Microsoft Corp said it would buy Perceptive Pixel Inc, a maker of large touch-screen display monitors that can be used by multiple people at the same time.
Microsoft plans to sell Perceptive Pixel’s large screens, which can run its latest operating system, Windows 8, the Redmond, Washington-based software company said at a conference in Toronto on Monday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Microsoft has a lot riding on the success of Windows 8, due to be released later this year. Perceptive Pixel’s 82-inch multi-touch screen, used by customers including news broadcaster CNN and oil-services provider Schlumberger Ltd, can respond to finger movements and a stylus at the same time, helping users mimic real-world work environments, according to the company’s Web site. It will be another vehicle for Windows 8 sales to big customers such as corporations and schools.
Photo: AFP
“It’s just a very big Windows 8 tablet, but people ‘Ooh and ah’ at it,” Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said at the conference. “Our challenge is to make that technology more affordable.”
The displays currently sell for about US$80,000, he said. The screens can connect to standard corporate computers and already work with Windows 8; Microsoft demonstrated one running the program at a conference in February.
Windows 8 will be shipped to manufacturers the first week next month and go on sale by the end of October, Microsoft said on Monday. In the coming year, Microsoft expects to sell “a few million” units of its Surface tablet, Ballmer said.
Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han, who demonstrated multi-touch technology at the TED conference in 2006, will join Microsoft, with his team becoming part of the company’s Office division.
The New York-based company gained prominence in 2008 when cable-news network CNN used one of its displays as a large interactive US map for presidential election coverage.
Now Han, who says many of his company’s biggest customers are top-secret defense and government projects, wants to take the products more mainstream. To do that, he needs Microsoft’s muscle and better integration with Office programs like the OneNote note-taking application and Lync conferencing software, he said in an interview.
Microsoft expects the acquisition to close this summer, and it will work hard to lower the price of Perceptive Pixel products, Giovanni Mezgec, a Microsoft general manager, said in an interview. He declined to give a specific month or say how much lower the prices may fall.
“We want to make this mainstream,” he said. “We will do anything possible to get the cost down and to get new forms of this out in the market places in any way possible.”
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to