Computing

Leap Motion will open its developer portal this week, allowing anyone interested in designing tools for its 3D gesture control system to get an advanced look at how to work with the technology.

The startup is also opening up its beta to more than 10,000 early-access developers who have been waiting for the opportunity to build applications for the system.

On July 22, Leap Motion will ship its first product, a thumb-drive-sized device that plugs into a USB port on either Macs or Windows PCs, giving users a way to control their computer by making hand gestures. The technology … Read more

Leap Motion won't ship its cutting-edge 3D gesture-control technology until July 22, but the company and one of its main investors, think that its ecosystem offers so much promise that they're starting a $25 million fund to support developers for the platform.

Highland Capital Partners, which led Leap Motion's Series A round last year, is launching the so-called Leap Fund in order to help boost entrepreneurs and companies developing for the Leap, a new technology that lets users control their computers with nothing more than movement of their hands. The $80 technology is accurate to a hundredth … Read more

Wireless charging isn't a very useful idea if every device needs a separate charging station, which is why it's notable that Intel has joined a newer consortium called the Alliance for Wireless Power

The chipmaker got itself a seat on A4WP's board of directors, joining Samsung, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Integrated Device Technology, and Gill Industries, the consortium said Wednesday in a statement (PDF).

Intel likes A4WP because the technology extends not just to mobile phones but also laptops. Here's how Navin Shenoy, vice president of Intel's PC client group and general manager of its mobile client … Read more

MakerBot, one of the most well-known desktop 3D printing companies, has been acquired by Stratasys, the companies said Wednesday.

In a release, the companies said it was a stock-for-stock transaction worth about $403 million, based on Stratasys' stock price as of Wednesday. Stratasys will exchange 4.76 million shares of its stock for 100 percent of MakerBot's outstanding stock. By agreeing to be acquired, MakerBot becomes part of one of the leading industrial 3D printing companies. The deal also allows the publicly-traded Stratasys to compete more directly at the consumer level with 3D Systems and that company's Cube … Read more

Nvidia, trying to move its graphics chips into the supercomputing market, has found a niche helping engineers build brain-like systems called neural networks.

For years, the company has advocated the idea of offloading processing tasks from general-purposes central processing units (CPUs) to its own graphics processing units (GPUs). That approach has won over some researchers and companies involved with neural networks, which reproduce some of the electrical behavior of real-world nerve cells inside a computer.

Neurons in the real world work by sending electrical signals around the brain, but much of the actual functioning of the brain remains a mystery. … Read more

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

Imagine a souped-up Google Glass built into a motorcycle or bicycle helmet that superimposes information and directions in front of your eyes as you speed down a highway or move through a congested downtown area.

LiveMap, a startup based in Moscow, is developing a motorcycle helmet with a head-mounted display, built-in navigation, and Siri-like voice recognition. The helmet will have a translucent, color display that's projected on the visor in the center of the field of vision, and a custom user interface, English language-only at launch, based on Android.

Unlike visor-mounted heads-up displays, which have been available for a … Read more

In another step toward 3D printers finding a place in everyday businesses and homes, online retailer Amazon has dedicated a section of its site to selling 3D printers.

The site sells 3D printers from well-known manufacturers such as Makerbot, as well as others such as Cubify and fabbster, alongside 3D printer filament and spare parts.

Prices for machines range from the $1,099 JET/Open Source 3D printer Replicator G to $2,479 MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D printer.

The section marks another move toward mainstream adoption for 3D printing and follows office-supply chain Staples' decision to begin stocking 3D printers.… Read more

Everybody knows we all need faster Web sites: speedy load times and responsive pages means that people stay on a site longer, look at more photos, see more ads, and buy more stuff. Much of the work to speed things up has happened in the browser, but a startup called Instart Logic hopes to profit by changing what happens on the server, too.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company came out of stealth mode Thursday, describing how its technology works and touting customers including Game of Thrones Ascent, GameStop, Bonfaire, and Kitchit.

"We generally drop people's load time … Read more