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Reports: Apple To Buy Israeli 3D Sensing Company PrimeSense
Several sources, including this report at Forbes, and this one at All Things Digital, say that Apple has bought (or is in the process of buying) Tel-Aviv based PrimeSense, the company behind the 3-D sensing technology in Microsoft's Kinect, for $345 million. The Forbes piece also gives a compact but interesting summary of the possibilities of ubiquitous 3-D hardware, and the sudden, recent drop in price of the components necessary for that to happen. Devices like the Lynx 3-D scanner that I saw at last year's SXSW (targeting the cheap and portable end of the 3-D scanning market) may have a lot of competition in the near future.
Also MS licensed Kinect technology from Prime Sense. These licenses don't go away simply because the company changes owners. SCO found out the hard way in the Novell case. They got the licensing business from Novell, not the copyrights. Just because they bought the business from Santa Cruz does not mean they can change the past agreements they made with Novell.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.