First things first: Why would you pick a name which sounds so similar to nVidia? I’ve had friends who’s startups had names that differed by more than a mere two letters from other brand names, but still got letters from brand lawyers from similarly names companies within days. Just strange, but I suppose investigating naming choices is beyond the scope of this blog.

Movidia is a fabless semiconductor startup based out of Dublin, Ireland, and has just secured $14 million in Series A funding led by Celtic House Venture Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company intends to enable users to be able to edit videos directly on their mobile devices. Especially, they are targeting the always on-the-go users, who contribute a lot of User Generated Content (UGC), but rarely have time to sit down and edit their content on a PC. There really is not much information available regarding the actual processors that the company intends to develop, other than the claim that they are supposed to be low-power. Since the company targets a lot of video processing, where a lot of parallelization can be exploited by working on different parts of the image simultaneously, one could expect either a multi-core processor or something along a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector processor.

There are a couple of issues that seem to bother me about the company’s strategy, although they are simply guesses without knowing what the company is actually developing. First, it is unlikely that mobile device developers will want to integrate an extra chip into their devices. They are having enough trouble with battery life on the current crop of smart-phones as it is. As such, it would seem the company would have to develop a chip that implements all the other basic cell-phone functionality as well. Which leads directly to the second problem - they would have to go up against the mobile processor giants such as Qualcomm, TI, and even possibly Intel depending on the final power envelope. All of these companies have mobile chips and sophisticated development tools to go along with them – which would make it difficult for Movidia to compete. Then again, Sean Mitchell has been around the semiconductor industry for a long time, and has lead Parthus Technologies through an IPO in 2000, so he just might have a few aces up his sleeve. Until Movidia reveals more about what exactly they are developing, enjoy the video below that the company created as an introduction.