen on snapping up at the moment.
The firm boasts it can facilitate one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many interactive real-time video conferences over the internet and Intel seems particularly keen for the firm to start streaming high-quality video over WiMAX wireless broadband networks.
