SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nvidia unveiled the next-generation chips in its roadmap for desktop computers and mobile devices today. And by 2015, those devices will be 100 times faster than they were in 2011.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, made the announcements at its GPU Tech conference today in San Jose, Calif. He said that the company’s next-generation graphics core for desktop and high-end mobile computers will move from Kepler to Maxwell in 2014. By 2015, Nvidia will launch Volta, a chip that includes its first instance of Denver processing technology.

With Volta, Nvidia will move to 3D transistors and stacked memory, or memory chips on a circuit board that are stacked on top of each other.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is also refreshing its lineup of Tegra mobile processors for smartphones, tablets, and other power-efficient devices. Nvidia is currently shipping (or about to ship) its Tegra 4 mobile processors. By 2014, Nvidia will launch Logan, which will presumably be called Tegra 5, and it will launch Parker in 2015. From 2011 (with Tegra 2) to 2015 with Parker, Nvidia’s processing power in Tegra chips will have grown 100 times in performance. Normally, chip improvements would call for an eight-fold increase in performance.

“You’re not the only one who has been holding their breath for these chips,” Huang said in his keynote speech.

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Galvanize is a coworking space in Denver dedicated to stimulating the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Today, it is opening the doors to its gSchool, a full-time, six-month web development program.

The 30,000-square foot facility opened in October, with Galvanize touting the three pillars of “capital, community, and curriculum.” Since then, over 100 members have moved in to generate ideas, collaborate, and build companies. Galvanize designed the facility for the needs of early-stage companies, offering options for individuals with ideas to small founding teams to growing businesses with 30 employees. Galvanize’s emphasis is on community and supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem at every phase of development.

However, even with work space, mentorship, and capital, companies cannot grow if they don’t have the team to support it. gSchool seeks to expand the talent pool by providing skills and training to people interested in becoming programmers. The creators of the program guarantee their graduates a job with a minimum salary of $60,000 within three months — or their money back.

“One of the things we face in the microenvironment here at Galvanize is a developer shortage,” said Chris Onan, Galvanize’s managing director of venture capital. “We have 55 companies that call this home, and 40 are looking to hire a web developer. It is holding our companies back, both in the Denver/Boulder area, but more broadly all around the county and the world. Tech talent is an issue, and this is something we are doing to address that.”

gSchool is a partnership with Galvanize and web development firm Jumpstart Lab. The curriculum includes a number of popular coding languages and accommodates a range of skills levels. Students benefit from a rigorous curriculum as well as from proximity to the hotbed of startups and elite group of mentors that are involved with Galvanize. These interactions not only provide opportunities to gain practical experience but also to build relationships that can support their own careers.

Jeff Casimir is the cofounder of Jumpstart Labs and the program director of gSchool. He has an extensive background in education and said his goal is to turn “normal people” into professional web developers.

“I think the sheer practice of skills is more significant than the amount of materials,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We could go over everything the students need to know in a few weeks, but that’s not good enough. They need to practice those skills so they become automatic. They need to be able to know the hard things are possible and have a toolkit. The startup community can’t wait for colleges to change their curriculum.”

While Galvanize and gSchool have the immediate goal of stimulating the Denver/Boulder startup scene, the vision is ultimately to be part of a larger, nationwide effort to address unemployment and tech labor shortages by offering an alternative form of education. Onan said there are far too many college graduates saddled with debt and working as bartenders or waitresses because they can’t find jobs, and as a result, attitudes about traditional career paths are changing.

“Millennials are moving to Denver and Boulder in droves to start companies,” Onan said. “The Corporate America game has been played. There is so much activity here, a lot that we owe to Brad Feld and David Cohen. A lot of the Galvanize companies have graduated from TechStars. Galvanize and gSchool are additive to that community. We want to see this become a tech epicenter attracting people from all over the world.”

By offering a place to work, an active support network, opportunities for capital, events, and education, Galvanize strives to leave no need untouched for entrepreneurs. All that’s left is ski lessons.

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That made yesterday’s Failcon — a San Francisco event where entrepreneurs revel in their most humiliating defeats — an ideal venue for co-founder Joe Gebbia to talk about his company’s five-year journey to legitimacy, and some serious revenue generation.

The key to success is finding your way out of “the trough of sorrow,” where an entrepreneur’s true mettle is tested, said Gebbia.

After the initial buzz and excitement of a company’s launch wears off, a long and grueling trek to adoption often follows. (The so-called trough of sorrow.) Gebbia and his co-founder Brian Chesky went through a period of 18 months where they were completely broke, owed $15,000 on their credit cards and were struggling to get potential investors to understand their vision.

“Our whole premise was a fail,” said Gebbia, showing slides of early versions of the company’s site design and logo. The initial concept of providing a housing solution focused around conferences was not sustainable, and required a rethink, Gebbia said.

Airbnb pairs people who have extra space in their home or apartment with those travelers who are willing to pay to stay with strangers.

While the idea is not for everyone, the opportunity to save a significant sum off the price of a hotel has propelled to company  to massive user adoption. Gebbia said Airbnb expects to book 3 million stays on its platform this year. In July the company raised $112 million in new financing in a round led by Andreesen Horowitz, DST and General Catalyst, at a valuation in excess of $1.3 billion.

During the 18-month trough of sorrow the founders couldn’t raise a dime, but they were able to attract significant attention on more than one occasion. During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the company emerged as one of the success stories of the conference, because they helped find lodging for many of the nearly 100,000 travelers to Denver, a city with only 20,000 hotel rooms. Attention flooded in, traffic spiked temporarily, but user growth did not follow.

“I think most people fail when they’ve hit the trough of sorrow,”  Gebbia told me after his presentation. “If you can get through the trough of sorrow, you can get through all the adversities of starting a company. The trough of sorrow makes or breaks people.”

Airbnb has become so successful, that the name itself has become synonymous with the concept of collaborative consumption – sharing the things you own and aren’t using with strangers. While showing pictures of the apartment he shared with Chesky, where the first Airbnb users slept, Gebbia said he was literally laughed out of meetings with potential investors.

Through it all, though, Gebbia and his partners never lost site of the initial vision, which gave them passion and dedication that fueled their eventual success.

“Because we’ve experienced it, we could believe in it,” said Gebbia.

[Image Credit: Jaymi Heimbuch/Flickr]