App.net Launches Backer, A Bitcoin-Friendly Crowdfunding Engine For Individual Software Features

As the popularity of crowdfunding grows ever larger, an interesting new trend has started popping up: developers, curious if a new feature is worth adding to their products, are asking interested customers to chip in to cover the costs of development. In other words: if you really want a feature, put your money where your mouth is.

Balanced, a payment service, recently used crowdfunding to support adding a new money sending feature. App.net, a subscription-based/ad-free Twitter alternative which as a whole was born out of a $803,000 crowdfunding campaign, is currently using it to determine if they’ll accept Bitcoin payments on their site.

This morning, App.net announced that they’re opening up the engine they built for their Bitcoin campaign, allowing other companies to use the platform to raise money for individual features. They’re calling the new platform Backer.

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Nvidia's Tegra K1 processor plays nice with Unreal Engine 4

byDavid Hinkleon Jan 6th 2014 11:59PM

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Nvidia and Epic Games have been friends for a while, so it's only natural the latest mobile processor from Nvidia, the Tegra K1, officially supports Epic Games' latest engine, the Unreal Engine 4. We saw our first hint at this union last summer, when Nvidia unveiled Project Logan – a mobile GPU built on the same Kepler technology powering Nvidia's latest PC graphics cards.

"We can take absolutely anything that runs on PC or on a console and run it on Tegra," says Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, in the Nvidia announcement post. "The differences between the platforms is really blurred." Nvidia says Tegra K1 is the first mobile processor capable of pumping out graphics on par with Xbox One and PS4, and even offers "faster performance" than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

In the sizzle reel above, Sweeney says all of Epic's tech demos – "Samaritan," "Infiltrator" and "Elemental" – came through collaboration with Nvidia. "I didn't think we'd be at this level on mobile for another three or four years," Sweeney said.NvidiaEngadgetShareTags: android, epic-games, mobile, nvidia, nvidia-tegra, nvidia-tegra-k1, tegra-k1, unreal-engine-4.fyre .fyre-comment-media-expanded{display:none!important}.fyre-notifier-container{display:none}.fyre .fyre-comment-divider>span.fyre-comment-reply-wrapper{top:18px}.fyre .fyre-comment-divider>a,.fyre .fyre-comment-divider>a:hover{top:20px} InfoDescription

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NomNom Launches First Plugin-Free Commercial Game Based On Asm.js And Unreal Engine 3

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Earlier this year, Epic Games and Mozilla showcased a demo of Epic’s popular Unreal Engine running in the browser without the need for a plugin. Based on Mozilla’s Asm.js JavaScript subset and its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler, this demo was meant to showcase what developers can now do in the browser thanks to the asm.js project and WebGL for bringing 3D content to the browser. Until now, though, virtually all projects that combined these technologies were demos. Now, NomNom Games, a subsidiary of Trendy Entertainment, has launched Monster Madness, the first commercial game that uses Unreal Engine 3 and Mozilla’s technologies.

As expected, the game runs best in Firefox, which recently gained full support for asm.js, but it will also happily run in Chrome and Opera. The game, it’s worth noting, is officially in alpha, but it’s now available for anybody who wants to give it a try – including some multi-player elements.

Bringing Monster Madness to the browser, Mozilla says, only took about a week (though they got some technical support from Epic and Mozilla).

Asm.js and Emscripten obviously help developers port many of their C and C

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