If you're a fan of Monte Cook's work, or just like saying "Ptolus", you might be interested in this piece of news: Malhavoc Press is having a sale to celebrate its 10th Anniversary. You can get 30% off every PDF Malhavoc sells, and 10% off Now In Print titles. Get the goods at RPGNow.
(Via Wolfgang Baur)
Tonight the Washington Technology Industry Association holds the kickoff event for its new Gaming Community. All the action will be at DigiPen in Redmond, WA from 5:30 to 7:30. Tonight's event features a panel on the topic "The Next New Thing in Gaming" with:
In keeping with the tradition of space shuttle crews making posters for their missions based on popular movies, the crew of the Endeavour has created this fantastic poster based on the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot.
Also very cool: one astronaut on the shuttle actually watched that movie for the first time during a mission in space -- NASA uplinked the newly-released film to the shuttle Atlantis while it was in orbit.
Via Wil Wheaton.
But many of the people trying to wrap their heads around the deal are missing an important point — the more than 10 million Microsoft cameras connected to television screens in homes around the world.
That’s how many Xbox 360 Kinect sensors have been sold in six months. The devices already have video chat capabilities, but the feature has been relatively low profile. Just imagine what would happen if Microsoft brought the Skype brand — and its 145 million connected users — into the picture. That’s a powerful combination of brands with the potential to get a lot of attention and usage.
Inexcusably, I left Kinect out of the equation in my last post. Todd Bishop nails it.
Microsoft has agreed to purchase Skype for $8.5B, the company's biggest acquisition to date.
Microsoft says that they'll be integrating Skype functions with Xbox Live, Outlook and Windows Phones. At my last agency I wrote a lot about Microsoft Unified Communications, so I'm very interested to see if and how how they'll tie Skype into that offering.
The news of the acquisition kind of blew my mind, but there was another, smaller explosion that occurred as I read the article: Microsoft talked about Xbox Live in the same breath as its email client and its smartphone product.
Now, people have been using voice communication with their game consoles for years. But increasingly, Xbox Live is about a LOT more than games -- it's a way to deliver many kinds of entertainment into the home, to purchase virtual objects, and to connect with friends who are online.
I'm looking forward to seeing where Skype integration takes Xbox Live. Will it be just a better way to talk to your teammates in Halo? Or will it be part of an evolution of Xbox Live into a full-on communications platform?
