Richard MacManus

When news broke of Adobe acquiring the web-based collaborative design tool Figma for about $20 billion — one of the most significant internet M&A deals over the past twenty years — you could almost hear the anguished cries of web designers the world over. Their collective response was best summarized in a brutal tweet by … Read more

It’s a milestone week for blockchain technology, as Ethereum moves from the environmentally damaging proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to the energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS). In a project nicknamed “the Merge,” Ethereum will first bring together the two consensus mechanisms, and then drop PoW completely once PoS has taken over. The Merge is predicted to complete … Read more

A Canadian startup called Wonder Interactive is creating a platform to turn Unreal Engine apps into HTML5 apps, which it claims will have “near-native performance and lightning-fast load times.” To find out why an Unreal Engine developer might want to create a browser version of their app, I spoke to the founders, Robert Stewart and … Read more

The metaverse has largely been promoted in 2022 as a potential successor to the consumer internet — certainly, that’s the vision Meta (née Facebook) is pitching, but it’s also true of dozens of blockchain-based metaverse projects (like Decentraland and Voxels). However, there are also various flavors of enterprise metaverse projects emerging. One of the first … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, then avatars will be a crucial building block for developers. Even better if those avatars are interoperable — meaning, able to be used across different virtual worlds and online games. One company early in the race to provide a platform for interoperable avatar technology is Ready Player … Read more

Some of the world’s biggest companies are going all-in on the metaverse. One you may not know about is Ansys, a US public company that makes engineering simulation software and has been around since 1970. Dr. Prith Banerjee is its Chief Technology Officer, and I spoke to him last week about his vision for the … Read more

WebOps is a portmanteau of “web” and “operations” and, at first glance, appears to be a close cousin of DevOps. As the name suggests, WebOps focuses on the deployment and operation of websites and web applications. The term has been around since at least 2006, when its Wikipedia article was first published (indeed, that page … Read more

Brain.js is a JavaScript library for deploying a neural network in the browser or on Node.js. It uses a computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) for calculations, or pure JavaScript when GPU isn’t available. The lead developer of Brain.js is Robert Plummer, by day a full-stack engineer at iFIT. I reached out to him to find … Read more

Nvidia is going all-in on the metaverse. At this year’s SIGGRAPH, an annual conference for computer graphics, Nvidia announced a range of new metaverse initiatives. These include the launch of Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a “suite of cloud-native AI models and services” to build 3D avatars; new neural graphics SDKs, such as NeuralVDB; plans … Read more

IBM is one of the leading companies in quantum computing hardware, with its roadmap targeting more than 1,000 qubits by the end of 2023. That’s the so-called “quantum advantage” level, when quantum computing will out-perform classical computing in certain use cases. So we know IBM is innovating on hardware, but is it as ambitious on … Read more

What Google Docs did for word processing and Figma did for interface design, Hex hopes to do for data science. Which is to say, make data science and analytics a collaborative process, using a slick web-based user interface. I spoke to Hex CEO Barry McCardel about how the data stack will change over the 2020s … Read more

Use cases for quantum computing are still at an experimental stage, but we’re getting closer to meaningful commercialization of the technology. In a new research report, IonQ and GE Research (General Electric’s innovation division) announced encouraging results for the use of quantum computing in risk management — which potentially has wide applicability in industries like … Read more

You.com is an ambitious startup taking on Google with a “customizable open search platform” powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP). Today, it is launching out of beta a service aimed squarely at developers: YouCode, a kind of mix between Google search and GitHub Copilot. You.com was founded by Richard Socher, former Chief Scientist at Salesforce … Read more

Nvidia today announced a new service called Quantum Optimized Device Architecture, or QODA. Nvidia claims it is the “world’s first platform for hybrid quantum-classical computing.” I interviewed Tim Costa, director of HPC and Quantum Computing Products at Nvidia, to find out more. As with most of the leading internet companies, Nvidia already has a foothold … Read more

How does software even work in quantum computers, and how do you create “quantum algorithms”? Those were my opening questions for Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq, an Israeli software company that offers a software development platform for quantum computing. “Quantum software is manipulating the quantum state vector in a way that will solve … Read more