Media & Entertainment

In 2010, Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 accessory it said would change the way gamers played. The Kinect was the first motion controlled gaming system that didn’t require a controller, instead allowing players to use their whole body to move the game. While the Nintendo Wii popularized motion controls with its innovative Wii Remotes Continue Reading →

About five years ago I bought a Chevy Suburban (aka “the Rig”). I got it for a great price. The gas mileage is terrible but I only planned to use it to go camping at Timothy Lake or snow shoeing on Mt. Hood. It turned out that the Rig also really came in handy when Continue Reading →

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has apologized for the Wii U’s missing features at launch. “Personally I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box,” Iwata told IGN in an interview published yesterday. “So I feel very sorry for the Continue Reading →

Groupon has just hit a home run. The daily deals site announced that it is now the choice service for Major League Baseball’s interactive media and Internet company. Through this deal, the MLB will handle the deals from its 30 clubs right through the GrouponLive events platform. GrouponLive, the online ticketing deals platform for Groupon, Continue Reading →

In 1996, people in the U.S. bought about 2.3 albums per year. Today, thanks to services like Spotify and Rdio, some of us listen to that many albums a day. Last-minute concert ticket app WillCall wants to make live music just as accessible. This week it released version 1.5 of its iOS app, which delivers Continue Reading →

Instagram’s tilt-shift effect is the finishing touch on a work of smartphone art. It can be a masterstroke or a muddy mess, depending on how you use it. Too often, we’ve seen tilt-shift overused, misappropriated or misunderstood. For the uninitiated, the tilt-shift effect is used by photographers to highlight a plane or exaggerate a minimal Continue Reading →

Will Facebook continue its reign atop the social hierarchy? Will businesses get better returns on their social media investment? Will your CEO finally learn to tweet? Here’s a look at the biggest social media trends set to unfold in the year ahead. Mobile social media usage continues to soar: In September, Facebook made a monumental–if Continue Reading →

The treatment of women in and by the video games industry has been a hot topic for most of the year – and for the last couple of days in particular. Hot on the heels of an Edge feature bemoaning and exploring the gender disparity in the video game industry, yesterday, women took to Twitter Continue Reading →

DRM rears its ugly, malformed, malignant, cross-eyed head again. Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic “anti-piracy” schemes. Combine this “malware” with digital distribution that sticks the Continue Reading →

Ed Fries, co-creator of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console, believes it is harder for gaming platform makers Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to ignore the gaming and app experience that Apple has created, highlighting the iPhone and iPad maker’s creation of a platform that is easy to develop for and affordable for gamers. In an interview with Continue Reading →