Wired: Top Stories (19 unread)
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Wired Video: How to Make Carrot 'Caviar'
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab Blog
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Chef and food hacker Michael Zbyszynksi explains how to make carrot caviar using ordinary carrot juice and a common chemical. In Gadget Lab.
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Spielberg's 'Boom Blox' Brings Art of Destruction to the Wii
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Chris Kohler
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: On May 6, famed director Steven Spielberg will release his first collaboration with game publisher Electronic Arts -- a clever, innovative Wii game called Boom Blox. Inspired by Spielberg's childhood love of destroying his toys, Boom Blox lets players experience the joy of smashing elaborate towers of blocks by throwing baseballs at them using the Wii remote.
But it's got much, much more. Multiplayer modes that mimic Jenga have up to four players pulling and throwing blocks in fierce competition. And a robust creation mode lets you make your own puzzles, then trade them with friends online.
Left: Gamers of all skill levels can enjoy throwing balls at this tower of blocks: Winding up with the Wiimote, then letting a baseball fly at the tower, is a universally fun experience. But hardcore gamers can approach each of Boom Blox's hundreds of puzzles with an eye towards perfection. One of these blocks will, when struck precisely, cause the whole tower to come tumbling down at once, as shown here.
: A tower of wooden blocks explodes, thanks to some strategically placed red Bomb Blox, as the town full of chickens panics in reaction.
While the core concept of Boom Blox was pure Spielberg, one of the Indiana Jones director's other major contributions to the game design was adding a cast of animal characters and a variety of different settings, like the Old West. "We were on the path of creating a very generic puzzle game, and he came in and really championed having themed worlds and characters you interact with to add that sort of emotional wrapper to it," says Amir Rahimi, the game's producer.
: Having carefully placed his Bomb Blox on this tower, Boots Beaverton celebrates as he knocks down a whole pile of valuable numbered Point Blox.
In addition to the extensive single-player puzzle mode, Boom Blox also contains a great deal of multiplayer content, both cooperative and competitive. In this mode, players compete to knock down as many gold blocks as possible. Each has a specific point value that players will earn if the block hits the ground during their turn. The game's physics engine accurately calculates the blocks' weight, so you'll have a harder time knocking the bigger ones over.
: An army of skeletons bears down upon the kittens' fortified stronghold. Can you hold them off and save the poor cats?
Some of the levels are purely twitch- and timing-based. In this level, you have to defend the adorable bow-tied kittens from the evil skeleton army. If you throw balls at the red Bomb Blox, they'll explode and take down the skeletons. As with all Boom Blox challenges, perfection (less dead cats, in this particular case) will give you higher scores and unlock more and more challenges.
: Dragging this block out of the way will help the mother gorilla get to her little children.
Not only do all of the different character blocks have different behaviors, they also act differently depending on what other characters are around. In the case of the mother gorilla, if her babies are on the screen, she'll do anything she can to get to them. This sets up some clever puzzles in which you have to gently move blocks around in order to create a path that Mom Gorilla can follow to her brood.
: This would represent a very bad move.
Boom Blox isn't all about wanton destruction. Just as many of the levels involve precision movements. In a mode reminiscent of Jenga but significantly more complex, you pull individual bricks out of a tower without letting it fall over. Some multiplayer games have blocks with negative values, and if you accidentally pull them out, you lose points.
: The dogs are attempting to defend their castle from the army of invading skeletons. Don't let them take your green Gem Blox away!
The real meat of Boom Blox is the game's extensive creation mode. You can edit any of the game's puzzles and change things up. It could be as simple as swapping out a bowling ball for the baseball -- try throwing that and see how much easier it is to take down a tower!
But you can also create your own elaborate puzzles with a whole variety of different goals. You can then upload them to EA's servers, where other players can download your creations and attempt to solve them -- then tweak them and re-upload them as slightly different puzzles, if they so desire.
: So many golden Point Blox, so few bombs. Where can you place them to ensure that this entire structure blows up in a chain reaction?
"In my opinion, part of what makes Steven Spielberg the master filmmaker that he is is his ability to spot and deliver what is universally compelling," says Rahimi. "The core of this game, that urge to build something up and break it down, exists with just about everybody in this world. So when you pick up that Wii remote and start bashing stuff down, it satisfies something that's really primal and really deep.
"When I heard the idea, it made perfect sense. In my mind, his credibility as a gamemaker just about tripled that day, because he figured out an idea that would be a fun videogame. And that's the mark of someone who can really deliver entertainment."
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May 6, 1937: A Ball of Fire und Alles Ist Kaput
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Tony Long
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1937: The German passenger zeppelin Hindenburg explodes and crashes while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 people and dooming the future of commercial trans-Atlantic zeppelin service.
The Hindenburg (which might have been named Adolf Hitler if not for the strong anti-Nazi views held by Hugo Eckener, director of the Zeppelin Company) and its sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, are the largest aircraft ever to fly. They stretched 804 feet — nearly the length of the largest trans-Atlantic ocean liners of the period.
Although other nations, notably Great Britain and the United States, built rigid airships, the German technology was superior. The Hindenburg’s latticework airframe was constructed of a lightweight alloy composed largely of aluminum and copper. Sixteen gas cells expanded to a capacity of 7,062,100 cubic feet for lift, and the airship was propelled by four 16-cylinder diesel engines, allowing it to carry 72 passengers and 60 crew across the Atlantic Ocean in just three days at a brisk 135 kilometers per hour (84 mph).
And it carried them in comfort. The passenger accommodations, contained in the airship's hull rather than its gondola, were designed by Fritz August Breuhaus, who had done similar work with Pullman railroad coaches and ocean liners. Hindenburg at one point carried a grand piano on board, although this was later removed to save weight.
Hindenburg, designated LZ-129 by its builder and named for Field Marshal (and Weimar President) Paul von Hindenburg, was designed to be filled with nonflammable helium as the lifting agent. But when the United States, which possessed all the world's natural helium sources, imposed an embargo on selling the gas to Nazi Germany, the company turned to the far-more-combustible hydrogen.
The exact cause of the Lakehurst crash has never been established. Given the strained relationship that existed between Germany and the United States at the time, sabotage was an early and popular theory. It seems likelier, though, that a lightning strike, or sparking on the hull that ignited leaking hydrogen, was to blame.
Whatever the reason, the spectacular crash killed 35 of the 96 passengers and crew aboard, as well as one member of the ground crew. It also killed the trans-Atlantic zeppelin business.
The industry might have survived, at least until World War II, if not for the intense media coverage of the crash, highlighted by radio reporter Herbert Morrison’s anguished cry as he broadcast from the scene: "Oh, the humanity!"
(Source: Various)
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Lights, Rockets, Robots Take Center Stage at Maker's Faire
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal and Jenna Wortham
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: SAN MATEO, California -- Maker Faire has a reputation as the premiere destination for people who like to build stuff of all shapes, kinds and scales.
This year's Bay Area iteration of the event didn't disappoint, with tens of thousands of nerds, hackers and crafters descending on the San Mateo fairgrounds outside San Francisco for two days of circuit boards, fire and do-it-yourself demonstrations.
With nearly 500 exhibitors presenting their creations, the Faire can be bewildering, so we sent a crack team from the Wired.com office down Highway 101 to cherry-pick the 12 coolest projects that we spotted over the weekend.
Left: Members of LUNAR, the Livermore Unit of the National Association of Rocketry, sent rockets flying into the air. They also provided the lighter side of rocket science. In this shot, some of the group's junior members give it a go.
: Bay Area husband-and-wife art team, Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito led the creation of these 30-foot-tall sculptures along with more than 100 collaborators from the Headless Point Artists' Retreat and Labor Camp.
Originally created for Burning Man, the two sculptures, Ecstasy, the feminine sculpture, and Mambatu, the squatting man, guarded the food court at the Maker's Faire.
The oversize figures are part of a larger eight-figure installation called Crude Awakening.
: An enormous skull greeted visitors to the Faire, 9-feet-tall and made out of e-waste. Its eyes and teeth were flat-panel screens.
A projector mounted on the skull played a series of sci-fi classics like The Last Man on Earth. Faire-goers could even text the skull and hear their message read aloud by one of hundreds of synthesized voices. Self-powered, it moved to the theme from the movie Jaws.
Its maker, James Burgett, describes himself as a "self-educated electronics recycler and generally strange guy who gives away computers."
: Acme Muffineering presented their whimsical take on personal transportation, which is essentially an electric vehicle set inside a metal "muffin" tin. The group says the muffins are about 18 times the size of your average muffin, but decidedly less delicious. On the other hand, the muffin cars can speed up to 18 mph, which is beyond the reach of your ordinary morning confection.
: A 17-foot robotic giraffe with webcams in his eyes and special touch-sensitive sensors proved a crowd pleaser over the weekend.
"Hello, my name is Russell," the electric giraffe, aka Rave Raffe, said to a crowd of children.
Russell rewarded kids tickling his sensors by saying, "He. He. He. That tickles," and "That feels nice." The whimsical giraffe is the creation of Russell Pinnington, after whom the robot was named, and Lindz Lawlor, who provides the base for its voice. You might have caught earlier versions of the beast at Burning Man over the last couple of years.
: Husband-and-wife industrial-arts team Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito presented their 6-ton, 20-foot-tall sculpture Epiphany to the Maker Faire.
The team considers the fire-spewing figure a manifestation of the current state of an oil-dependent economy.
"She could be fearful or hopeful, worshipping either a tree or oil derrick," Cusolito said, "but either way, she's engulfed in a state of fervor."
Fire technicians Danya Parkinson and Joe Bard of art collective Pyrokinetics were responsible for rigging Epiphany's pyrotechnics: They installed a pilot light in the cardiac region of her 20-foot-tall frame that, when triggered, radiates fire outwards through her hands. The blazes are supposed to mimic a fiery vascular system.
: Any good carnival wouldn't be complete without rides, and at the Maker Faire, a 21st-century experiment in artistry, science and sideshow acts, the Unwheeldy, a two-wheeled cycle, was in high demand.
In the photo, Festival-goers Alex Woodman and Taylor Johnston, both 12, pedal the tandem two-seater.
Bay Area computer software engineer Matthew Blaine, 34, co-designed and built the vehicle, which he called a "giant tandem dicycle." The dicycle's wheels are each 9-feet tall and positioned 5-feet apart from one another, set in a steel frame.
The hardest part about building a monstrous bike? Finding super-size materials. "Most bike shops don't carry giant, 4-foot spokes," Blaine said. "So we made them out of salvaged steel."
: Stanford neuroscience grad student Alan Rorie showed off his hand-built, steam-powered time machine.
Created out of copper, sheets of steel and nitric-acid etched brass plates, the sculpture is hooked to a steam engine with a steam boiler to power its movement. Of course, Rorie's machines don't actually bend the laws of physics, but he credits his creations with helping to pass the time and "keeping [him] sane." His steampunky time machine, or "dihemispheric chronaether agitator," as he calls it, was handcrafted over the last few months.
: If one thing is true about the crowd at Maker Faire, it's that they love robots. If two things are true about Makers, it's that they love robots fighting.
This year, the world's largest robotic fighting league, RoboGames, put on an exhibition called the ComBot Cup. You've undoubtedly seen RoboGames bots in action, so we went backstage to snap some pictures of the competitors retooling their machines after several rounds of combat.
Here, R.D. van Noy and Scott Kincaid worked on their heavyweight robot "S.J." on Saturday.
: This year, the world's largest robotic fighting league, RoboGames, put on an exhibition called the ComBot Cup. You've undoubtedly seen RoboGames bots in action, so we went backstage to snap some pictures of the competitors retooling their machines after several rounds of combat.
Backstage at the RoboGames competition at Maker Faire, Curt Meyers pushes his robot, "Jaws of Death," into position.
: At sunset Saturday, the emphasis of the fair shifted from making to burning. One group, Interpretative Arson, built a "large-scale fire toy that translates anyone's movements into fire."
Functionally, the 2πR project consisted of a series of propane tanks arrayed in a circle around a central platform. The platform was mounted with ground-based sensors that were rigged to torches atop the propane tanks. A person standing on the platform could point in the direction of a tank, thereby covering the sensor, causing the torches in that direction to explode into fire.
The group allowed audience members to get into the central platform and make the fire dance, like this young boy.
: Russell the Giraffe lights up after dark, an indication that he was originally designed as a sideshow for raves. Inside that friendly exterior lurks a 1,000-watt sound system for all your electronic music needs.
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Games Without Frontiers: Online Play Kicks 'Grand Theft Auto IV' Into Overdrive
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Clive Thompson
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Liberty City has always been a strangely lonely place.
Sure, there have always been plenty of virtual citizens in the various Grand Theft Auto cities crafted by Rockstar Games. You were constantly running into caustic gangsters, cynical cops and old folks with walkers who dove out of the way when you rolled up on the sidewalk.
But there were never any other real people there -- no live humans. In meatspace terms, when you played GTA, you played alone. It was always a single-player game: no multiplayer mode, and not even an option to engage in co-op thuggery alongside a friend.
When you think about it, this is superweird. The first GTA debuted in 2001, right around the time that games were moving aggressively online. We were constantly told that artificial-intelligence characters were too stilted -- that the only way to have realistic, unpredictable play was to let gamers engage with other folks online. Hey, Halo proved that online play could extend the shelf life of a console game for, like, 19 years or something, right?
Yet GTA remained stubbornly, even defiantly, single-player. It was as if the Rockstar designers were so proud of their painstakingly crafted metropolises that they didn't want any other messy, mostly-big-bags-of-water humans in there screwing things up.
Until GTA IV arrived -- and Liberty City went online. So I duly logged in, wondering, What the heck is this going to be like? Do I need other people in here? Do I want other people in here?
It turns out that I do, and I do. For my first game, I headed into Hangman's Noose mode, where you team up with other players to accomplish a mission -- in this case, meeting up with a crime boss at the airport and keeping the cops away from him.
It felt like being in a Twilight Zone version of Grand Theft Auto. Everything was the same, but ... different. Much as aficionados of multiplayer gaming would have predicted, my teammates pulled off some hilariously unexpected moves: They'd drive in more spastic or more cunningly accurate patterns than I'd ever seen -- or attempted -- inside the game; they'd perform seemingly kamikaze moves with an AK-47 that the artificial intelligence would never have dared.
Better yet, multiplayer missions give you some subtle yet fascinating new ways to experience the city. At one point, two partners and I piled into a Ferrari while another of my teammates raced across the city. Since I didn't have to drive, I was able to enjoy some sightseeing -- zooming my camera around to different, Hollywood-like angles -- that was never possible when I was the one steering.
The sheer scale of Liberty City makes for online console play that's far more open-ended than anything I'd ever before seen. Most console multiplayer gaming takes place on fairly small maps. But with the mission modes of GTA IV, you're given a really big chunk of sandbox to play in, so there are seemingly zillions of different ways your teammates can accomplish a mission.
This leads to some quite funny incidents. During one mission, one of my partners and I arrived at a waterfront checkpoint -- him in a battered van, me in a sports car. We got out of our vehicles wondering, Hey, where's the third member of our team? So we stood around for two or three minutes, puzzled, admiring the morning sunshine. Suddenly, off in the distance, we saw a car racing toward us. It was a cop car -- and it was on fire. Our third team member emerged triumphantly. I'm still wondering what the hell happened to him.
There are 15 different modes of online play, most of which are pretty good. One clear winner is GTA Race, which blends car racing with combat: You can assault one another's vehicles, and even carjack one another. The result is exquisite madness, with drivers jumping out of wrecked compact cars and in 18-wheel trucks, then tearing off down crowded sidewalks while followed by lowriders hurling Molotov cocktails. If, like me, you're a subpar driver, you can simply abandon the goal and become a machine of revenge -- setting up a roadblock, waiting for other drivers to approach, then blasting them to pieces. This is food for the soul.
Other modes, however, are more of a letdown. I found the death-match games underwhelming, in part because GTA's targeting system isn't very fluid, but also because the maps weren't well designed. They possess few of the nooks and crannies you get in a great Call of Duty or Halo map.
Overall, though, GTA IV will make you glad that Rockstar finally let other people into Grand Theft Auto's world. This city's big enough for the both of us.
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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
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Pentagon Wants Cyberwar Range to 'Replicate Human Behavior and Frailties'
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Danger Room
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Congress orders Darpa, to put together a National Cyber Range, part of a massive, secret $30 billion government-wide effort prep for battle online. Contractors running the Range are supposed to be able to "replicate realistic human behavior on nodes."
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Essential Camping Gadgets for City Dwellers
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab
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Considering leaving the city behind for a weekend of camping? Don't forget these essential gadgets.
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Steven Spielberg's Wii-Inspired Videogame Is a Demolitious Block Party
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Chris Kohler
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Steven Spielberg knows a thing or two about action games. He advised on the development of the Medal of Honor series, based on his film Saving Private Ryan, and he claims to be on his second play-through of the processor-punishing PC title Crysis. So it's a bit surprising to learn that for his first venture as a videogame creative director, the man behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park is making not a photorealistic shooter but a cross between Tetris and Jenga. It all goes back to when he was a kid, Spielberg says. He'd spend hours setting up his electric trains so that the locomotives would crash into one another. Now, with the help of a design team at Electronic Arts, Spielberg hopes to recapture that spirit of creative destruction in Boom Blox, out in May.
Inspired by a Wii tennis session, the auteur got the idea of combining Nintendo's innovative Wiimote motion-sensing controller with his youthful delight in mayhem. In the first few levels, you hurl balls at a pile of blocks. The aim? To knock it down. But it's not just mindless destruction — you have to think strategically about which blocks to take out in order to bring the whole stack down quickly. "When you pick up that Wiimote and start bashing stuff, it satisfies something primal," says Amir Rahimi, the game's senior producer. Game | Life: Episode Twelve: In this week's episode, Steven Spielberg makes a foray into the game business with Boom Blox, and Chris Kohler reviews Mario Kart Wii. For more, visit video.wired.com.
Spielberg didn't just hand off a high concept and then disengage. "He weighed in on everything from the look of the characters and environments to the way the balls move through the air to the different game modes," Rahimi says.
One of those modes challenges players to extract blocks from a complex tower without the whole thing collapsing. Basically, it's Jenga — except that in this digitized version, the buildings are inhabited by cute little creatures. That detail was 100 percent Spielberg. "We were on the path of creating a very generic puzzle game," Rahimi says. "He brought in the idea of having characters you interact with to give it an emotional wrapper."
If the game is as fun as it looks, it may go some way toward erasing those unpleasant memories of the 1983 E.T. game for Atari 2600.
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Internet Mysteries: How Much File Sharing Traffic Travels the Net?
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Threat Level
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Much internet public policy turns on whether ISPs can throttle traffic like peer-to-peer file sharing. But how much of the net's traffic really is file sharing? Turns out that nobody knows -- or if they do, they aren't sharing the data.
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Maker Faire 2008: Scale Model Battleships and Pyrotechnic Sculpture
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 5:15pm EDT by Wired.com Video
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Wired.com's Alexis Madrigal checks out this year's Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. DIY hackers at the tech festival showed off everything from a robotic giraffe to a life-sized Mouse Trap game.
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Yahoo Shareholders Restive After Deal Collapses
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Kevin Kelleher, Portfolio.com
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Subscribe to Portfolio magazineNo Microhoo? Shareholders of Yahoo are clearly unhappy.
Shares of Yahoo fell as much as 19 percent in early trading Monday, to a little more than $23, although still above the level they were at before Microsoft disclosed its $31-per-share offer on January 31.
"The only question is whether this is really the bottom," says Eric Savitz on the Tech Trader Daily blog.
In lowering his rating on Yahoo shares to "sell," Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup, wonders why a deal was not forged. Noting that a price of $35-per-share (the midpoint between $33 and $37) amounted to only $3 billion, or 7 percent of the initial bid, "it's surprising that a 7 percent solution couldn't be found."
Henry Blodget on Silicon Alley Insider, says, "Despite Yahoo's suggestion to the contrary, we have yet to hear from a single Yahoo shareholder who publicly supports Yahoo's board's decision to hold fast at $37."
Yahoo shares have not been at $37 since January 2006.
Kara Swisher on All Things Digital says that some top Yahoo executives are also dismayed that merger discussions collapsed over the weekend.
In particular, the description in the New York Times that some Yahoo executives "were high-fiving each other for defeating Microsoft's bid," caused consternation.
"That was very telling, if it was true," one executive told Swisher. "It shows a complete lack of connection to the balance of the company."
The proposed merger had drawn its share of critics, who charged that integration and cultural issues would outweigh potential benefits from combining the two. But now that the deal won't happen, the outlook for both companies is as dire as it was three months ago, before the merger was proposed.
"Without Yahoo, Microsoft has no compelling means of becoming the No. 2 player in online advertising," said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart. "And without Microsoft, Yahoo has no magic wand to lift its stock back above the mid-20s."
This much is certain: Yahoo's stock will take a hard tumble this week as arbitrageurs and others counting on a Microsoft buyout relinquish their shares at a steep discount to last week's levels. "The word crater comes to mind," said Rob Enderle, president of tech advisory firm Enderle Group.
Yahoo had already been facing at least one shareholder lawsuit after it refused to accept Microsoft's proposal. It's likely to face more lawsuits, as well as other pressure from activist investors.
One of them, Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital, is urging Yahoo shareholders to vote against all of the company's board members when they are up for election later this year. Jackson says that he's started hearing from more Yahoo shareholders since Microsoft dropped its bid.
"They're surprised and extremely frustrated," Jackson said. "They were certain a friendly deal was going to happen."
To appease those shareholders, Yahoo needs to improve its financial performance dramatically. The company unveiled a plan in March showing how a new search technology and an open-source approach to software development would help boost its revenue and cash flow. But analysts and investors have signaled that they aren't impressed.
The best short-term hope for Yahoo to increase its cash flow is to ally itself with the very company that has put it in dire straits—Google. Yahoo and Google may enter into a limited ad partnership that will run Google ads on keywords where Yahoo makes less money.
That could help bring Yahoo new revenue in coming quarters. But it could also drive away advertisers who are on Yahoo precisely because its search engine, which is significantly less popular than Google's, charges less for keywords.
Shares of Microsoft are up nearly 3 percent today, and its stock will likely fare much better in the near term. But longer-term threats to its profit growth remain. Vista software sales are slowing; Apple is gaining market share in desktops and laptops; and Google is pushing free versions of office-productivity software, threatening Microsoft Office's cash cow.
Microsoft has invested heavily in online advertising, only to see its share of the search market—like Yahoo's—decline steadily. The division that includes Microsoft's online-ad business has posted steadily growing operating losses for nine straight quarters. In aggregate, it's racked up $1.7 billion in losses since early 2006.
Such pressures drove Microsoft to pursue Yahoo. The $31-a-share bid that Microsoft made in February offered a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's stock price at the time. But it also discounted 32 percent off the $41-a-share bid that Microsoft had previously made for Yahoo, a bid that was also rebuffed by Yahoo's board.
Last week, Microsoft raised its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo's board held out for $37.
"I think Yahoo misread Microsoft," said Enderle. "People usually bid low and then raise their bids. But Microsoft didn't want talks to drag on, so its strategy was to get the deal done as quickly as possible." Yahoo, however, sensed that protracted talks could strengthen its hand, and so it held firm to a higher bid. "Yahoo thought Microsoft was lowballing it," Enderle said, "and they missed the boat."
So, like Yahoo, Microsoft must now scramble. Ballmer has outlined other possible acquisitions it could make if the Yahoo deal fell through: Facebook, Time Warner's AOL, and News Corp.'s MySpace. Facebook is also determined to remain independent, while AOL has talked with Yahoo about a deal. That leaves MySpace as the easiest partner for Microsoft.
Or Microsoft could simply bide its time and come back to Yahoo after its shareholders start screaming. In doing so, it would follow Larry Ellison's playbook in Oracle's acquisition of BEA Systems. Oracle walked away from BEA after its bid was rejected, then talked a lot about how hard it pushed for its bid. Once BEA investors complained, Oracle bought BEA at a lower price.
"Microsoft can come back again," said Aggarwal, "especially if Yahoo doesn't do very well on its own."
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Did Bill Miller Blow the Microsoft-Yahoo Deal?
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 4:25pm EDT
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Bill Miller, a behind-the-scenes player in Microsoft-Yahoo talks, may have had a hand in the collapse of the deal.
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First 'Massively Multi-User Online Music Fest' in Works
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 1:45pm EDT by Listening Post
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Can't make it to Canada's New Music West later this month? Virtual Vancouver plans to broadcast the show live in its 3-D virtual world.
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Creative Clones the Flip, a Popular $100 Camcorder
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 1:40pm EDT by Gadget Lab
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An online retailer has inadvertently leaked details on the Creative Vado, an upcoming clone of the popular handheld Flip camcorder.
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Your Next Flight May Be Fueled by Trash. And Manure
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 1:20pm EDT by Autopia
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An alt-fuel company wonders: If jet fuel can be produced from algae, why don't we make it from trash, wood waste and ... manure?
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Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Marty Graham
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Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you'll ever need.
Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It's starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.
Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper's classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.
"I'm extremely bullish about this business -- it's not a question of if it will explode, but when," says Taylor, who spun the business off his baby boomer social networking site Eons.com. "I've watched and built a career on migrating the whole newspaper to the web, and the obituary section is the laggard category."
The site comes as the funeral industry is learning to target the public's desire to grieve online for the dearly departed. On social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, online memorials are springing up organically to give friends, family members and strangers a place to mourn, and even small, family-owned funeral homes have begin offering web-based memorials for their customers.
The site sets itself apart from memorial sites like SweetMemoriesSite.com, ChristianMemorials.com and PreciousMemoriesAndMore.com in two ways. First, people can find information on those who've died with a name search from a database that includes the entire Social Security Death Index since 1936 (which Legacy.com already offers). And second, the site plans to market more to the funeral industry than other sites, where individuals pay for tributes.
Tributes will allow people to verify deaths, get memorial service information, and leave tributes and messages.
"Until Tributes, people had to have very specific information -- where their friends died and what funeral home handled the services -- to find out what happened and leave memorials," said John Heald, a funeral director who is working with Tributes.com. "We are building a channel to the funeral industry to build our site with them, so we can be an aggregator for all the obituaries."
Tributes plans to sell its service to funeral homes that will then package an online tribute with the other services offered to the bereaved. Obits will stay up indefinitely, while condolences may come down after five to 10 years.
"We need to learn from MySpace. For example, when a teenager dies there are thousands of condolences," Heald says. "It's a new, important, effective way of grieving."
The death-care industry is ready to embrace an idea like Tributes.com, says Robin Heppell, who coaches funeral directors on how to use the web to promote their business and to make their services more valuable.
"People who spend the winter in Florida log on to faraway websites during the winter to check to see who died back home," the Vancouver-based funeral director and consultant says. "Most funeral homes have websites now, and those that don't are looking at setting up."
Mortuaries with well-established websites, like Pellerin Funeral Home in Louisiana and Haskett Funeral Homes in Canada, say the amount of traffic they get, and the way the websites are used, surprise even them. Both family-owned businesses have learned to upload video tributes to their sites, and keep a condolence page open to collect messages long after the funerals.
"I have friends who check the website every day to see who's died, and our parish sheriff leaves a tribute for every one," says Debbie Gauthier, who manages the Pellerin website. "We know it's one of the best things we can do for the family -- the tributes and condolences are comforting to people long after the funeral has ended."
There's definitely a hunger for online memorials. The Pellerin website includes a longstanding video tribute to Pope John Paul, who died in April 2005, that still gathers many hits a day. "You can watch that one forever, we won't be taking it down," Gauthier says.
And Heppell points to the memorial page on Facebook for Stefanie Rengel, a 14-year-old Toronto girl murdered in January. "Ten thousand people offered condolences, memories and comfort," Heppell says.
The industry is already learning that a decedent's self-created MySpace or Facebook profile can be jarring for the families of the recently deceased. Heppell advised funeral homes to "have one of the deceased friends look at their page first, because there can be suggestive photos and explicit language that the families aren't ready to deal with."
Taylor, who left Monster.com in 2005 to launch Eons.com, a website popular with aging baby boomers, started his newest venture after noticing that there was no central repository for online memorials where one could grieve and remember -- and verify the loss of -- a loved one.
He spun Tributes off Eons as a separate entity, and sought investors to give Tributes five to 10 years to take off.
"Jeff always had his eye on Monster's obits, and he noticed the obits weren't getting any traction for getting online, even when every other section of a traditional newspaper had made the transition," Haney says. "When he evolved a strategy for Eons as a lifestyle brand for boomers, he saw that the grieving groups are very popular at Eons."
By harvesting the U.S. Death Index, Tributes will automatically have a listing for everyone who dies, or who has died since 1936.
The website also plans to offer round-the-clock grief support groups.
"Traditional support groups that meet once a week aren't as valuable to members as the 24/7 online groups," Haney says.
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Nine Inch Nails Gives Fans The Slip
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 10:44am EDT by ListeningPost
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NiN's latest album is yours for the taking. It's available for free in several formats: MP3, Lossless (FLAC or Apple) or 24-bit, 96 Kbps WAV.
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Beauty and the Beak: Bald Eagle Goes Bionic
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:13am EDT by Associated Press
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A bald eagle named Beauty was found scrounging for food at an Alaska landfill, slowly starving to death starving because most of her beak was shot off. A mechanical engineer, a dentist and a veterinarian are among the volunteers who have been working for two years to make Beauty an artificial beak.
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Mavel-ous 'Iron Man' Pure Gold at the Box Office
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 8:52am EDT by Associated Press
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'Iron Man' takes the top spot at the U.S. box office this weekend with a $100 million debut and wracks up more than $200 million world-wide. The film, the first from Marvel Studios, is the second-biggest opener ever among non-sequels -- only 'Spider Man' did better.