Phoenix Technologies COO David Frodsham has joined the board of Insignia Solutions, and we feel a Register stock tip coming on. Insignia is best known for its SoftWindows product, which is by no means the money-spinner it once was, but Frodsham's arrival indicates a positive future for Insignia's next generation products, and a strengthening alliance with (perhaps even purchase by) Phoenix. At the moment the companies have quite a bit in common, and Insignia's software technology must be of considerable interest to Phoenix. It's recently started shipping Jeode, a Java implementation designed for embedded systems. It's based on Insignia's Embedded Virtual Machine (EVM), a runtime engine which has a small memory footprint, and which Insignia claims, using a proprietary technique known as adaptive dynamic compilation, can execute Java applications around six times faster than interpretive VMs. Phoenix meanwhile has got a lot more interested in appliances and the like recently, and struck a licensing deal with Boca Research for the latter's Internet appliance development earlier this week. Boca's designs are being used for AOL TV set-top boxes. So Insignia could bring quite a bit to the Phoenix party. Jeode supports numerous operating systems, including CE, NT, VxWorks and Linux, and a range of hardware, including MIPS, ARM, x86, PowerPC and Hitachi SH. So if, say, you were a major bios vendor looking to strengthen your pitch in the coming Internet appliance market, and you therefore needed to broaden your wares out beyond Wintel, Insignia could come in very handy. Mr Frodsham, incidentally, has something of a history. He was part of the team that defected from Psion back in the 80s in order to develop pocket x86 PC designs. The nicest of these was built by Sharp, but it wasn't successful, and The Register broke three before giving up (the case wasn't tough enough). He subsequently got himself taken over by Phoenix, and seems to have done rather well for himself. Hiya, David. ®