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Nvidia announces its Studio line of laptops to compete against the MacBook Pro

27 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

One of Nvidia's new Studio laptops, meant to compete against the MacBook Pro

During its press conference in Taipei a day before Computex starts, Nvidia announced a new line of laptops that will run its RTX graphics processing units, as well as a new software platform called Studio, with SDKs and drivers to make graphics rendering and other tasks faster. The units are targeted to creative professionals, like video editors, photographers and graphic designers, and meant to compete with the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

One of Nvidia’s new Studio laptops, meant to compete against the MacBook Pro

The series will include seventeen laptops made by Nvidia’s manufacturing partners (including Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Razer). The laptops will begin retailing in June, with prices starting at $1,599.

The 17 laptops will be equipped with Quadro RTX 5000, 4000 or 3000 GPUs or GeForce RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060 GPUs. Nvidia claims they can perform up to seven times faster than the MacBook Pro. Studio laptops with Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs will have 16GB of graphics memory, and some of the devices will also have 4K displays and Nvidia’s Max-Q tech for building thin and lightweight laptops.

The Nvidia Studio suite includes the CUDA-X AI platform for automating tasks like color matching videos or tagging …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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To realize its VR dreams, Facebook needs to kill what Oculus has built

25 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Lucas Matney

Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into his virtual reality dream, a new platform that Facebook owns.

Facebook bought Oculus and has spent the last five years killing what it was and reinventing it as a Facebook-scale company. It has dumped most of the co-founders, brought in Zuck loyalists to take over the most important decisions and shifted towards accessibility over appeasing the company’s early supporters.

Facebook’s latest release is the realization of all that.

The company’s Quest product, which they released on Tuesday, offers a streamlined version of high-end virtual reality while leveraging time-honed software to make the process of getting up-and-running immeasurably easier. It’s probably the best VR product that’s been built yet, and one that has the mainstream firmly in view.

Facebook needs to lean in on the new device and move away from what got it there.

With past VR releases, there’s always been a key technology to blame or a key feature that was missing, but if the Oculus Quest fails, Facebook may just have to consider that the whole product category doesn’t hold the mass appeal it hoped for. Of more immediate concern should be why they’re maintaining such …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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China’s largest chipmaker is delisting from the Nasdaq

25 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

The U.S-China trade war is increasingly influencing tech. Huawei has suffered a turbulent past week with key suppliers pausing work with the company, and now China’s largest chipmaker is planning to delist from the New York Stock Exchange.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) announced in a filing published Friday that it plans to delist next month ending a 15-year spell as a public company in the U.S. The firm will file a Form 25 to delist on June 3, which is likely to see it leave the NYSE around ten days later. SMIC, which is backed by the Chinese government and state-owned shareholders, will focus on its existing Hong Kong listing going forward but there will be trading options for those holding U.S-based ADRs.

In its announcement, SMIC said it plans to delist for reasons that include limited trading volumes and “significant administrative burden and costs” around the listing and compliance with reporting.

What it doesn’t say is that this is linked to the frosty relationship between the U.S. and China, and already the company has played that rationale.

“SMIC has been considering this migration for a long time and it has nothing to do with the trade war and Huawei incident. The …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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The U.S. Senate is coming after ‘loot boxes’

24 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Lucas Matney

Gamers feel passionately about loot boxes, turns out some elected officials do too.

A new Senate bill was formally introduced today with bipartisan support and it could categorically shift how today’s top platforms and distribution platforms monetize the titles they sell. The bill’s introduction was first reported by The Verge.

The bill asserts that “pay-to-win” transactions that give users a nominal advantage for a fee or loot boxes which allow users to essentially play a slot machine for gaining rare or important items, are bad for minors and need to be banned. If the bill passes, offending studios could be fined.

It’s hard to reiterate what a major impact this legislation could have, the games industry has reorganized itself around micro-transactions in the past decade. Much of the growth of the industry’s greatest success stories has been tied to the idea that free-to-download games can quickly nurture massive growth with network effects and then gradually monetize those users via small payments for items that can give them a unique look or edge.

This obviously wouldn’t fully sink in-game transactions by any means, but loot boxes have been one of the most lucrative models and by placing a ceiling on acceptable behavior for these …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Semiconductor startup CNEX Labs alleged Huawei’s deputy chairman conspired to steal its intellectual property

23 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports the Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that Eric Xu, who is also one of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, worked with other Huawei employees to steal its proprietary technology.

The lawsuit, set for trial on June 3 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, started in 2017 when Huawei sued CNEX and one of its founders, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a former employee at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, for stealing its technology and using unlawful means to poach 14 other Huawei employees. CNEX filed a countersuit the following year. Huawei has denied the startup’s allegations in court filings.

The lawsuit is happening at a fraught time for Huawei. Last week, the Chinese telecom equipment maker (and the world’s second-largest smartphone brand), was placed on a trade blacklist by the Trump administration, which also signed an executive order that would make it possible to block American companies from doing business with Huawei …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Tencent CEO warns companies must keep innovating to survive amid US-China tensions

22 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Rita Liao

On Tuesday, Tencent’s usually low-profile founder and CEO Pony Ma made rare comments to weigh in on escalating tensions between the United States and China, calling domestic tech companies to build more self-reliance in a bid to stay competitive.

“China has come to the forefront of development. There is less and less room for taking the best from outside and improving on them. As the ZTE and Huawei cases have intensified recently, we are also constantly watching whether the trade war will turn into a tech war,” said Ma at an event in China’s Yunnan Province per a transcript Tencent provided to TechCrunch.

Ma’s concern is not unexpected. As recent US-China negotiations show, the Shenzhen-based telecommunication and smartphone giant has become deeply entangled in the trade spat. The Commerce Department last week restricted American companies from selling components and other technology to Huawei — which the Trump administration has labeled as posing a national security threat — though it has since scaled back the ban. That would eventually cut Huawei off from certain services from Google, chips made by Qualcomm and Intel, and its other American suppliers.

Despite China’s efforts …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Google brings release channels and Windows Container support to its Kubernetes Engine

21 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Frederic Lardinois

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the bi-annual gathering of cloud-native computing boffins, Google today announced that it now offers three release channels for its Google Kuberentes Engine (GKE): Rapid, Ragular and Stable. With these, Google Cloud users can decide whether they want the freshest release or the most stable one — or easily evaluate the latest updates in a development environment. This new feature is now in alpha testing.

“Each channel offers different version maturity and freshness, allowing developers to subscribe their cluster to a stream of updates that match risk tolerance and business requirements,” Google explains in today’s release.

The company is launching this new feature into alpha with the first release in the Rapid channel, which will give developers early access to the latest versions of Kubernetes .

With this release into the Rapid channel, Google is also bringing early support for Windows Containers to GKE. Over the course of the last few releases, the Kubernetes community brought improved Windows support to the platform and now Google will offer support for Windows Server Containers in June.

In addition to these features, the company is also releasing Stackdriver Kubernetes …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Several chip companies, including Qualcomm and Intel, have reportedly stopped supplying Huawei after blacklist

20 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Several key suppliers are reportedly cutting off Huawei after the Trump administration added the Chinese telecom equipment and smartphone giant to a trade blacklist last week. According to Bloomberg, semiconductor companies Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx and Broadcom will no longer supply Huawei until further notice. This follows another report earlier today that Google has suspended some trade with Huawei, leaving it with access only to the open-source version of Android.

In addition to impacting Huawei’s business, the blacklisting has ramifications for telecom providers who are getting ready to launch 5G networks. In China, the three big telecoms (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom), which are all heavily reliant on Huawei, may be forced to delay 5G rollout. Meanwhile, U.S. carriers, especially smaller ones, may have to spend millions of dollars replacing Huawei equipment they have already installed or looking for new suppliers.

In tweet last week from the account Huawei Facts, the company called the blacklist a “lose-lose” situation. In a more recent tweet, it said “Oops! The U.S. is already coming to its senses over a ban on #Huawei, with a government official admitting that it cannot distance itself from the tech giant as easily as …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Equity transcribed: Away’s $1.4B valuation and CrowdStrike’s S-1

18 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Kate Clark

Welcome back to another transcribed edition of Equity, the wildly popular TechCrunch podcast that digs deep into the week’s news about … equity.

There were no IPOs this week so there was only one episode, but it was jam-packed with news about direct-to-consumer scooters, luggage funding and fake meat. This is where tech has taken us this week.

Oh, and Slack set the date for its direct listing.

Kate: So [Away] raised a 100 million, series D. This round was led by Wellington Management, so not by a traditional venture capital firm. Though Away is backed by big name faces like Forerunner Ventures, which is responsible for investments in pretty much direct to consumer companies. So this valued Away at 1.4 billion, and that’s obviously quite large, but what’s particularly surprising about that valuation is that Away was valued at just 400 million the last time they raised money, which was a series C of 50 million, maybe about 1 or 2 years ago.

Alex: Oh gosh.

Kate: I’m not sure exactly when that was. But we’re seeing a major, major, major uptick in its valuation. And the reason why is because at its series C, Away was profitable already. Like I was telling …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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How an immigration crackdown is hurting UK startups

18 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Lomas

The two people who sat down in reception without an appointment would not leave the startup’s office until the end of the day.

Two months later, a letter followed informing the company it had been suspended from the United Kingdom’s register of licensed sponsors, the database of companies the government has approved to employee foreign workers. The business had 20 working days from the typed date to make “representations” and submit “evidence” and “supporting documents” to counter the “believed” infractions spread across 12 pages, threaded through with copious references to paragraphs, annexes and bullet points culled from the Home Office‘s official guidance for sponsors.

Early in the new year another letter arrived, and an assessment process that had begun with an unannounced visit one autumn morning delivered its final verdict: The revocation of Metail‘s sponsor license with immediate effect.

“There is no right of appeal against this decision,” warns paragraph 64 of the 22-page decision letter — in text which the sponsor compliance unit has seen fit to highlight in bold. “Whilst your client can no longer recruit sponsored workers under Tier 2 and 5 of the Points Based system, they can continue to recruit UK and EEA workers as well …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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