Fountain Valley’s Kingston Technology Co. launched a viral marketing series on YouTube.com starring some of its own.
Kingston, the biggest maker of memory products for computers and consumer electronics, created the series to show off the durability of its new line of solid state drives.
The drives contain flash chips and have no moving parts, making them tougher than traditional disk drives and faster at some tasks.
The YouTube video shorts, dubbed the “SSD Destructo Series,” were filmed around Kingston’s campus in Fountain Valley and at nearby Mile Square Park.
Each episode features a new and innovative way to attempt to destroy a solid state drive, known as SSDs for short.
Louis Kaneshiro and Aaron Jacoby from Kingston’s technology resources group did the shooting, narrating and crashing and burning in the videos.
Their attempts to mangle the drives included hitting them with a baseball bat, swinging at them with a golf club and toasting them with a blowtorch, among other fun (and destructive) activities.
Perhaps the conclusion of these experiments is an inexact science—but nine of the 11 attempts failed to completely destroy drives. The buggers still worked after all the abuse.
Conexant Hire
Newport Beach-based chipmaker Conexant Systems Inc. recently added to its executive ranks and appointed Phillip Pompa as senior vice president of product marketing. He’s set to work with Conexant’s sales and engineering groups to gain market share in the company’s product segments.
Pompa reports to co-President Christian Scherp, who was promoted to the post last year and shares it with Sailesh Chittipeddi. Both report to Chief Executive Scott Mercer.
Pompa, 53, held prior posts at Austin, Texas-based Rational Semiconductor Inc. and SigmaTel Inc., where he headed the portable media player group and eventually was promoted to chief executive.
In 2008, Conexant bought some of Freescale Semiconductor Inc.’s technologies for digital picture frames and a line of chips that go into printers that also fax, scan and copy.
Freescale got the technology from SigmaTel when it acquired the chipmaker for $110 million that same year.
In 1999, Pompa cofounded Austin’s Alchemy Semiconductor Inc., which was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices in 2002.
Quest Hires
Aliso Viejo-based Quest Software Inc., a maker of business software, beefed up its executive team with experts in what’s known as “systems management.”
The company named Carl Eberling as vice president and general manager of virtualization and monitoring and Steve Kahan as vice president of global marketing. Both report to Doug Garn, Quest’s chief executive, who took over from longtime chief Vinny Smith in 2008.
Prior to Quest, Eberling was the senior vice president of information technology for Kaiser Permanente.
Kahan has held vice president, product management and marketing posts at BindView Development Corp., now part of Mountain View-based Symantec Corp., and NetIQ, now part of Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. Most recently he headed marketing at Houston-based Planet Internet Services Inc., which manages data centers for companies.
Quest’s software improves on the business software made by others, including Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp.
Kofax Customers
Irvine-based Kofax PLC, a maker of scanning and database software that helps companies cut down on paper, has started off the year with a bang.
The company recently landed a couple of deals with new customers.
It snagged a half-million-dollar deal with insurer Progressive Corp. and also a deal valued at $750,000 with Australia’s largest state public health department. Kofax didn’t name the department.
For Progressive, Kofax’s software is set to help process the roughly 150,000 non-claim-based invoices it receives yearly.
For the Australian public health department, Kofax’s software cuts down on the need for manual data entry at some 220 public hospitals and more than 500 community health centers, the company said.
Kofax makes scanning software used by businesses to get rid of paper and speed up work.
The software collects paper documents, forms, invoices, e-mail and photos and organizes them into a searchable database of electronic files.
CES
Attendance at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show, which wrapped up earlier this month in Las Vegas, was better than expected. Early numbers show that attendance totaled 120,000 for the first two days, up from 98,495 for the first two days at the 2009 event, according Arlington, Va.-based Consumer Electronics Association, the trade group that puts on the yearly event. That’s a 20% increase.
