I mentioned it in an earlier post, but as it all went down while I was in the middle of swappin’ out cameras, I missed getting this little gem on video. Fortunately, ye olde Tube of Yous has come through. To explain what you’re seeing: About halfway through his set, Coulton pushed an iDVD-built video menu to the concert hall’s projection screens. It had two items: one labeled “Play this one”, one labeled “Not this one”. After a few rounds of playful banter between Coulton and a sound guy whos name he simply couldn’t remember, they managed to tag-team the audience into chanting for the not-to-be-played video (The camera used in that video up above didn’t quite pick up just how loud the chant was – people were pretty riled up). “Sound Guy” clicks the no-no video, aaaaaand it’s a rickroll. There were a few thousand people in that concert hall. Could this be the largest simultaneous Rickroll in the history of the intarwebs? → Read More
You hear that rumble? Thats an army of geeks, gettin’ down so damn hard that the very walls around us were beginning to crumble. Okay, fine – it’s just a nasty bit of clipping caused by the compact-car sized subwoofers lining the edges of the stage. They were inescapable. Wherever we stood, it was like the subs were in our camera. Sounded amazing in person; on film, not quite as nice. Read on for impressions of the set and a shot of the crowd showing off their gadget collection. → Read More
Late last year we discovered that MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson, arguably the most popular individual on the Internet with 240+ million MySpace friends (he is added by default to every MySpace account) was actually 37 years old, not the 32 that he continues to claim on his MySpace page.
Now we’ve learned a much more colorful part of Anderson’s history: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below) that he was “convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation” (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”
MySpace and Anderson would not comment on this post. But most of the information is now available online as news articles from the 1980s (and earlier) have been added to Google and other search engines. We came across an initial article accidentally and started investigating from there. Some of the information in this post has been obtained by a source close to Anderson. → Read More
I had the best spot in the house, standing on a nice sturdy chair staring down the 10x zoom lens of an HD camera from about 15 feet from the stage. Then the battery died on the camera and security kicked me off my chair, simultaneously. After egging the audience into rickrolling themselves, Jonathan brought Felicia Day (who, by the way, we’ll be spending a few minutes with tomorrow afternoon for a quick Q&A) of The Guild and Dr. Horribles Sing-Along Blog to be the voice of GlaDOS. Too friggin’ awesome. Update: Second (and, yes, quite a bit better) video after the jump: → Read More
It’s no burning man, but CrunchGear is live at the Penny Arcade Expo where we’re playing RPGs, engaging in cosplay, and decreasing our chances of perhaps, one day, losing our virginity. Pop by CrunchGear for more news and photos. → Read More
I know you were all wondering what this moment looked like. The jealous, huddled masses were sitting outside while we flimsily credentialed press got to lick the first public playables of Spore, Mirror’s Edge, and so on up and down. Frankly I expected a little more violence. Not that it would have made for a better convention, but it certainly would be quite a video. → Read More
They told us to stop filming but we’re naughty and we’re putting it up anyway. It’s a public convention and this is a public build that most people have already seen the demo of anyway, right? No harm, no foul. This is the same demo they showed me at E3 (same build, even) and the demo videos are good, but we thought you might want a little idiotic commentary to help wash down the postapocalyptic angst. → Read More
I think it’s actually more accurate to say that I failed to Zerg my opponent correctly. The game looks great, it controls just like the original to be honest, and the graphics are smooth and very detailed. I have this feeling that my old Protoss tactics are going to be of little use in this updated game. Although you’ll be happy to learn that many of your favorite units and buildings are still around and function more or less the same. Updated with better video. You like that sound? The Blizzard booth is kitty corner from the Rock Band 2 stage, and you know they aren’t going to turn it down. → Read More
As mentioned earlier, Bungie had one level from their upcoming “Mythic” map pack on display at PAX 08. Called “Assembly”, it’s a very Midship-esque Covenant themed map. I gave it a quick run through earlier today, trying to get as much of the level on video as possible while attempting to avoid firefights — not an easy task. Beside the sneak peak, Bungie had little else to say about the map pack. → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&file=http%3A//blip.tv/rss/flash/1220689&feedurl=http%3A//crunchgear.blip.tv/rss/&autostart=false&brandname=CrunchGear&brandlink=http%3A//crunchgear.blip.tv/ $7.00 on Brando. For this we’re killing the environment. → Read More
After missing a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville. → Read More
We’re here in my hometown covering the hell out of PAX. This was the waiting room, which was later full to capacity. These poor souls all had to wait while Greg and I checked out Starcraft 2, Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3, Rock Band 2, and about a billion other awesome games that are playable there. We’ll have videos coming up as soon as they are encoded and uploaded, so stay tuned! → Read More
I’ve contemplated ditching my business cards for some time, but every convention I attend and every PR flack requires me to donate one dead tree to them. A friend recently told me he had ditched business cards altogether a while back and immediately directs people to connect with him on linkedin, which is a great idea. But, I really want a kickass looking business card that won’t get lost in the shuffle. I think I found what I’ve been looking for over at Instructables. The video only gives the final product and if you’re steady with a soldering iron then read on, good buddy. → Read More
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=33781 Yesterday’s list was incomplete and/or inaccurate. Today, MS released the full achievement list to IGN. The full list and a few other goodies from the horse’s mouth aka Cliffy B. after the jump. I can’t f*cking wait for this game! BODIES AS SHIELDS!!! → Read More
Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.
Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.
We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.
Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date. → Read More
