Richard Garriott’s Father, Owen, was an astronaut. The neighbors on either side of his childhood home, Joe Engle and Hoot Gibson, were astronauts. “Going to space,” Garriott said at SXSW on Monday, “seemed like something everybody just did.” Garriott has since made millions developing video games (famously inserting himself into the Ultima series of role-playing […]
Julie Urhman might be a great fundraiser, but she’s no saleswoman. The CEO of OUYA — the Kickstarter-funded wunderkompany that raised more than $8.5 million dollars to build an independent, developer-friendly video game console — thinks her product is incredible. But if you press her for details on why you, the consumer, might actually purchase […]
Raucous applause greeted guests of the 100 Year Starship panel at SXSW as they took the stage. It seems little introduction was necessary for this crowd to heap praise upon the panel, but the moderator Benjamin Palmer (of the interactive marketing firm The Barbarian Group) introduced the panelists anyway as: Dr. Mae Jemison (astronaut, first […]
Some urban planners are geniuses. Some are Albert Speer. And some put the sewage plant next to the theme park. It’s in the last category that Electronic Arts is currently falling in. For all the innovation and improvement EA and Maxis have put in this potential gem, there’s an unholy stench of soiled diapers and […]
Shadowrun may be the most popular geek franchise you’ve never heard of. The game started life in 1989 as a pen-and-paper roleplaying game, and while it never quite achieved the same notoriety outside of nerd circles as its distant cousin Dungeons & Dragons, or even it’s contemporary Vampire: The Masquerade, it’s always been much beloved […]
Sci-fi fans and computer users are always fantasizing about ever more advanced computer interfaces and Leap Motion is more than happy to provide. Leap Motion is a new 3D motion control sensor designed to put usability quite literally in the user’s hands. Compatible with both Apple and PCs, users need only to plug the three-inch […]
Lenovo’s been making an impressive push with its new wave of hardware. The company was kind enough to send us the new IdeaCentre B540 to give it a once over. As a regular user of Windows Vista and until a few months ago, a Windows XP user (I know!), I was excited to put a […]
Dr. Mike North likes building stuff. A lot. At the start of his Sunday morning SXSW panel, North showed video of a trip to Lithuania, where he and a bunch of other engineers decided to build a snowbike by replacing the front wheel of a bicycle with a small pair of skis. North showed footage […]
To an overflowing crowd of devoted fans at the SXSW Gaming Expo, Axel Alonso (Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief), Arune Singh (Director of Communications at Marvel Entertainment), and Peter Phillips (senior vice president and general manager of Marvel Entertainment’s Digital Media Group) gave updates to existing projects and explained exactly what the teased Project Gamma is going […]
As the SXSW behemoth slowly awakened, Bill Gates gave the final keynote at SXSWedu. The host introduced Gates as a “modern day Edison,” an apt comparison in more ways than one, but if philanthropy redeems, perhaps we should forgive him. Gates described the explosion in computing power and the implosion in cost, telling an anecdote […]
