Network Gaming Accelerator
I wish I was clever enough to rename then patent an existing idea and get 4 million in funding for it. Oh, and this thing that is basically a tweaked network card will cost $300. Isn’t that called a con? And I thought the Ageia PhysX guys had a difficult sell ahead of them. Graphics cards alone are expensive enough without other (pointless) cards to buy.
March 9th, 2006 at 2:21 am
You’re on the money - Greg’s calling it out as ‘bullshit’ :)
http://www.costik.com/weblog/2006_03_01_blogchive.html#114174974475590064
March 9th, 2006 at 3:25 am
If it does what it says on the tin, $4 million is easy pickings - the VCs would easily make $100 million off it. Ageia’s raised $60+ million off a much more difficult consumer selling point. The bigger issue for both companies is the seeming insatiable PC add-in market. Ever since people started spending $500 x2 on SLI or Crossfire graphics cards, the market’s been wide open. Also, I doubt you’ve ever tried to patent an idea - not as easy as you might think and the main man behind Bigfoot already has over a dozen to his name. Might not mean much to us normal folks, but the VCs love anything they can pin down in law or sell onto Intel or IBM.
March 9th, 2006 at 8:26 am
To jon: Not easy? Well, it’s expensive, but it’s terribly easy. Practically anything you apply for gets accepted - at most you have to tweak your claims a bit, but not much more than that.
See http://www.patentlysilly.com for various examples.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Except Greg put it in rather more words and technical detail than me. ;) Sounded fishy from the outset to my CS degree drop out brain, comments from smarter people on various forums just seemed to confirm that it’s, well, BS like Greg said.
That reminds me, what happened to that Valve/Cisco PowerPlay nonsense?