Computers

Previous talk of a 2014 launch seems even more unlikely.

Editor’s note: Brendan Gill is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSignal, a startup that crowdsources data on mobile networks from consumer smartphones. Prior to that he founded a California-based e-commerce company after retiring from a brief lifeguarding career. You can find him on Twitter as @brendan_gill. Stefano Bernardi recently wrote a good cautionary post about the difficulties of raising investment in the US. He’s not wrong – the odds are stacked against you – but I don’t think European entrepreneurs should be discouraged. Founders need investors that offer more than just money: they need ex-entrepreneurs that have experienced exits; they need super connectors that can make deals happen and they need battle hardened veterans that have seen bubbles come and go many times over. The fact is that there are many more people who meet that description in Silicon Valley and having them as partners can make a huge difference. But how do you raise capital in the US? Rather than the vague and oft-repeated advice to “hustle your way to intros” I want to provide specific, practical tips we learnt whilst raising our seed round in the US last year. Start local Don’t book your flight just yet, there’s a new wave of European funds that are comfortable with pre revenue startups, know how to move fast, and won’t ask for 5 year cash forecasts right off the bat. They also regularly network with funds in the US and can be one of your best sources for intros to US funds/angels they like to co-invest with. I’m thinking of the likes of Connect, Hoxton, Kima, Number1, Playfair, EC1, Team Europe, Passion etc (Disclosure – Passion is an investor in OpenSignal). If you get one of them on board they could contribute to your round and potentially introduce you to a US fund to lead. Timing Closing a deal can take a long time. The standard US Visa Waiver program is 90 days and you’ll want to plan for all of that and start your research and reaching out to people in advance. A successful investment will usually involve a partner meeting where anywhere from 2-6+ people with ferocious travel schedules need to be in the same room. No one warned us but some of these meetings can take weeks to schedule so you need to factor this in and hit the ground running when you land at SFO. Basics Whilst many investors are still based in the 40mile stretch that lies between San Francisco and San Jose (“the peninsula” in local parlance) there has been a clear trend towards San Francisco in recent years. Staying in SF is more fun but staying on the peninsula can save you some cash. Either way you’ll be travelling between the two a lot and you’ll be far better off if one of your group drives as the CalTrain service is limited and slow. ZipCar is really useful for this and you can sign up with a foreign license but do it well in advance as it takes time.  For apartment hunting I’d recommend Airbnb and PadMapper and try not to stray too far from SOMA or Palo Alto as those are the epicenters of action for the city and the peninsula respectively. Be prepared Decide with your co-founders in advance what the plan is. Are you prepared to move to the US or are you staying in Europe? Are only some of the founders willing move? Based on this, filter your approach. Use Crunchbase, AngelList and other resources to see which investors have made investments in Europe in the past year. Don’t waste time with a US fund that doesn’t invest internationally under any circumstance. Those that do will still expect you to have a US parent entity in which to invest so that the investment terms are subject to US laws. If you are already incorporated in Europe and have external investors make sure they are willing to re-incorporate. Factor in another month at least if you are know you will need to re-incorporate. Getting meetings We didn’t have a large network in the Bay Area when we started and found this to be our biggest limiting factor. You’ll want to cast the net wide and reach

Google is feeling the heat over its decision to build its new Hangouts IM and audio/video chat product with proprietary technology that doesn't support server federation via the XMPP industry standard, but the company is defending its move.Specifically, Google maintains that XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) industry support is weak, which dilutes its purpose as a common protocol, and that its technology hasn't kept up with the times.This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation took Google to task over this issue, saying that the move is bad for users from the standpoints of interoperability and privacy.If there were support for XMPP server federation, Google users would be able to chat with people on other IM services, or with those who host their own chat servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An anonymous reader writes "Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for the digital economy, wants to use 5 billion euros of European Union tax payers' money, together with matching funds from the chip industry, to recreate European success in semiconductors similar to that of Airbus. Because of its strategic importance to wealth creation Kroes wants Europe to reverse its decline in chip manufacturing and move back up from 10 percent to 20 percent of global production." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple MacBooks and Windows laptops with Intel's new Haswell chips will benefit from a 50 per cent boost in battery life, the company has claimed.The new generation of processors, which will focus on lowering power consumption without compromising on performance, are set to be officially unveiled at next month's Computex show in Taipei. According to Rani Borkar, corporate VP and GM of the Intel Architecture Group, the Haswell processors will offer a huge improvement over the current-gen Ivy Bridge chips when it comes to battery longevity.In a media briefing, reported by ComputerWorld, Borkar said that in standby or idle mode, the chips will be up to 20 times more efficient. Impressive stuff.MacBooks first in line?The improvements are hugely important to Intel's manufacturing partners and consumers who're searching for that holy grail of all-day battery life from a laptop.Apple's MacBook range may be among the first products to benefit from Intel's new chips. Reports earlier this month suggested that new MacBook Pro laptops, featuring Haswell processors would be launched at WWDC on June 10.

The road to 4K gamingWant to justify that £829 graphics card you just bought? Need to figure out how to drive that massive-o-screen that almost melted your credit card? Well, the only realistic answer is either incredibly high-resolution gaming or going for a multi-GPU setup that might melt your PSU, as well as your personal wealth. The thing is, despite the fact that graphical hardware has evolved at an astounding rate over the last few years, panel and game technology hasn't really kept up. Since the last generation consoles came around, most of us have been aiming for 1080p resolutions. At first that was a laudable goal and it felt like an age before it became the standard res. But now it is, with the Steam hardware survey claiming around a third of users have a primary display running at 1,920 x 1,080. At that resolution, even sub-£100 graphics cards are more than capable of running most new titles on relatively high settings, at playable frame rates. To really push your modern midrange/high-end graphics cards you need to up the resolution and, sadly, the 30-inch panels of the last five years - with their 2,560 x 1,600 resolutions - are still at the top of the tech tree, knocking around the £1,000 mark. There are 27-inch screens with the 16:9 res of 2,560 x 1,440, and these are probably your best bet for high-res gaming on a relatively sensible budget. The next step up is to strap a bunch of screens together in some sort of widescreen surround setup. We're talking about resolutions of around 5,880 x 1,080 when you're linking up three 1080p screens in landscape mode with bezel correction. And with those extra pixels filling up your eyes you may actually need a second GPU just to cope with it all. When I started this whole long-winded testing process, I was of the opinion that the square peg of surround screen gaming was struggling to fit into the same round hole as 3D. I thought both were resource-intensive frame rate hogs - limiting the fidelity of your game, without adding much to your experience. And to be honest, that opinion hasn't changed. You need some incredible graphical grunt to get the most out of a triple-screen array, and for the most part that means selling your soul to the dark god of multi-GPU gaming. Beware, though - that way madness lies. The resolutions involved in multi-screen arrays in-game put huge demands on your available GPU power, but as we start to tread the seemingly long dirt track to 4K gaming, maybe this is something that we need to start thinking about seriously. Strapping a few monitors to a couple of GPUs is the only realistic way for us to achieve resolutions above what our blessed 30-inch Dell panel can render, which is the only way to really put the latest and greatest graphics chips through their high-res paces. As an exercise in seeing just how far we can push the modern GPUs of this generation - and seeing how close we are to machines capable of 4K gaming - the high resolutions involved in surround screens setups are useful. But as a gaming experience right now, they're simply an indulgence, with a huge amount of wasted screen real estate and a massive premium placed on frame rates. The whole deal with surround screen gaming is to have a wrap-around view of your game world, with a pair of panels either side of a central screen essentially acting as your peripheral vision. If extra screens were given away - and the frame rate hit wasn't effectively halving performance - then it would be a neat extra to have, adding a little immersion to your experience. But that isn't the way of surround gaming. At best you're looking at screens around the £100 mark, so you're adding another £200 to your gaming setup for a pair of panels that, by definition, you're not actually meant to be looking at. The distorted images stretched out over the peripheral screens aren't pretty, but are there to catch the corner of your eye while you're focusing most of your attention on what's happening right in front

BBC is bringing iPlayer for Android to 10-inch tablets.

It's exciting to see cool new computer stuff coming out at this time, but spare some time to give a broken laptop some attention. Here's a viral short video that does...

The hotly-tipped 'pure Android' incarnation of the HTC One handset will arrive this summer, according to a report on Friday night.CNET claimed to have "confirmed" that the handset, which would dispense with HTC's polarising Sense UI in favour of the stock Android Jelly Bean 4.2 operating system, is definitely on the way. The claim follows reports earlier on Friday claiming that the handset would be launched within two weeks, although CNET's sources only quoted a "summer" release timeframe.The clamour for a HTC One model without the Nexus-style version of Android, follows the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition at the company's Google I/O conference last week.U-turn?The launch of a Google-centric HTC One would be somewhat or a surprise given that the company told TechRadar that no such device was in the works.ff Gordon, senior global online communications manager, telling us: "HTC is not currently planning a 'Nexus Edition' of the HTC One".Has something happened to change HTC's mind, or was the company simply playing it cool with its denials?

Apple's iPhone range has long been the standard bearer for smartphone cameras, but it has now been bested by its great rival Samsung, according to new tests.In photo and video tests DxO Labs, the Samsung Galaxy S4 camera performed higher than the Apple iPhone 5 by an overall score of 75 to 72.The Galaxy S4 ousted Apple as well as the Nokia Lumia 920 in most of the main categories for photos and videos and was especially good in bright light, according to the tests.Top of the pile is still the Nokia 808 Pureview handset, although the Symbian OS and the limited availability of the device means its not a mainstream contender.Comfortably aheadIn its report, DxO labs wrote: "Achieving a DxOMark score of 75 overall puts the rear-facing camera module of the Samsung Galaxy S4 comfortably ahead of the pack. That's no mean feat as the bunch includes the handset maker's own Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S3 as well as Apple's iPhone 4s and latest iPhone 5, all achieving a very respectable 72 in our DxOMark scores.The S4 makes good use of its fast efficient AF and robust and reliable auto-exposure systems to maximize image detail from the 13-Mpix sensor and deliver images with fully saturated color.Are you an S4 user? Have you noticed an improvement in the camera tech over the Galaxy S3? Has it really knocked Apple's advanced tech off its perch? Let us know in the comments below.