Forget Intel versus AMD--that was a chip-maker battle of yesteryear, played out inside your desktop PC. Now the real CPU war is happening inside smartphones and servers, where Intel is playing a desperate game of catch-up to ARM and a few new pretenders, and there're billions of dollars at stake ... Server chip maker Smooth-Stone has just raised $48 million of venture cash to fund development of ARM-based server chips. The 12-man company is just two years old, but its bold plans to challenge
Tidal power will get its biggest test this summer ... The world's largest turbine--a 130-ton, metal shaft with twin rotating blades--is making its way on a barge from Invergordon, Scotland to the European Marine Energy Centre test site off the coast of Orkney. Installers will then battle 50-foot waves and an average temperature of 11 degrees to install the turbine and connect it to the electrical grid ... The scale and timing are significant ... For one thing, it's the biggest installation ever
In his 30-year career, Kevin Pollak has appeared in more than 60 films and created indelible roles in such modern classics as A Few Good Men and The Usual Suspects. His Internet awakening occurred in 2009, when he started his Streamy Award winning weekly talk show Kevin Pollak Chat Show backed by Jason Calacanis (Mahalo). He ventured into the world of Web video with his acclaimed original Web series Vamped Out (it was his directorial debut and he wrote and starred in it as well). Vamped Out
Microsoft may be late to the new world of smartphones begun by the Apple iPhone back in 2007, but the company has some interesting advantages over competitors like Apple and Google. Chief among those is that Microsoft is, lest we forget, a gaming powerhouse ... Far from the half-hearted (albeit underrated) efforts of Zune, Microsoft's Xbox experiment is innovative, critically acclaimed, and, most importantly, incredibly successful. Xbox Live, when it launched way back in 2002, was a ballsy move
In general, I'm politically right of center when it comes to fiscal issues. Obviously, after the catastrophic banking crisis of 2008, when we saw up close that the virtues of the invisible hand of the market come with a price: markets crash and revivals can be long in coming and very painful to wait for. The cost to our society has been very dear so far, and is looking to get worse before we see a meaningful upturn. Sometimes letting the market just do its thing can simply be too devastating to
Once the most popular vehicle for music promotion, MTV has just lost its access to the world's largest record label. Universal Music Group announced Friday that MTV.com will no longer be carrying its artists' music videos, a big blow for the music channel given that UMG represents 25% of the global market. Instead, the label will broadcast its videos via the online music-video site Vevo, the Hulu-for-music-videos platform that has been growing in popularity with help from partner YouTube. With
Hybrid design dispenses with theory and relies on nimble, multi-faceted teams of experts to tackle the complexities of a design challenge ... For the better part of the past decade, the design profession has been in a chaotic period. Confronting a unique mixed salad of conflicts--political, social, economic and environmental--designers have been struggling to define their core beliefs. The result has often been a defensive stance, rather than a positive look at the industry's capabilities and
Forbes Magazine has named the University Research Park & MGE Innovation Center at the University of Wisconsin—Madison as one of the top 10 technology innovation and development parks that’s changing the world ...
How do information and communication technologies influence innovation in Africa? Robert Fabricant's third report from World Economic Forum ... The second day of the World Economic Forum on Africa was packed, with one head of state after another marching through with their entourage. The big showdown was Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's appearance on a panel with Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's current prime minister, to discuss Zimbabwe's future. Everyone was eager to see if he would put on a
With what may be seen as curious timing, Google's just revealed that soon it'll be selling digital books through its own Google Editions store. The search giant is obviously keen to not let Apple and Amazon dominate an industry it hasn't also wrapped a tentacle around ... Google's been mulling this sort of move for over a year, and it ties in with its Google Books effort to try to reinvent publishing as a cloud-based marketplace. Speaking at the Book Industry Study Group (which explains the