Nvidia’s Emerging Technologies Conference Showcases Visual Startups

There was a time when 50 different graphics chip companies flourished.
Now Nvidia is the king of the heap, the last standalone graphics chip maker in the market. But now the entrepreneurs have moved on to the applications of graphics. Visual computing has become such a magnet for innovation that more than 60 companies signed up for Nvidia’s Emerging Technologies Summit at its first annual Nvision 08 graphics show. Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment.
The startups include game physics companies such as Natural Motion, as well as scientific computing firms such as Elemental Technologies.

Who Is Watching Online TV Anyway?

A survey that IMMI conducted in 2007 and 2008 of 3,000 people in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Denver using mobile phones and monitoring software found that well-educated, affluent white women, ages 25 to 44, who were too busy to watch TV shows when they originally aired represent the largest group of online TV viewers. IMMI additionally found 50% of online viewers outright replaced traditional TV viewing with online watching, while 18.7% used online shows to fill in episodes they had viewed before and after on TV. The other 31.3%, meanwhile, watched an episode online that aired previously to episodes they had viewed on TV.