When Tech Rules the World – Infographic
12:00 pm
NVidia’s Big Presence at SIGGRAPH2011
11:22 am
NVidia looks to have a big presence at SIGGRAPH this year (like very year I suppose). If you browse the show floow you’ll see them working with Autodesk, Adobe, Dassault, and others. In addition, they’ve got their Innovation Theater, Sketch Match , and the annual NVArt competition with CGSociety. Also this year they’ll have a series of “Tech Talks” that sound particularly interesting.
Highlighting the NVIDIA “Tech Talks” will be an expert panel discussion from 1:45 to 3:00 p.m. PDT, “VFX Trendspotting: Unlocking GPU Performance,” where attendees will be able to tap into the some of the most brilliant minds in visual effects R&D and learn how the GPU is being leveraged to enable dramatic performance gains in rendering, lighting, fluid and particle simulations. Attendees will learn more about how to integrate GPU acceleration into their VFX production pipelines.
Get all the details in the press release after the break.
Bitcoins: The Taxless Currency
11:06 am
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 21/07/2011
7:00 am
Our selection for today starts with a look at the stressfull problem of traffic jams. Ria Novosti, design studio Thumb and Car Indurance made some infographics about this issue, and again from Car Indurance comes the helpfull map of America’s best roads for sports cars, while Infrastructurist explains the recent Streetcar Renaissance in the U.S.
Infographics Summary for 2011-07-20
10:30 pm
The Virtual Mine Receives an Emmy Nomination
1:48 pm
Now this is impressive. Sand Castle Studios has a Second-Life creation called “The Virtual Mind” which strives to educate the public on the importance and dangers of mountain-top removal coal mines, coal fired power production, and alternative energies. Done as part of a documentary film called “Deep Down”, the project has now been nominated for an Emmy Award for New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming.
“We are so honored to be singled out in our industry and recognized for the Virtual Mine with this Emmy nomination,” said Kimberly Winnington (SL:Gianna Borgnine), Chief Executive Officer of Sand Castle Studios, LLC. “This nomination is a proud achievement, and a testament to all of the incredible hard work put in by our very talented team including myself, William Reed Seal-Foss (Content Creation) and Karl Stiefvater (Software Engineer). It also solidifies how powerful virtual worlds are as way to connect with others, examine problems, and participate in activities in order to learn more about them in a way that might not otherwise be possible.”
via The Virtual Mine Receives an Emmy Nomination | Sand Castle Studios.
Autodesk acquires Pixlr, 3D Systems acquires Alibre
9:00 am
Busy week in the CAD markets. First off, 3D Systems acquired Alibre design, bringing in their productivity tools to their rapidly growing CAD suites.
“With Alibre in our portfolio we are personalizing and integrating design and manufacturing productivity,” said Abe Reichental, President and CEO of 3D Systems. “The combined affordability and user friendliness of our expanded 3D content-to-print solutions offer a clear and compelling choice for engineers, designers and makers to create and make instantly, at work and home.”
Then, Autodesk took the surprising step of acquiring web-based image editing company Pixlr. Autodesk has been experimenting with Cloud-based technologies for the last few years (projects like Dragonfly and Photofly), so it’s interesting to see them moving straight into the acquisition space. Apparently Pixlr will be integrating with Autodesk’s Sketchbook product, making it easier to exchange and share images online.
“Lots of people–not just creative professionals—want to express themselves visually,” said Samir Hanna, vice president of Consumer Products at Autodesk. “Combining image editing capabilities with sketching capabilities provides new avenues for rich visual expression. We also intend to marry the Pixlr team’s web development experience with our expertise in mobile app development to help people everywhere be creative on the devices of their choice.”
A bit surprising, but worth keeping an eye on.
JPEGmini – Your Photos on a Diet!
8:45 am
A while back we ran a comparison of PNG, JPG, WebP, and HIPIX looking at the various compression details and artifacts. The results were interesting, with HIPIX emerging as the leader in detail and filesize. However, in the comments someone brought up another format called ‘JPEGMini’, however the entire algorithm is proprietary and locked up so that I couldn’t test it.
That might change now, thanks to the JPEGMini website. Using their website you can upload images or entire albums to be recompressed with their algorithm for an estimated 5x on savings with no perceivable difference in quality. And all for free. The example images they show are impressive, hopefully I can get some time later today to actually run some tests.
VizWorld.com 
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