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Hardware - Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Dell Shops Direct For Zing

Dells says it has bought Zing Systems, but has not yet said how much it paid. Zing Systems had raised $13M led by IDG Ventures Boston with Redpoint Ventures. It sell a portable entertainment players that connects, downloads, manages and exchanges entertainment content directly from the player through WiFi or other wireless protocols, without requiring a PC.

The first from Zing is the Sansaconnect from San Disk which won best of CES last year and will sell for $249. Its a wifi connected MP3 player.

Zing has a famous group of staffers led by Arthur van Hoff who was a Principal Engineer at TiVo, CTO at Marimba and co-inventor of Java at Sun Microsystems he created the JAVA.

Given a reasonable price, this seems like a good deal for Dell. The company has not done many M&A deals and is terrible at consumer gadgets and design. The Zing people have some of that DNA and now Dell has sent a message to the venture economy that you should think of them as potential buyers.

View - Zing site