stacks

Asus has revealed a new partnership at Computex today to make its computers more Android-friendly. By teaming with BlueStacks (download), which makes an "app player" for running Android apps on Windows, the company will make Android apps available on 30 million Windows computers around the world.

"Asus has always been an innovator, and this is a big move for the space," BlueStacks' Chief Executive Officer Rosen Sharma wrote in an e-mail to CNET. "Thirty million computers running mobile apps is a lot, but it's just the beginning."

Asus will include BlueStacks in its … Read more

The BlueStacks app player for running Android apps on Windows has taken a major step forward today with the release of its first beta, which can run even graphics-intensive Android apps on desktop PCs.

The BlueStacks beta (download) leverages a new, patent-pending technology that the company has developed called LayerCake, which does two things necessary for running Android apps on Windows. First, it powers the app on hardware that it wasn't originally intended to run on. That's basically the ARM to x86 conversion which runs the apps, and it comes with the blessing of one of AMD's … Read more

LAS VEGAS--BlueStacks isn't a household name, but it's about to become arguably one of the most useful pieces of preinstalled software on Windows 8 computers.

At the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show here today, BlueStacks revealed a functional demo that runs Android apps of all kinds on Windows 8. This follows last year's debut of the software and release as a rough alpha for Windows 7, but it comes with a piece of unexpected news. The software maker has been in talks with hardware manufacturers to ship the program preinstalled on Windows 8. A beta of the Windows … Read more

The typical Android user apparently does not look kindly upon flip-flops, opting instead to pair his jeans and T-shirt with the far-more-practical sneakers.

We say "he," because the typical Android user is male, according to the folks at BlueStacks, a startup that makes software for running Android apps on Windows PCs. Using data from Nielsen, as well as information culled this month from more than 145,000 of its Facebook followers, BlueStacks created a composite Android user dubbed Mr. Android 2011.

"Mr. Android is everything Android users are...all their dynamism, visualized as one person," John Gargiulo, vice president of marketing and business development at BlueStacks, tells CNET.

So how would you spot Mr. A 2011 walking down the street?

Well, while there's a 47 percent chance he has black hair, green-haired Android users are an extremely rare species, clocking in at only 3 percent of those polled. Subtle pompadours, however, appear to fit the Android aesthetic, a trend marketers of hair products may wish to keep in mind. … Read more

As interest in open-source cloud computing continues to grow, a new--albeit self-interested--survey shows that users are looking to move from experiments to production deployments.

Today, systems management software provider Zenoss released the results of what they've titled the "OpenStack Adoption Survey". (OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system.) The data was culled from 772 surveys filled out at the recent OpenStack Conference in Boston and the Zenoss open source management community.

OpenStack, which came on the scene in July of 2010 out of Rackspace, is software that delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system for both public … Read more

Polycom dives into videoconferencing on tablets, Asus unveils a new line of Ultrabooks, Twitter to get "tweet" trademark, and Facebook launches an iPad app -- finally.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Those of you who want to check out an Android app without an Android device can now run that app on your PC thanks to a program from the folks at BlueStacks (download).

The software, dubbed the BlueStacks App Player, has just hit the alpha stage, meaning a test version of it is now available for anyone to download. The basic player lets you run several preloaded apps, install up to 26 others, and sync apps from an Android phone to your PC.

I installed the App Player on a PC running Windows 7. The installation failed the first time … Read more

IBM and 3M today said they will develop new adhesives designed to build silicon towers that will be packaged on 3D semiconductors.

The collaboration--IBM brings the semiconductor know-how and 3M is the adhesive expert--aims to make commercial 3D chips via new materials.

According to IBM, the idea is to stack semiconductors in layers up to 100 chips. These chip stacks would allow for better integration and system-on-a-chip capability. Compute, networking, and memory could be stacked on one processor.

IBM has outlined nanoscale breakthroughs before, but one big hurdle is finding the materials to package these 3D silicon skyscrapers. New adhesives … Read more

You probably learned in elementary school that outlining is a good way to organize your thoughts. ThoughtStack is a basic tool that lets you create flexible outlines, or tree hierarchies, with your ideas. It's not the most intuitive program we've ever used, but with a little practice, we can see how it could be a very effective way to brainstorm and keep track of what you come up with.

The program's interface is plain, with a text box at the top and a larger pane below where the tree is displayed. To add a node to the … Read more