Last week NVIDIA launched the GPU Ventures Program, which strives to identify, support, and invest in early stage startups that are able to leverage NVIDIA's GPUs for parallel computing applications. Clearly, the goal that NVIDIA is trying to accomplish here is to show that the processing power of GPUs can be utilized for many more tasks than just rendering polygons in video games. Finding some killer applications for all this parallel processing power would be a significant step in growing the market demand for GPUs. But finding killer applications is not exactly an easy task. Many technologies finally took off long after the companies that pioneered them disappeared. To avoid a similar fate, the clever guys at NVIDIA figured out that instead of imposing their idea of what a killer application ought to be, it might be smarter to stick to what they know how to do best, building massively parallel chips, and to leave the pursuit of finding killer applications for these chips to an ecosystems of startups centered around their technology.
Essentially, this venture program is more or less an extension to the Emerging Companies Summit - a private showcase of startup companies that NVIDIA held in 2008 for the first time. This summit is scheduled to take place again sometime this fall, although an exact date has not been set yet. NVIDIA plans to showcase the developments by these startups on their newly launched Venture Zone website. Currently, in addition to being able to browse the profiles of companies that have already become part of the ecosystem, the site also allows you to submit your business proposal on how you plan to build your company around NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) computing platform. Investments in early startups are expected to span from $500K to $5M, and NVIDIA also intends to help out with marketing, development, and even product distribution. So if you have a good idea that can take advantage of the CUDA platform it might be time to dust of that business plan textbook and get to work!
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@icdboss noted, hopefully they will have a better experience dealing with Samsung locally, given the company's large presence in Austin