Hasta La Gadget!

The first step in any awesome developer adventure is to prove to developers that working with a group like NETGEAR is worth the effort – now that they’ve got Qualcomm Atheros on their team, that goal just got a lot easier. What the folks at the newly announced NETGEAR Developer Program are showing off today to get people pumped up for the program itself is Qualcomm Atheros’ Skifta. This Skifta app is not brand new, but it’s definitely making the whole idea of developing for NETGEAR hardware seem well worth the effort.

What you’ve got with Skifta is an app that allows you to control the media that exists on your home network. If you’ve got a NETGEAR drive sitting in your network, you can access all of the songs, movies, photos, and more in an instant. We’ve got it running on a Motorola DROID RAZR M here today – which just so happens to run a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor under the hood – and the process in gaining access to our media was more than just simple – it was just a couple of taps!

What you’re seeing here is our access to a slightly less traditional server, just to show you how versatile this system is. When we fire Skifta up on the DROID RAZR M, we see our Alienware gaming PC. This PC runs Windows 7 Home Premium and is connected to our wi-fi network with a collection of shared movies, photos, and songs.

We can choose to play a song straight from the Android device here – as shown, or we can connect to most DLNA/UPnP players around the house. You can connect to your PlayStation 3 if you want, or to your DLNA HDTV too – whatever you’ve got prepared. This process essentially turns your Android device into a one-stop-shop for controlling the media anywhere inside your home network. Open it up, scan, select, and play!

This is just one example of the wave of excellence that’ll surely be popping up in the NETGEAR Developer Program soon – stay tuned and get jacked for more!

NETGEAR Developer Program teams with Qualcomm for smart apps galore is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

Parallel computing is normally reserved for supercomputers way out of the reach of average users — at least at the moment, anyway. Adapteva wants to challenge that with its Parallella project, designed to bring mouth-watering power to a board similar in size to the Raspberry Pi for as little as $99. It hopes to deliver up to 45GHz (in total) using its Epiphany multicore accelerators, that crucially, only chug 5 watts of juice under normal conditions. These goliath speeds currently mean high costs, which is why they need your funds to move out of the prototype stage and start cheap mass production. Specs for the board are as follows: a dual-core ARM A9 CPU running Ubuntu OS as standard, 1GB RAM, a microSD slot, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, Ethernet and a 16- or 64-core accelerator, with each core housing a 1GHz RISC processor, all linked “within a single shared memory architecture.”

An overriding theme of the Parallella project is the openness of the platform. When finalized, the full board design will be released, and each one will ship with free, open-source development tools and runtime libraries. In addition, full architecture and SDK documentation will be published online if-and-when the Kickstarter project reaches its funding goal of $750,000. That’s pretty ambitious, but we’re reminded of another crowd-funded venture which completely destroyed an even larger target. However, that sum will only be enough for Adapteva to produce the 16-core board, which reportedly hits 13GHz and 26 gigaflops, and is expected to set you back a measly $99. A speculative $3 million upper goal has been set for work to begin on the $199 64-core version, topping out at 45GHz and 90 gigaflops. Pledge options range from $99 to $5,000-plus, distinguished mainly by how soon you’ll get your hands on one. Big spenders will also be the first to receive a 64-core board when they become available. Adapteva’s Andreas Olofsson talks through the Parallella project in a video after the break, but if you’re already sold on the tiny supercomputer, head over to the source link to contribute before the October 27th closing date.

Continue reading Insert Coin: The Parallella project dreams of $99 supercomputers

Filed under: Misc

Insert Coin: The Parallella project dreams of $99 supercomputers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone who’s been wanting to make a game for the Oculus Rift headset, but hemmed and hawed during the Kickstarter run, now has a second chance. Oculus has kicked off its own pre-order campaign that offers the VR developer kit at the same $300 that it cost for the more proactive among us, or $345 for those beyond US borders. As an added incentive, the first 1,000 who pull the trigger still get a copy of Doom 3: BFG Edition to show what the Oculus Rift can do. Twiddling your thumbs will have cost at least a month — these new kits won’t ship until January — but the pre-order still means a head start over competing developers that haven’t yet seen the virtual light.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

Oculus Rift developer kits go up for regular pre-order, catch VR procrastinators originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MasterCard has been in the cashless payment game for quite a while, and now it’s hoping to get more developers on the PayPass bandwagon with its freshly unveiled user interface software development kit. By leveraging the SDK, programmers will be able to bake the firm’s NFC payment system, which is compatible with over 70 handsets, into their own Android or BlackBerry OS 7 apps. The kit is free to license and includes API code libraries, documentation, a developer guide, sample code, a white-label reference application and a testing suite. Once apps are created with the SDK, they’ll have to go through MasterCard’s approval process before they go live. Yearning to code PayPass-enabled smartphone software? Check out the press release below for more details.

Continue reading MasterCard announces PayPass User Interface SDK, lets devs roll their own NFC payment-enabled apps

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

MasterCard announces PayPass User Interface SDK, lets devs roll their own NFC payment-enabled apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 8 slates are riding a wave of 40 Xbox titles into an October launch, and now Microsoft has laid the foundation to deliver more games with a brand new studio focused on tablet development. The currently unnamed, London-based outfit will be headed by former Rare Production Director Lee Schuneman, who has shepherded Kinect Sports titles, the Xbox 360 Avatars, Fable: The Journey and the Xbox’s Sky TV app to completion. Slabs running Redmond’s latest OS won’t see a project from the team for a while, however, as the studio is still looking for new hires and won’t open its doors until November.

Continue reading Microsoft announces new entertainment and game studio focused on Windows 8 tablet development

Filed under: Gaming, Tablets

Microsoft announces new entertainment and game studio focused on Windows 8 tablet development originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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