Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Last week UK pro-gaming team Birmingham Salvo claimed the prestigious Championship Gaming Series (CGS) title for 2008. The team defied their underdog status and eventually triumphed against US favourites Optx. The ten-strong UK team competed in 4 games (Counterstrike, Fifa 2008, Dead or Alive 4 and Forza Motorsport) and will now share a total prize of $500,000 (£255,850).

This equates to roughly £25,585 each (assuming the money is shared equally between the ten players - which is unlikely, since they also have a manager to pay and other costs to cover) which all begs the question; why are pro gamers paid so little?

Consider that these players must also pay taxes and have training/hardware costs to cover; quite possibly they could well only…

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A few months back this blog covered the dispute between the designers of the popular Scrabulous Facebook app and the toy makers, Hasbro and Mattel, who were threatening to sue them for breach of copyright. Well, the episode finally came to a head last week, with the developers deciding to suspend the app in the US and Canada after Hasbro pursued legal action.

The problem simply is that there is too much money at stake for the toy companies owning the rights to the Scrabble format to ignore the issue. Ultimately the whole episode has worked out pretty well for Hasbro, who had the enviable position of being able to launch a sure-fire hit of a product (its own official Scrabble…

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Ted.com is the website of the long-running Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which since 1984 has brought together many of the world’s leading thinkers and intellectuals, and challenged them to give the talk of their lives in just under 20 minutes…

For many years the conference was an invite only affair, and even then tickets cost around $6,000, meaning that the general public had very little benefit from this remarkable series of talks and presentations.

However in 2006 the website started featuring videos of some of the mini-lectures delivered at TED each year, and has continued to add both new and archive videos since then. The site now resembles a much smaller, Youtube-style, content database, containing nearly 300 20-minute videos of some of…

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We have long been aware of the potentially Orwellian threats to individual privacy that come with new developments in technology. Often the trade off is inevitable: technology permits a modern soceity to meet the needs of its members, but in return heightens the level of technological dependence to which we are subject.

How many times have we heard someone speculate about a return to the world of fifteen years ago in which mobile phones were entirely unused and unnecessary? In only one decade such technology has become so deeply entrenched in modern life that such a return to a previous state seems about as possible as reversing the movement of tectonic plates or the erosion of mountains.

There is no doubt that…

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I have just read a very interesting post on the Google vs Viacom lawsuit on Mashable.com (a leading social networking blog).

(N.B. If you are new to the topic check the previous post on this blog for background info).

The Mashable article is very condemning of Viacom in making their requests for logging history, and also critical of the US judge who ruled in their favour on the action, mainly out of anger that Youtube users might now be at risk from facing potential (and probably successful) copyright violation lawsuits from Viacom.

To draw a parallel with another similar high profile case - it is as if Metallica (the famous heavy metal band), who sued Napster over enabling illegal filesharing of their music a few…

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