imagine

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Public's first reaction to Google Glass summed up by SNL.

- Can you really make money online by playing competitive games?

- Busting online piracy group has led to increase -- in piracy.… Read more

Imagination, a key supplier of Apple chip technology, will buy MIPS, one of the oldest names in the silicon business.

U.K.-based Imagination Technologies, a major supplier of graphics chips, will buy the operating business of MIPS Technologies, a vendor of power-efficient chips used in routers, set-top boxes, and game machines.

With the deal, valued at $60 million, Imagination will get 82 "key" patents that are "directly relevant to the MIPS architecture" and comprehensive license rights to all of the remaining 498 MIPS' patents, for a total of 580 patents.

Imagination, known primarily as a … Read more

Got a battered old suitcase sitting around the house? Jeff Conley might be able to make music with it. The Boston indie-folk musician crafts working guitars and drums from vintage luggage. They're not something you'd find at the local Guitar Center, to be sure. But neither are the other offbeat entries to the Made of Imagination contest.

That project, co-sponsored by art site Booooooom, MTV, and Sony Xperia, tasks participants with creating their own instruments -- "beautiful, hopefully ingenious, and probably ridiculous" ones, that is. If they actually play music (or at least make noise of some kind), so much the better. … Read more

Intel will not join a chip-related alliance aimed at making it easier for software developers to take advantage of the compute power locked up in graphics silicon.

Advanced Micro Devices, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., and Texas Instruments announced the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation on Tuesday.

Here's how Lisa Su, an AMD senior vice president, described it in a phone interview with CNET.

"The point is, even if you put a really powerful CPU next to a really powerful GPU, if these [chips] don't interact and the applications don't know when it's better to … Read more

It was 6 a.m. when Eric Simons was jolted awake by the yelling.

After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old entrepreneur had finally passed out. A few hours of sleep would help with the day ahead.

But unlike most people working at AOL's Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He'd been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company's food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing … Read more

The guys at Chaotic Moon are on a roll. Literally.

First, they wowed CES with their Board of Awesomeness, a Microsoft Kinect-powered skateboard that the rider controls with various gestures. They parlayed that into a shopping cart that can follow you around a grocery store, scan your groceries, and possibly even check you out automatically. But all that was just January's work.

These days, the Austin-based Chaotic Moon Lab--the R&D arm of the larger studio--has taken the same skateboard I rode in Las Vegas in January and made a few X-Men-style modifications. Now it's powered by your mind.

The obviously named Board of Imagination integrates a neuroheadset from a company called Emotiv, with a Samsung tablet running Windows 8, which is in turn connected to the skateboard's motor. The headset translates thought into electrical circuitry that's routed through the tablet, into the motor, and powers the board. Simply put, you think--it goes. … Read more

Apple has just elevated the graphics chip to superstar status. Why focus on the graphics?

Apple announced today at the iPad event in San Francisco that the new iPad has a quad-core graphics processing unit (GPU). (So much for the central processing unit, or CPU, which typically garners all of the attention.)

So far, chip review site Anandtech offers the best educated guess about the graphics engine. Anandtech cites graphics chip technology from Imagination (PowerVR SGX543MP4) and CPU tech from ARM (Cortex A9).

"Our guess? Dual-core Cortex A9 [CPU] plus a PowerVR SGX543MP4 [GPU], an upgrade over the 543MP2 … Read more

Remember the Board of Awesomeness, the Kinect-controlled motorized skateboard from CES? Well, it just got more awesome.

The creator of this high-tech board, Chaotic Moon Labs, has come up with a new version called the Board of Imagination that works by reading your brain waves. That's right, a mind-controlled skateboard. You simply imagine where you'd like to go and how fast you want to get there, and the Board of Imagination will take care of the rest.

It's powered by the same 800-watt electric motor and Windows 8-enabled Samsung tablet as the Board of Awesomeness, but it … Read more

After taking second place in the 2011 Imagine Cup finals, Team Lifelens of the U.S. is one of four teams from around the world to win a $75,000 Imagine Cup grant, Microsoft announced today at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The Lifelens project is run by students at universities across the country who have been working since November 2010 on an app that can image malaria cells for fast diagnosis right there on the phone, sans Internet.

The premise is straightforward. Apply a blood sample to a slide with a dye that only malaria … Read more