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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

AMD unveils game streaming platform with Radeon Sky Graphics

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/27/amd-cloud-game-streaming-radeon-sky-graphics/

AMD's taken some time at GDC to unveil Radeon Sky Graphics cards, the backbone of its cloud platform that streams games à la OnLive to PCs, Smart TVs, tablets and mobile devices. According to the outfit, the silicon is built upon its Graphics Core Next architecture, and is powered by its RapidFire tech to provide a "highly efficient and responsive" experience. Other details regarding the initiative are sparse, but it sounds like developers and cloud gaming companies will have to enlist the hardware before gamers can reap its benefits.

Update: Joystiq's gotten word that the Radeon Sky series includes a trio of enterprise-grade graphics cards, with the top-of-the-line Sky 900 model toting 6GB of GDDR5 memory, 3,584 stream processors and sporting a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second.

[Image credit: mnsc, Flickr]

Filed under: Gaming, AMD

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Flipboard launches user-created magazines, partners with Etsy (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/26/flipboard-user-created-magazines-etsy/

Everybody loves Flipboard, right? If you're a fan like us, rejoice -- your favorite social magazine just got a whole lot better. Today Flipboard for iOS is receiving a major update that will let you create and curate your very own magazines. It also brings a boatload of other improvements to the table including a content partnership with Etsy. An update to the Android version will follow shortly. We were able to take the new version of Flipboard for a spin and get a demo from CTO Eric Feng. Hit the break to dive into the details and watch our hands-on video.

Gallery: Flipboard user-created magazines hands-on (iPad)

Gallery: Flipboard user-created magazines hands-on (iPhone)

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Mobile, Apple, Facebook

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Source: Flipboard (iTunes App Store)

These Six Regular People Just Got Invited To Use Google Glass (GOOG)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/six-regular-people-get-google-glass-2013-3

google glass

Earlier today, Google announced that it had picked the winners of its #ifihadglass campaign this week.

It will be sending out thousands of invites telling these lucky people that they can buy the Google Glass device for $1,500.

Google just sent us a list of some of the winners along with the things they will do with Glass once they own a pair. Here's the full email.

In February we asked people across Google+ and Twitter to tell us what they would do #ifihadglass, because we’re seeking a diverse group of Explorers to help us shape the future of Glass. Glass isn’t the sort of technology you can develop in a conference room -- we really need people to take it out into the world and see what they’d like to do with it across a wide range of hobbies, lifestyles, and environments.

And now, the suspense is almost over -- the results are in! Over the next few days we’ll be contacting several thousand people over Twitter & Google+ to invite them to join the Explorer program.

It’s been inspiring for the team to see such an enthusiastic response to Glass -- when you’re taking a moonshot this big, the encouragement and feedback along the way really helps a lot. And as we’d hoped, we’ve seen all sorts of ideas we never could have predicted -- here are a few fun ones:

Sarah Hill (Columbia, MO) would take Glass to a VA hospital and let veterans see their war memorials
Herschel Taghap (Seattle) would show people what it's like to be a line cook in a restaurant
Shannon Rooney would travel to Japan and help her Grandma re-experience her homeland without leaving her home in the U.S.
David Moriarty: improving doctor-patient interaction for clinical trials
Anthony Brown (San Francisco, CA) is a zookeeper who would show penguin feedings with Glass
Max Wood (Gray, GA) is a firefighter who would improve fire safety by using pre-fire planning maps

As always, you can keep in touch with Glass on its Google+ page. There are also a lot of Glass communities springing up, like this community for the Glass Explorer Edition or even the more grassroots Society of Glass Enthusiasts (with multiple regional chapters!).

SEE ALSO:&nbs! p;The 25 Most Creative People In Tech

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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

DICE+ launches $99 developer kit, pre-orders for $40 consumer model start this summer

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/26/dice-launches-99-dev-kit/

Game Technologies, the Poland-based company behind the little electronic die that is DICE+, has just announced a $99 developer edition that bundles a transparent-cased model along with its software development kit. As a reminder, the DICE+ is an inch-sized rubberized cube packed with Bluetooth, an accelerometer and a rechargeable battery, with the aim of bringing human interaction to electronic board games and beyond.

We had a look at a demo DICE+ here at the 2013 Game Developers Conference and it looks relatively unchanged from the one we saw at E3 last year. However, the microUSB port is now revealed via a sliding mechanism instead of a pull-out flap, which should result in a more balanced roll. Marketing director David Gatti also told us that the cube's internals have been revamped and simplified for more cost-effective production.

Filed under: Gaming

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Source: DICE+

HP introduces Unreal Engine 4-ready 'turnkey solution' workstations, collaborating with ALT Systems

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/26/hp-workstations-gdc-2013/

Hewlett-Packard may not be well-known by consumers for creating the machines that power the industries that power the world we live in, but the company's workstation business does just that. From film to oil drilling to medicine, HP's workstations have their hands in a lot of pies -- and today, that expands more directly to yet another major industry: video games. With its Z1, Z820 and Z620 workstations, HP is collaborating with Epic Games, Autodesk, and ALT Systems to create what they're calling a "turnkey solution" to game development workstation woes. The three aforementioned units can be customized to arrive with a variety of variables, including Unreal Engine 4, Autodesk, and NVIDIA GTX-line GPUs.

In so many words, ALT Systems will take the disparate pieces of hardware and software from HP, NVIDIA, Autodesk and Epic Games to provide an all-in-one buying solution for game dev studios. As ALT Systems president Jon Guess laughingly explained, it provides clients "one neck to wring" should things go wrong, rather than dev studios having to suss out hardware issues on their own. The first fruits of the partnership arrive this year in game developer-centric versions of the aforementioned three workstation models. For a full rundown of the various workstation configurations that'll arrive this year, ALT Systems has a site set up just for you.

Gallery: HP Workstations (GDC 2013)