Rick's Short Circuit: Intel and Wind River, Mars, and venture capital

Breaking news from the Wall Street Journal: “Intel agreed to acquire Wind River Systems, a maker of software for embedded devices, for $11.50 a share in cash, or about $884 million.”

Why go to Mars, and why now? “It’s been 40 years since Apollo astronauts took humanity’s first baby step into the cosmos. Now it’s time to take the next one,” says IEEE Spectrum by way of introducing a six-part special report on reaching the red planet. The report touches on technology as well as business aspects (“Why now is the right time to build your space portfolio”). Interesting speculation: China could land people on Mars before the US does.

Adobe Systems wants to get into the smart-phone market, says the Wall Street Journal, adding, “But the software company’s year-plus effort to expand beyond the PC has been hampered by shifting strategies within Adobe and an inability to offer a version of Flash that runs on the iPhone and BlackBerry devices.”

In the Huffington Post, Penny Herscher looks at “The Death of Venture Capital as We Know It.” She says, “A massive shakeout of venture capital firms has been predicted for years but it is finally going to happen over the next year because of a perfect storm of timing.” She wonders whether one in ten VC firms will be left standing. For more, see the Mercury News’http://www.mercurynews.com/vcsurvey] venture-capital survey.

From Wednesday’s Electronic News Today, Intel makes Core i7 both faster and less costly, TSMC bases extended European research efforts at IMEC, and What happens when analog design meets DfM?