GigaOM

Startups selling virtual goods and offering virtual experiences are raking in the venture capital these days. Perhaps it’s the fact that virtual gifting hit the mainstream in 2007 or because people are worried about the impact of business travel on the environment, but the virtual world is beginning to get its share of real dollars.
In [...]

Confession: Back when AMD was pitching its Opteron chipset, I convinced my husband to buy shares in the company on the belief that its plans to build a backwards compatible 64-bit processor was so obviously better than Intel’s efforts with Itanium that the market would eventually see it. The market did, and AMD shares went [...]

Elemental Technologies, a startup focused on faster transcoding, has raised $7.1 million from General Catalyst Partners and Voyager Capital. The company’s software uses the graphics processor rather than the CPU inside a computer to handle the work of ripping a DVD or video file to another format. It’s one of several startups using Nvidia’s [...]

Summer is generally a slower time for news and this summer is no exception. But the kind folks at Microsoft, Yahoo and Carl Icahn’s investment firm are charitably offering up a form of entertainment with their ongoing Let’s Make a Deal saga.
The latest installment is a letter to shareholders from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang that [...]

As semiconductor firms get around the limitations of making individual processors faster by putting more cores onto a single chip, the mindset of today’s software developers and engineers mindset needs to adapt. Here are five startups that have the potential to stretch multicore processors to their very limit.

Yesterday afternoon, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini seemed a little hazy on the future home for Intel’s Atom processor during the chip maker’s quarterly earnings call — a fact I don’t find all that surprising since the netbooks or mobile Internet devices the chips are designed for exist only in a marketer’s imagination and failed product [...]