Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced an Eclipse working group to define an open development standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Together with founding members IBM and Eurotech, the M2M Industry Working Group will establish an integrated development environment for M2M networks, as well as a Linux-based, lightweight communications protocol, based in part on Sierra Wireless' Koneki project and the Lua scripting language.

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CSR says its new “SiRFusion” technology will combine information from satellite, Wi-Fi, cellular, and various sensors, providing reliable navigation even indoors. It will be offered next year on “SiRF starV” receiver chips, according to the company, which also announced availability of a “SiRFprimaII” SoC (system on chip) that includes both a navigation engine and an ARM Cortex A9-based application processor.

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Calxeda announced an ARM-based “server-on-a-chip” that includes up to four ARM Cortex-A9 cores, a fifth “management controller” core, a fabric switch, and multiple controllers supporting peripherals such as SATA drives, PCI Express, Ethernet, and SD cards. HP says it will build these ECX-1000 processors into “Redstone” servers — initially Unbuntu Linux-based — later versions of which may alternatively employ Intel Atom CPUs.

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Texas Instruments (TI) announced a low power (7mW standby) Cortex-A8-based system on chip (SoC) intended to supplant ARM9 processors in cost-sensitive devices. Priced as little as $5 in volume, the Sitara AM335x SoC is available in six models, most of which can be clocked to 720MHz, and half of which include 3D graphics acceleration, according to the chipmaker.

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BeagleBoard.org announced a new open-platform, hobbyist-focused development board — priced at just $89 and equipped with a Linux distro that boots in ten seconds. The BeagleBone offers an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 720MHz, 256MB of RAM, two 46-pin expansion connectors, a USB host port and multipurpose device port, on-chip Ethernet, and a microSD slot.

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Motorola's Atrix 2 is well worth its $100 on-contract price, at a time when some Android smartphones are selling for $300, says this eWEEK review. Dual-core, 1GHz performance, a 4.3-inch qHD display, and a responsive eight-megapixel camera offer good value, and an extra $300 brings you the nifty Lapdock 100 accessory.

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NYSE Technologies and several financial services firms have launched the OpenMAMA project to deliver an open-source messaging API for financial services and telecommunivations. OpenMAMA 1.1 for x86-based Linux platforms has been released, and additional messaging middleware for high-volume, high-speed transactions on Linux and other platforms will follow, according to the Linux Foundation.

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Red Hat joined Facebook's Open Compute Project, intended to open source the design and development of second-generation data centers for powering web and cloud services. Red Hat has certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Open Compute specs, and will test RHEL and other software on Open Compute servers — whose hardware specs have been contributed by AMD, Asus, Dell, and Intel.

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VeriFone Systems announced an Linux-based Point of Sale (POS) payment device that integrates a near field communication (NFC) contactless reader. The H5000 runs Linux on an ARM11 processor, offers a 3.5-inch color touchscreen, and supports multiple payment types– including legacy magnetic stripe, EMV smartcards, and contactless cards — with a single hybrid card slot, says the company.

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Google unveiled Google TV 2.0, which will roll out on Sony TVs and Logitech Revue boxes Oct. 30. Featuring Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”), the upgrade includes a revamped interface featuring a new customizable home screen and app shortcuts, provides hundreds of Android Market apps, and offers improved search for TV and YouTube, says the company.

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Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless began selling the Droid Razr Android smartphone on pre-order for $300, with shipments promised by Nov. 10. Meanwhile, a 3.5-inch Motorola Fire XT Android smartphone was announced in Italy; Motorola Mobility announced strong third-quarter earnings of $3.3 billion; and more evidence piled up regarding an imminent release of two Motorola Xoom 2 tablets.

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Partner announced a POS (point of sale) system that incorporates a 15-inch resistive touchscreen and an Intel Atom D525 processor. The SP-800 offers an aluminum body, 4GB of RAM and a 2.5-inch drive bay, a bevy of ports, plus optional peripherals that include an MSR (magnetic stripe reader), 2 x 20 customer display, smart card reader, and more.

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MontaVista Software has updated the MontaVista Linux “Bare Metal Engine” distribution with dynamically configurable data plane features. Bare Metal Engine (BME) offers a single development environment that can scale from high embedded Linux services down to the “near zero overhead” bare metal environments used in network packet processing, the company says.

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HP plans to use ARM-based processors in some of its data center servers, according to a pair of Oct. 26 reports. The CPUs in question will apparently be quad-core Cortex-A9 SoCs (systems on chip), expected to be introduced by Calxeda on Nov. 1.

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Xilinx launched an open source Linux platform and developer community for its Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which combines a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 28nm FPGA. The Zynq-7000 EPP Linux Solution offers GNU toolchain, runtime libraries, and debuggers, plus options including a Virtual Platform hardware emulator based on Cadence VSP.

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