accelerator

People love prizes. And that's the core belief animating a start up called SherLabs.

Through a product called TapFame, the company offers game developers the ability to drop an instant sweepstakes or leaderboard contest into their apps, which presumably would drive interest and downloads.

It's a unique take on the issue of app discovery, which I've written a lot about -- and which continues to be an issue for the middle and lower tiers of developers. Developers want their apps to be noticed, but the market is so crowded, it's hard to stand out without spending … Read more

The newly-minted Chrome 18 beta expands the scope of hardware acceleration in the browser to older computers, but it's still not available to all. Meanwhile, Chrome 19 dev goes bleeding edge with JavaScript.

Released today, Google Chrome 18 beta for Windows, Mac, and Chrome Frame improves 2D Canvas support and introduces a software rasterizer. The new features are not yet available on Chrome 18 beta for Linux.

Basically, this means that games and animations based in the HTML5 Canvas tag ought to run faster and appear smoother. Google noted in its blog post announcing the changes that this was … Read more

As freeware system cleaners go, Magix PC Check & Tuning Free offers a good balance. Some such tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible and give you few options and not enough information about what they're doing to your system. Others overwhelm beginners with options and detailed scan reports, and they often make it too easy to delete the wrong things. The freeware version of PC Check is designed to be easy to use yet useful to people with widely varying skills, yet it also lets you perform cleaning and tune-up operations separately as well … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software took the hardware acceleration plunge today with the release of its first alpha version of Opera 12, code-named Wahoo.

Hardware acceleration offers a range of benefits to Web browsers--faster performance, lower battery consumption, and new features that would be otherwise impractical. So it's no surprise that browser makers--catalyzed in part by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9--have been rebuilding their engines to support the idea.

But Opera, while not the first with hardware acceleration, thinks it's got a competitive approach. It uses hardware for everything its Vega display engine handles--font display, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) effects, … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software is a browser company, but its chief technology officer believes the modern Web still could learn a thing or two from publishing technology that's hundreds of years old.

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and … Read more

OSLO--The next version of Opera Software's browser will get a major graphics-hardware boost, an approach that's been spreading to browsers keen to increase battery life, improve performance, and enable new features.

"Everything is accelerated," said Jan Standal, Opera's vice president of desktop products, in an interview today at the company's Up North Web press event here about Opera 12. "The whole user interface."

Specifically, that means hardware acceleration for Cascading Style Sheets transitions and animations, for Canvas 2D drawing, and for text, he said. And Opera 12 gets support for the WebGL … Read more

Intel has released a graphics driver update for its Sandy Bridge processors that boosts performance up to 37 percent for games on Windows 7 and Vista.

"This major graphics driver update for 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Intel HD graphics improves game performance by up to 37% on ULV platforms," Intel said in a statement.

ULV--or Ultra Low Voltage--processors are Intel's most power efficient and are typically used in thin and/or compact laptops such as Hewlett-Packard's updated Pavilion dm1 and Samsung Series 9.

ULV-based systems will see the biggest performance improvement, Intel said. "It is where some of the biggest gains are seen on the driver," Intel spokesman Dave Salvator said. But the driver update applies to all systems with Sandy Bridge processors sporting HD graphics. … Read more

Monotype Imaging is bringing its font-rendering software a step into the future with hardware acceleration features it expects will help improve readability, add fancy features such as 3D, and offload work from mobile devices' main processors.

The company, while perhaps best known for creating and licensing typefaces, also has a business selling software that lets printers print the text and devices such as e-book readers display it on screens. It's this last category where the company offers its iType product, and the new version 5.0 announced today adds the new hardware acceleration features.

iType 5.0 draws upon … Read more

As a teenager, Curtiss Pope worked as a clerk at Food 4 Less in east San Jose, Calif., gathering up shopping carts and helping customers find grocery items. He got the job to help his single mother of nine pay the bills, but it also seeded the idea for a start-up he's launched while helping to buck a well-documented Silicon Valley trend.

Pope, an 29-year-old African-American, goes up against some tough stats as he seeks funding for his company, AisleFinder, which aims to help people find items in grocery stores.

According to a recent CB Insights report, which tracked … Read more