The Bing - "no-pain-no-gain"

We have introduced the Cherrypal netbook - the Bing - at the Sundance Film Festival today, Friday 1/16/2009.

First though, today is my Dad's birthday - he would have turned 86 today - Dad, I miss you and will always love you.

The Bing is based on the Intel Atom N270 processor, 10.2" screen, full keyboard and web browsing capabilities, local applications as well as cloud access, brilliant multi-media experience. We are also looking into some other interesting platforms as we speak.

The Bing will also be part of the Green Maraschino initiative.

We will pre-sell the Bing for a very limited time in a combo deal - pay $399 for 2 systems - get the C114 now and the Bing netbook in March. Purpose of this campaign is to create an early adopter community with customers and Brand Angels. Speaking of, all active Brand Angels will get a Bing for free.

We will also launch the "no-pain-no-gain" program. All customers who had to wait for the C114 for more than a week for either delivery or refund will get a free Bing in March as well.

The Bing is the thing, isn't it?

Green Maraschino

We have silently launched our "Green Maraschino" (GM) open source initiative. Objective of GM is to provide an open platform for ultra-low power computing, from silicon to super-cloud architecture. Users as well as developers are invited to participate. Just talking about global warming is not good enough anymore. Talk the talk and walk the walk. GM's objective is to provide a platform that reduces energy consumption of computers, networks and data centers dramatically, at a price point that is far below we are used to today.

Green Maraschino is a journey, not a destination, driven by the community, for the community. As we move forward priorities might change. However, providing a platform for ultra-low energy consuming systems for the least possible price are pillars of the GM value system and will not change.

Please send an email to greenmaraschino@cherrypal.com and become a part of the movement.

GM is divided in 10 sub-projects:

M0 Embedded-Linux
M1 Multi-core/Multi-processor load balancing and utilization optimization
M2 Device drivers
M3 Browser and plug-ins
M4 Local applications
M5 Connectivity to Internet and Cloud
M6 Cloud infrastructure
M7 Cloud applications and services
M8 Grid and Cluster engine
M9 Super-Cloud infrastructure (cloud-to-cloud)

CherryPals are shipping, and shipping, and shipping ...

We are shipping Cherrypals since over a month now. Some media outlets still broadcast "scam" warnings and other misleading information about us. CherryPal is still considered "vaporware" by those who are ignoring facts, and probably not interested in inexpensive energy-conserving technologies at all.

We are not alone in this uphill battle. I am in touch with many greentech/cleantech companies, many of them complain about unfair media coverage, I wonder why.

Let's focus on the more important things though.

We are preparing the launch of a very broad open source initiative, called Green Maraschino. Objective of Green Maraschino is to involve users as well as open source developers all over the world to make inexpensive low-energy consuming technologies even more user friendly and powerful. Coming soon ...

A big thank you to our Brand Angels. They have been tough but fair with us. Their feedback is "priceless". It's fun and very rewarding working with them. Again, thank you very much.

One more thing. Supposedly the car industry bailout bill passed today - $14 Billion - WOW. Imagine, how many jobs could be created in the greentech industry for this amount of money, how much energy could be saved, how much pollution could be reduced if Washington would provide our industry with $14 Billion? By the way, I am talking to a little car company in the DC area. They have developed an electric city car, just $16,000 retail ... they can't get funding. You figure.

Drill baby drill is easy - preserving our planet for future generations is not that easy and requires teamwork, let's do it together. If you would like to get involved in Green Maraschino send me a mail (green@cherrypal.com)

Technology shouldn't strangle us

After many weeks of unpleasant experiences we finally decided to pull the plug on PayPal payment services. We will refund all PayPal processed orders received in the last 2 weeks, and ask customers to re-submit their payments using Google Checkout or Moneybookers.com

http://www.cherrypal.com/SHOP.html

We are in good company, unfortunately. High volume and being a new player in the PC market apparently is something "state-of-the-art" technology can't deal with. This was very disenchanting for the victims of hurricane Katrina, and now very unpleasant for CherryPal and their customers. Isn't technology supposed to make life easier?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68788

Speaking of technology, green technologies in particular, I got invited to Blogradio's Innovator Radio broadcast today. If you have a minute please listen in.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Innovators-Radio/2008/10/24/Conversation-with-Mike-Michalowicz-and-CherryPal-cloud-computer

Last but no least, I attended a CEO gathering at Tesla in Mountain View yesterday. Many "green technologies" CEOs complained about the lost appetite of venture capitalists since the Wall Street meltdown started several weeks ago. Whether we are in a recession or not, we all need to invest in our future, create jobs in growth industries and, of course, safe our planet. If you are interested in our "Invest Green" program or would like to invest in another green technologies companies please check this our:

http://www.cherrypal.com/investgreen.html

The C114 is coming Election Day, November 4th

Finally, CherryPals are going to be shipped November 4th, 2008.

We have made some last minute changes, slimmer casing, more local memory (Solid State Drive 8GB), and all for the same low price of US$ 249. The lower memory C100 (4GB SSD) won't be offered anymore.

The very recent economic global crisis painfully reminded us that US politics have global reach, they impact every corner of our world. We also know by now that reducing the pace we pollute our environment takes a gobal effort, why not start with it now?

On Election Day 11/4 CherryPals will get shipped for the first time, we will know who is going to move into the White House and last but not least we will learn very soon thereafter whether or not the United States government will finally take environmental issues more seriously.

Ironically, embracing the green movement and creating new jobs are directly related to each other. Industry analysts have predicted that we here in the United States could create as much as 5 Million new jobs over the next 10 years if our government would provide more aggressive incentives and support to jump-start green technologies companies. Needless to say the global impact in terms of job creation as well as benefits for the environments would be mindboggling!!!

Well, in that regards I do have a questions? Is Obama or McCain more serious about boosting green technologies? Let me know what your thoughts are?

CherryPal's new web site

Since our proxy company went out of business and the web design company demonstrated some strange business ethics we decided to maintain the web site ourselves - our new site might be less fancy but far less costly and easier to maintain and update. Form follows function.

The beginning ,,,

Last year on a sunny Saturday morning my computer froze ... again. Ten minutes later one of my kids come to me with yet another computer problem - this time it was a virus. I was on a tight deadline and needed to get some critical emails out. I decided at that moment that there had to be a better way.

It just so happened that I was already working on a project to make cloud computing mainstream, and realized that the ideal solution would be to combine a simple though low-energy consuming device with seamless integration of a consumer facing cloud computing user experience.

This combination made it possible to develop a computer that did the same thing as a traditional PC, but much cheaper, much "greener" and last but not least much more hassle-free.