imagine

Apple on Friday upped its stake in U.K. chip company, Imagination Technologies.

The company purchased 2.2 million shares at 1.43 British pounds ($2.36), for a total cost of 3.14 million pounds ($5.19 million). The purchase brings Apple's stake in the company to 9.5 percent, effectively tripling its ownership in Imagination, according to a report on MocoNews.

Apple uses Imagination's SGX GPU in the recently released iPhone 3G S, allowing it to have much better graphics using Apple's OpenGL ES 2.0, according to AppleInsider. Samsung is reportedly integrating Imagination's … Read more

If any organization needs to make sense of unstructured data it's the government--especially agencies like the CIA and other intelligence groups that comb through a myriad of disparate information on an hourly basis.

Last week, In-Q-Tel, the technology arm of the CIA, invested in Lucid Imagination, which provides support, maintenance, and add-on software for Apache Lucene and Solr. According to Lucid, the Lucene/Solr technology is downloaded more than 9,000 times per day, and more than 4,000 organizations are using the software for enterprise search.

I've wondered aloud quite a few times as to whether or not open-source projects (and specifically Apache projects) can turn into businesses or if they are simply the cogs and wheels that make other products function better (aka the Oracle syndrome).

I probably would have argued that enterprise search would fall into one of those no-man's lands where the technology is important but not quite a standalone business. There has been a huge amount of venture capital investment in search but few big winners in the category.

But the investment from In-Q-Tel adds some credence to the value of the function as well as the technology in the respect that the government is actually using the software and not just making an investment as we see in the venture capital world. Lucene and Solr are "sufficiently complex" open-source products that require a commercial entity to support ongoing efforts once they are adopted. This gives Lucid a legitimate shot at building a business. … Read more

Gamers and geeks, step aside. It's Mom's turn to jump on the gaming bandwagon. On Monday, Nintendo announced a new DS Lite bundle, clearly tailored to the interests of middle-aged women.

At the usual $149.99, the bundle includes a lime green console, a matching carrying case, and Personal Trainer: Cooking. Those who tend to buy into gender stereotypes can already preorder the bundle just in time for Mother's Day on Amazon. Don't forget to add on My Weight Loss Coach and Imagine: Babyz while you're at it.

In the past couple of years we'… Read more

If you were looking to create a start-up, and particularly an open-source start-up, you could hardly do better than to stumble upon a pre-existing open-source project with millions of downloads, widespread adoption by some of the biggest names in the industry, and a fast-growing enterprise need.

Take Lucene, for example, as CMS Watch's Kas Thomas noted on Monday. It is a hugely popular project with one big failing: no enterprise support. Writes Thomas:

Lucene has a lot going for it...(It's) one of the safest (open-source projects) around, in terms of governance and oversight (through the Apache Foundation), … Read more

Apple has taken a small stake in a British chip designer, revealing how the company plans to power the graphics in future iPhones and iPod Touches.

Imagination announced Thursday that Apple has acquired a 3.6 percent stake in the company, which will only cost Apple 3.2 million pounds, or about $5 million. Imagination designs chip cores for a variety of applications, but its most prominent designs are its PowerVR cores for graphics in mobile phones.

That is believed to be the source of Apple's interest in the company, according to AppleInsider, which has tracked Apple's interest … Read more

REDMOND, Wash.--When it comes down to it, Microsoft's Sphere really is kind of like taking the Surface computer notion and squishing it into a giant ball.

"The basic design is really quite simple," Microsoft researcher Andy Wilson told CNET News in an interview last week. Like the tabletop Surface computer introduced last year, Sphere uses a combination of infrared cameras for input and a projector for output to create a multitouch computer. "The camera and the projector share the same optical axis by virtue of mirrors."

Unlike the tabletop, though, Sphere is a ball-shaped … Read more

For Your Imagination, an online video production company based in New York, announced Friday that it has pulled in an additional $1 million in seed funding from existing investor ConsensusOne Ventures. ConsensusOne, which initially invested $1 million in January 2007, will then help the small company work on a Series A funding round.

For Your Imagination, or FYI as they like to be called, produces the Web shows DadLabs and Break a Leg as well as an interview series about Gotham start-ups called NextNYers and a live music series, Live at FYI.

But in the New York tech community, FYI … Read more

NEW YORK--When it comes to a strategy for galvanizing young voters in the hours before the "Super Tuesday" primaries, a coalition of big-media outlets chose to throw an online and offline dialogue with candidates. A group of tech-friendly 20-somethings in New York decided the best way to organize young supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama would be to invite them to a massive dance party.

Over the past week, invitations created through Facebook and Evite flew around the inboxes of many plugged-in young New Yorkers: an appropriate donation to Obama for America would give them access to an … Read more

If Fred Flintstone were somehow transported forward from the stone age, he probably wouldn't know what to make of our internal combustion engines, direct injection, variable-valve timing, fuel-cells, and plug-in electric hybrids. He might however, feel at home in the Imagine Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. Designed by the aptly-named HumanCar. The Imagine is described by its creators as a "human-electric hybrid," meaning that it can be powered either by its two onboard electric motors or by "variable human power input" (i.e. pedaling). The four-passenger Imagine has an exoskeletal safety cage chassis and comes with a … Read more