Journalism

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

Quantum computing is not yet a mainstream technology, but as I discovered at last week’s London Tech Week, there are some promising use cases for it. I attended a panel at the Quantum Computing Summit exploring how three global companies, in three different sectors, are using quantum computing. The panelists were Einar Magnusson, Head of … Read more

Interoperability — or lack thereof — is a key issue in the nascent metaverse industry. The Khronos Group aims to solve this with a new open standards discussion forum called The Metaverse Standards Forum, which launches today. The group includes representation from most of the big players in the 3D internet, including Nvidia, Meta, Epic … Read more

Last week I attended The AI Summit in London, where I discovered how companies are using machine learning (ML) and other forms of AI technology. One session I enjoyed was run by Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), a global product placement and influencer marketing company. Normally I run away from anything to do with “influencers,” but … Read more

When you hear the word “metaverse” in 2022, you’re likely to think of Meta (née Facebook) or one of the big online gaming platforms, like Fortnite or Roblox. But there’s also a groundswell of “open metaverse” projects on the internet, most of which are web-based — and some tied into the Web3 ecosystem as well. … Read more

Heading into Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, there were rumors that a “mixed reality” AR/VR headset would dominate the event — even though the hardware itself wasn’t expected to be revealed. Others predicted that Apple would launch a new 3D development environment. Neither of these things happened. If anything dominated WWDC this year, it was … Read more