Hasta La Gadget!

NEW YORK — With corporate profit margins at an all-time high and more Americans out of work than at any other point in the past three decades, it may seem like an odd moment to look to the business world for hope.

But an idealistic coalition of liberals and conservatives want to show that capitalism can be fixed with a new business classification, the benefit corporation, which is required by law to consider both profits and people. Nine states, including New York and California this year, now recognize such corporations, and businesses like the environmentally conscious sports apparel company Patagonia have jumped aboard. Critics argue, however, that benefit corporations muddy the waters of corporate governance — and that if lawmakers want businesses to do something for people, they should mandate it.

“Traditional corporations don’t measure their success by the impact they have on their employees,” said Mike Brady, CEO of Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, N.Y., which was the first company in the state to register for the new corporate class. “We measure our success from our number of employees.”

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More on Opportunity: What Is Working

Traditional console makers have often sworn up and down that mobile doesn’t make money for game development. That might still be true for some developers, but you’ll get a very different answer if you ask Epic Games. Co-founders Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein have collectively described the currently iOS-only, Chair-developed Infinity Blade as the “most profitable game we’ve ever made” when considering the amount of money and time invested relative to the money coming back. Yes, that includes even the Gears of War series, which most consider Epic’s primary cash cow. Sweeney, like his long-time competitor Johh Carmack at id Software, is also taken aback by the power stuffed inside the latest generation of mobile devices — a 2012 iPad is nearer the performance of a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, he tells Gamasutra, and the pace is only picking up. Even more insights await in the interview with Sweeney; click below if you want a hint of what one of gaming’s pioneers has to say about where your tablets, phones and (yes) PCs are going.

Epic Games: Infinity Blade on iOS more profitable by the pound than any other game we’ve made originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At Uplinq I met representatives of Samsung who are promoting the LPDDR3 memory designed for the next-generation smartphones and tablets. LPDDR is also known as “mobile DDR” and it is a type of memory that can consume 10X less power in standby mode, when compared to typical “PC” DDR3 memory. Obviously, this is a big deal because most of the time, your smartphone is in standby mode, doing very little. Many smartphones currently use LPDDR2.

This type of memory consumes less power because they have a special design which requires a lower voltage, a slower refresh rate and they also have a mode where they don’t even have to keep their content. The design works for mobile devices, but the extra cost is not justifiable (yet!) on regular PCs and laptops which have components that consume much more juice anyway (display, CPU, GPU). (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Qualcomm OpenGL driver turns 2D games into 3D, More work required for LTE roaming, says Qualcomm CEO,

If you have never seen this movie, you must. Not because the brilliant Nora Ephron—the movie’s screenwriter—passed away yesterday, but because it’s a brilliant simple movie. A funny, clever, sometimes poignant, every time spot on look at relationships. A romantic comedy that is actually good cinema, not just the candied crap cakes made out of canned pink goo that populate movie theater nowadays. More »

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from the Modbook team – back before Apple’s original iPad, in fact – but the MacBook Pro conversion company is apparently back with a new offering. A new Facebook teaser campaign promises a product announcement on Thursday this week with the tagline “Imagination goes pro”, and indications that there could well be a new Pro-based artists tablet in the offing.

Details are in short supply, but a couple of previously posted graphics suggest the new Modbook will again use an active digitizer with a special stylus. We reviewed the original Modbook back in 2008 and came away impressed by how well OS X worked with a pen, particularly in terms of the flexibility that introduced for artwork and graphic design.

Interestingly, this isn’t the same Modbook team as last time. In fact, a new company licensed Axiotron’s original intellectual property, subsequently securing private equity funding to reboot the business in March. At the time, it said it expected “its first product release before the end of the year.”

Exactly what that product is – or what Mac it will be based upon – is unclear, though one of the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display machines would make for a very interesting basis for an artist’s tablet. We’ll know more tomorrow when Modbook makes its big announcement.

[via Engadget]

Modbook teases new Mac tablet conversion is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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