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NVIDIA has finalized a deal that will see it acquire the physics technology company Ageia Technologies Inc.

Ageia is best known in the gaming community for its PhysX software and PhysX card. The PhysX software is currently being used and developed for use in games on PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and the Wii. It is now expected that NVIDIA will integrate PhysX support into its GeForce range of cards, allowing for direct physics acceleration through a graphics card.

Speaking of the acquisition, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA, said:

The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are—creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences … By combining the teams that created the world’s most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce®-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.

Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of Ageia, also commented:

NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world’s best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience.

Specific details as to the terms of the deal and the price paid for Ageia have not been divulged. But NVIDIA has said it will release more information regarding the deal during its quarterly conference call on February 13.

Read more at Vnunet.com and the NVIDIA press release.

Matthew’s Opinion

With Intel owning Havok and NVIDIA now owning Ageia, AMD is the odd one out. The company may own ATI, but it has no dedicated physics software company on board.

When the PhysX card first appeared, it was very expensive and only supported a few games. The card disappeared, but the software SDK continued, and it has clearly impressed games companies due to its use across so many projects. PhysX is a recognized name with gamers, and it has technology NVIDIA can use, so the acquisition is a win on both marketing and technology fronts for the graphics company.

It will be interesting to see how much the PhysX brand means to NVIDIA. We could just see it clearly identified on the graphics card packaging and marketing as “now with PhysX.” It may be more drastic than that, however, with the next range of GeForce cards actually called GeForce PhysX.

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Posted Feb 6th 2008 2:31PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Household
Despite numerous technological advancements in home automation, it’s never really seemed to catch on with the mainstream. Now it’s time for the children — our future — to take things into their own hands. Hasbro is launching the Room Tech Clock (left) and Room Tech Lamp (right), which put a bit of wireless conspiracy to good use by having the Clock turn on the Lamp when the alarm goes off. Sadly, these kids aren’t really dreaming big yet, since that’s about all this duo can do, other than an audio jack on the alarm to play tunes off your portable audio player. The two Room Tech devices will be out in September, at least in the UK, for £39.99 ($79 US) a piece.

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Remember that Windows 7 video, the one that looked strangely like Vista. Well it turns out it pretty much was Vista, at least in the design. It seems the video that was taken was of Windows 7 Milestone 1 which is actually not a standalone OS, but actually requires Vista to run. According to TG Daily Windows 7 Milestone 1 gets installed on top Vista and SP1 is required. So with that the icons and functionality remain the same as Vista currently is. Basically Windows 7 M1 currently is the foundation of what could possibly be a “new and much leaner kernel” and without Vista would as of now just be a basic UI and raw code. So it seems like we are still going to have to wait before we can get a good look at what Windows 7 will actually look like.

Via [tg daily]

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Single guys ought to make the Halitosis Detector a part of their ‘dating’ arsenal, since you can’t really tell on your own if you have a breath bad enough to kill plants. This nifty little device comes with built-in sensors that are capable of rating your breath in four stages, ranging from really good to brimstone and sulfur status from the deepest abyss. As it costs $11, that’s a small price to pay considering your breath might make or break your future the hot date whom you’ll be going out with tonight for dinner.

Product Page via DVICE

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Further evidence that Apple is not overly worried about ceding ownership of the media player market: Software engineers working on the iPod apparently have spare time to secretly encode Lincoln’s second inaugural address in their work.

Such has been discovered by an iPod Touch owner who installed the January update and ran an odd-looking file through a property list editor and base64 converter. Up popped Abe’s stirring oratory. You know, the one that starts: "Fellow countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first…"

Super Tuesday iPod touch Easter Egg [TUAW]

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Posted Feb 6th 2008 10:37AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Laptops
We’ve been waiting for Dell to pop a Penryn chip inside one of its laptops — so far it’s been HP and Toshiba sitting pretty with some of the few Penryn laptop offerings in existence — but we didn’t think it’d come for free. Dell is pushing Penryn on consumers with an upgrade to the existing XPS M1330 line, which is a far sight smaller than what HP and Toshiba intro’d Penryn in, but the best news is that if you build out the AUD$2,000 model (which includes 4GB of RAM and other perks) you get a free “upgarde” [sic] to the Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, at least for today. As you might’ve guessed from that currency, this deal is only in Australia so far, but new Dell products and deals usually start there and end up in the States whenever the international date line swings around.

[Thanks, Rupert]

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After six months renting, house-hunting and finally moving into a new home, emptying the final box was a liberation. Sealed within, moreover, was  something sent in last year but forgotten amid the home-moving craziness: The fanless, Wii-sized Zonbox. Joy!

With it up and running again, I’m reminded what a great little supplemental computer it is.

• It has 512MB of RAM, integrated video, 6 USB ports and 4GB of Flash storage. And it’s very small.   

• It’s so quiet as to be a little unnerving: I’m used to hitting the on switch on a computer and hearing something to indicate that it’s waking up.

• Forget the official selling point (a super cheap computer allied to an online storage subscription, with minimal local storage) and think of it as a computer for every room and every (light-weight) purpose—if you’re prepared to do extra work. File storage, retrogaming, serving web? It’ll handle all those.

• They’ll sell you one without the storage sub for $300. With the 2-year storage subscription it’s $99.

• It runs a standard Linux distribution, albeit a pruned and well-manicured one. Straying from the pre-installed apps, the web, and email, gets you quickly into irritating sysadmin territory.

• Reasons to stay away, if you’re looking for them: low specs, no integrated optical drive, only 4GB of flash storage.

• There’s a similarly-themed laptop edition. We recently gave it a favorable review.

• It uses only a few watts of power, so is very cheap to run.

• It’s a good cheap second computer for the kids, or when the other half is doing the taxes.

• Bearing in mind that the offical Zonbox is fitted with a tailored Linux distro that won’t give you too much lip, you can get much the same thing from other vendors. The raw hardware seems to be made by CuteBox, but it doesn’t sell direct. Another company selling it is Thin Teknix, which calls it "The Chimp." A third alternative is the $280 Linutop, which is even smaller, but it doesn’t look quite as nice and has lower specifications: an AMD Geode CPU, 256MB RAM and only 4 USB ports.

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So, I’m sure by now you have probably read my experience of helping Santa get a Wii for my kids for Christmas in addition to getting two more Wii’s for family and friends. It seems part of the reason for my struggle and the struggle of many others were Wii-sellers. These are the folks that have been snatching up the Wii whenever it becomes available to resell it on eBay or Amazon for US$50 to US$100 over retail or more.

MSNBC had an article profiling one of these Wii-sellers and I’m sure like me reading the article will leave you pretty disgusted. I’ll give it to him–he makes some pretty valid points about providing a service since many people didn’t want to do the leg work to get a Wii such as getting up early, waiting in line, stalking stores for shipments or hunting for them online. Where he lost me was when he acknowledged that he worked with a co-worker to jack up the price of one of his auctions. It sounds like he didn’t have to do it after that first time, but he already let the cat out of the bag.

Look, if you want to buy a Wii and resell it on eBay then I suppose it’s a free market. Just don’t have people fraudulently jack up the price of your auctions. Also, next time your kids want something for Christmas and you can’t find it without paying US$100 over retail to a reseller just appreciate the fact that you created a new market. Everything comes around in life. Give a Wii, get a Wii without profit. The gift will be returned.

Read more from the MSNBC article.

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Here’s a sneak peak of Dell’s latest computer, the XPS 730 H2C which has been targeted to be the successor to the XPS 720. While it might not look too easy on the eyes, the innards are what matters when it comes down to framerates. The XPS 730 H2C will feature DDR3 memory, a minimum graphics setup of being triple SLI-ready, a generous amount of drive bays and pretty decent cooling that ought to get overclockers drooling to see how far they can push such a system. It will only be a matter of time before Dell pushes out thte XPS 730 H2C, so stay tuned!

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Posted Feb 6th 2008 9:21AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Cellphones, GPS
We’re rather watch a couple hours of Home Shopping Network than subject ourselves twice to these promo videos for Garmin’s nuvifone, but the “Scenario” video is at least worth a first viewing, since it provides a few action shots of the mail app, camera and (most importantly) browser in action. Don’t get too excited, this isn’t the tell-all we’ve been hoping for, but if you can’t get enough nuvifone — and who can? — you can check out the videos after the break.

[Via NaviGadget]