Crunch

What’s a Game Developers Conference without some sweet new tools for developers to sink their teeth into? Khronos Group, the association behind OpenGL, has today announced the fourth generation of its cross-platform API spec, which takes up the mantle of offering a viable competitor to Microsoft’s DirectX 11. The latest release includes two new shader stages for offloading geometry tessellation from the CPU to the GPU, as well as tighter integration with OpenCL to allow Read More...

Capacity crunch, isn’t that a breakfast cereal? RIM’s Mike Lazaridis seems to have been a real grouch at MWC this week as apparently he hasn’t stopped talking about the doom and gloom awaiting mobile carriers over the next few years. Focusing on the bandwidth-hungry North American market, Lazaridis has criticized the apparently irresponsible network saturation growth, which he sees as being primarily driven by app-centric operating systems. If you’re wondering who he could possibly be Read More...

The Federal Communications Commission has canceled various meetings this week thanks to the heavy snow. But while harsh winter weather may stop traffic to the agency, it won’t cool off the buzz over hot topics like how the Commission is going to get the bandwidth-hungry wireless industry more spectrum licenses. Here’s the big headline at Business Week on the problem: FCC May Pay Broadcasters Read More...

There’s a lot to love about Wolfram Alpha’s iPhone app. But as regular readers will know, one of them is not the price. At $50, it’s just way too hard to justify the purchase when you can get all of the information online, for free. So just in time for the holidays, Wolfram Alpha is doing something about it: Slashing prices!

The app will be on sale for a much-more reasonable $19.99 starting tomorrow and running Read More...

Monetizing remnant advertising is not an easy task, but 5to1, a TC50 finalist, seems to be off to a good start, and they’ve added on another $1.81 million to their previous round of $4.5 million from existing investors Fuse Capital and Prism VentureWorks. The platform employed by 5to1 gives content owners the ability to place ads in relevant places at the right time, and to the correct audience. The company is run by former Fox Read More...

Cloud Engines, the company behind Pogoplug, the device that turns any USB hard drive into a network accessible drive, raised $3 million in funding according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the investment with the company with existing investor Foundry Group and others participating in the round.

According to the startup’s CEO, Daniel Putterman, Cloud Engines will use the money to kick start their international plans for retail, specifically in Europe. The company will Read More...

RadiusIM, the New York-based startup behind the eponymous location-aware instant messaging service, is actively trying to find a buyer, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. We first caught wind of the company back in August 2006, and dubbed it ‘another proximity-based IM service’.

The company is not too shy about e-mailing all the usual suspects to see if they’d be interested in acquiring them outright, so either they wanted this to become public knowledge and we’re helping Read More...

It was bad enough when Bing put ads on Google and in AdSense during its launch to get people to come check it out. (In fact, it’s still the top sponsored results when you search for “bing” on Google, even though Bing.com is also the top organic result at this point also). But now the shoe is on the other foot and Google is buying search ads on Bing for its fledgling Read More...

Update: The challenge has been won by the M.I.T team (see final map below).

This morning DARPA launched ten red balloons across the U.S. in a Network Challenge to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet. The first team to correctly locate all ten balloons will win a $40,000 prize.

The idea is to see how people can self-organize on the Internet and how information disseminates through social and viral networks. There Read More...

Nearly five months after launching a free, ad-supported application for iPhone and iPod Touch, eBuddy is today introducing a paid version of the program, which enables users to communicate with contacts across various instant messaging clients.

Priced at $4.99 (iTunes link), which in my opinion is fairly expensive, the app lets you chat with friends on Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger alike.

Unlike its gratis counterpart, eBuddy Pro for Read More...