Last month, Skydeck released the beta version of its mobile phone app. By the end of the year, the 1-year-old company plans to formally launch the application and itself, according to CEO Jason Devitt.
Skydeck's software allows users to keep track of and search through their cell phone calls much as they would their e-mail.
Devitt declined Tuesday to say how many people have signed up to use the software. But at a dinner of venture capitalists and startup execs, he said the take up has been good and is meeting his expectations.
The early adopters are professionals, such as sales people, lawyers and real estate agents, he said. The company expects to make money by offering business applications, including one to work with Salesforce.com software.
Tiny Pictures likes to say your mobile phone is your social network.
That's because its Radar application for mobile phones and computers lets groups of friends share photos and videos, and then comment back and forth.
Already the service has 1.2 million users, John Poisson, founder and CEO, said Tuesday, up from 750,000 in February.
Poisson said new features are coming to Radar by the end of September that will permit users to subscribe to channels and receive content, such as trailers and footage from new movies.
The company also may seek some more venture money, though no specific plans are in place, he said. Tiny Pictures raised $7.2 million from Draper Fisher Jervetson and Mohr Davidow Ventures in February.
"We can probably get to break even very shortly," quipped Bart Decrem, CEO of the startup Tapulous, over dinner Tuesday.
Tapulous is the maker of the popular (if somewhat frivolous) musical Tap Tap Revenge (pictured) application for the iPhone and iPod Touch as well as Twinkle, an application that connects people with other people nearby.
In a week or so, Tapulous plans to announce that it is selling advertising and a soon-to-arrive premium edition of its applications.
"It's so easy [to make money]. It will be crazy to leave money on the table", added Decrem."
Already Tap Tap Revenge is registered on 1.25 million devices, Decrem said at a dinner of venture capitalists and startups in San Francisco. The opportunities for the Palo Alto, CA, company founded this year are there, he said.
Time to have a break from Nvision and head to much cooler San Francisco for a Mobile Web Roundtable dinner moderated by Mitch Lasky of VC firm Benchmark Capital at Orson restaurant.
Ambitious targets for lowering the cost of solar cells are achievable as today's high cost of silicon comes down, SunPower co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Richard Swanson (pictured) said Tuesday.
Today, solar cells remain relatively high priced – at $4 a watt of electricity. As a result, solar power can cost 2 to 5 times greater than power generated from oil.
By 2013, the cost of making a solar cell could fall to $1 to $1.20 a watt, Swanson said at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.
He said it is difficult to say what retail prices would result. But estimates show prices of about $1.44 are possible.
"At that price, we see unlimited growth potential for our industry," he added.
Swanson said he sees the shortage of silicon needed to make photovoltaic cells easing soon. With greater availability, projections show photovoltaic cells could generate more electricity in the country in 2040 than natural gas, he said during a keynote address.
He added that it takes about two years for a solar cell to generate more energy than the energy required to produce it.
Just got out of the interview with Dan Vivoli (pictured), the man in charge of NVIDIA's GPU businesses and also Sr VP Marketing.
Vivoli first confirmed that inspite rumours, Nividia "has no desire to exit the chipset business (from the high-performance and integrated graphics in the desktop to the low-power motherboard GPU in laptops)".
Nvidia's GPU Chief also denied any intentions to build a CPU, X86 or not pointing to the low price and good performance of current CPUs from AMD or Intel.
"We're focused on GPUs. You can get a perfectly fine CPUs for not much money".
Intel is repeating its Nehalem strategy to anyone who will listen in briefings that generally mimic one another. The company appeared in the past month at IDF, Siggraph, etc. Little new was discussed from one appearance to the next.
But something struck me in a discussion of Nehalem at the Hot Chips conference on Tuesday. In addition to creating a processor with more cores – a maximum of eight – Intel focused a great deal of energy on improving the performance of each core.
Sound reminiscent of the processor speed wars of earlier this decade, when staying in front of Advanced Micro Devices was the name of the game?
In a coherent talk at the technical conference held at Stanford University, Senior Principal Engineer Ronak Singhal spelled out the improvements to the core that should offer a boost in performance when a four-core version of the chip first shows up in the fourth quarter.
These improvements include trying to better predict the chip's expected workload; increasing parallelism, or the ability to jobs simultaneously; and enabling the processor to better handle new and legacy software.
They were a major piece of the "philosophy" driving development, Singhal said.
First thing today, I'll be covering the Emerging Companies Summit hosted at the Nvision conference with presentations from over 60 companies leveraging the power of GPUs for both visual and high-performance computing applications (and not only games!).
The Summit also includes 2 interesting panel discussions on "GPU vs CPU" and "Raising Money" and a fireside chat with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsung Huang.
After lunch, I will sit down with Nvidia Sr VP of Marketing, Dan Vivoli, for a short conversation on issues like the chipset business, AMD's lead, Nvidia's x86 intentions and more if time permits.
Check back for more coverage on the Emerging Summit.
Although I enjoyed the appearance of Battlestar Galactica actress Tricia Helfer at the end of Nvidia's keynote, I thought it was not really necessary as it purpose was to show how actors deal with virtual characters.
Which is no so much more challenging than when actors in the last century actors had to deal with their "virtual" doubles without the help of technology.
But during her appearance, Helfer did admit of being a control freak and that virtual characters might help cope with that!
Helfer's tall height gave also Jen-Hsun Huang a chance to crank a joke on Tom Cruise. And that of course is invaluable!
"So for the rest of the interview I will be pulling a Tom Cruise [as Huang tried to reach Helfer's height]".
But my advice to Huang though would have been to cut the keynote short at that time (it was running over 2 hours!) and instead send all the fans to Helfer's table where she signed autographs on attendees t-shirts and keep the other open to invite Tom Cruise next year :)
According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured), it was him who insisted to tell the world about the quality issues in some of the Nvidia chips. Not his customers -the PC makers- who were more concerned that the press will start asking questions about the failures and pushing for an industry-wide recall.
"The first person in the world that talked about the chip issue was me, right? I issued a press release with a $200 million reserve and in fact our customers were saying 'Jen-Hseng why are you doing that?'", the Nvidia CEO said in a press briefing.
For Huang, Nvidia's handling of the chip failures and subsequently the recall was impeccably logic but messy.
"We know that there are some failures associated to our chips. We know its specifically related to a combination of the chip and the specific design of the notebook [because of more challenging thermal environment]... Sometimes it will fail. Most of the notebooks are fine... It's just that certain notebooks have this problem", Huang added.
"VIA has a really terrific CPU, the Nano... You put Nano with GeForce together and you put a box around it, you'd think it's a high-performance computer. Everything works: Blu-Ray works, DX10 works, all game works. It's small, it's low cost, consumes very little power. It's unbelievable", Huang said.
At the Nvision trade show on Monday, Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang added his company
will optimize all its software to run with the chip, just as it works with chips from Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
The optimization is a huge investment for the company, he said at the San Jose event. But
the chip is a terrific CPU, Huang said.
The Nano is designed for desktop and notebook computers. But analysts said it also might be
appropriate for consumer products, a market Intel has in its crosshairs.
According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the main reason for creating Nvision was that there was no industry event for the visual computing eco-system. When I asked him about Siggraph, here's what he answered:
"People who go to Siggraph are researchers and we'll still do that. But the end-markets don't go to Siggraph... Some of the hard core programmers will go but there, but there are a lot of visual artists that don't go. Obviously there are a lot of gamers who don't go. A lot of the actual car designers that don't go. But the people who create the tools for the car designers go. We think we need to create an industry event for visual computing that goes far beyond than just internal core.
Siggraph is fabulous... but we need something bigger than that. We also wanted to define the industy. Like Cisco defines the networking industry. So a lot of the companies can say 'Hey, we're in the visual computing business'. And people would understand what that meant", Huang said.
I think that the Siggraph 2008 organisers and the 28K+ artists, research scientists, gaming experts, developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 87 countries, plus, more than 230 international exhibiting companies would beg to differ with Huang's view. So if you're one of them, please rush to the comments section below!
The graphics industry is on the verge of a powerful transformation that will bring
three-dimensional video displays and screens to computers and other computing devices.
"We are on the cusp of a display revolution," Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said
Monday at a San Jose industry trade show. The industry used to be all about color, he said.
"Now it's about more dimensionalization."
Speaking at the Nvision 2008 show, Huang said the revolution will be enabled by increasingly
powerful graphics chips that now put more than 100 processors on a single slice of silicon
and harness a teraflop of computing capacity. A teraflop is a measure of computing speed
equal to a trillion calculations a second.
"We transformed industry after industry," he said, referring to graphics chip
manufacturers. Automobiles are now designed digitally, movie makers use use digital
effects, and video games get more realistic each year.
Nvidia's chief took another swipe at Intel's planned Larrabee graphics chip on Monday, at the Nvision 2008 conference, suggesting the chip would trail Nvidia's best effort several years from now when it is expected in the market.
In past comments, graphics chip maker Nvidia described Larrabee - a high-end graphics chip expected in 2009 or 2010 with ten or more cores - as a GPU from 2006, falling short its promised performance.
On Monday, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang added to the criticism, saying no one yet knows what Larrabee's performance will be. "By the time Larrabee ships, Nvidia's technology will be so much more advanced," he said at the Nvision conference in San Jose. "Maybe Intel is talking about our past" when it trumpets the product.
He said Intel's claim that Larrabee will work smoothly with Windows-based programs because it is built on the x86 technology in today's computer chips is a "smoke screen." The only benefit is that it will have some existing software tools to draw on, he said.
Huang added that the increasing competition in the graphics chip market should be good for the business.
The new competition will draw attention to the need for graphics chips. "Competition, in fact, frames an industry," he said.
