Is This Uncanny Valley-Scaling Robot Proof Of Our Impending Demise? How World of Warcraft maker keeps the hits coming. Who’s responsible for Blizzard Entertainment’s string of money-minting video games? Meet Paul Sams, the chief operating officer of Blizzard, now a division of Activision Blizzard, the gaming powerhouse created from the $18 billion merger in 2007 of Activision and Vivendi Games. He’s one of the top executives responsible for making sure Blizzard keeps pumping out hits like World of Warcraft, which has 12-million-plus paying subscribers. This year, Blizzard celebrated its 20th anniversary (see the company’s own retrospective here), and 2010 was its biggest financial success in its history, thanks to the launches of World of Warcraft Cataclysm and StarCraft II. By far, World of Warcraft is the most successful game in Blizzard’s history; author Jane McGonigal says gamers have collectively played about 5.93 million years of WoW.
WoW players put in about 30 million hours a day. Here’s our Q&A with Sams, and read here for our previous Q&A with Sams. VB: How many people are working for you? Welcome to the TED Revival: Blind People Drive, Paralyzed People Walk. Yesterday morning at TED resembled an old-time faith-healing session--except instead of the Bible, the force was technology. First Dennis Hong presented the results of his robotics lab RoMeLa's collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind. They equipped a car with an accelerometer, GPS, two cameras, and laser rangefinders, and then created a set of novel nonvisual interfaces--vibrating gloves and seat mats, and a brand-new screen called the AirPix that looks like a tiny air hockey table.
It uses puffs of air like pixels to create an "image" of obstacles in the road ahead. Mark Riccobono, blind since age 5, drove the specially outfitted Ford Escape around the track at Daytona one month ago, successfully dodging obstacles along the way. Next, Eythor Bender took the stage. Finally, the big reveal.
[Images: TED Conference on Flickr] LinkedIn InMaps Reveals your Professional Network. For anyone blessed with a LinkedIn account, this might be quite interesting: InMaps [linkedinlabs.com] is new service that visualizes the collection of a LinkedIn 'connections' as a single network graph. The work was clearly inspired by the results from the interactive visualization and exploration platform Gephi, as Mathieu Bastian, the driving force behind the Gephi project, now works at LinkedIn Labs. Each color corresponds to a different group within the professional network, which can be labeled by the user.
The graph should allow users to recognize connections that share mutual people, or indentify areas that might be underrepresented. See also Career Paths. Thnkx Nicholas and Armando. Shocking: The Brutal Work Conditions At The Cheezburger Network (Video) Pet Holdings, the company behind the Cheezburger Network – home to LOLcats, FAIL Blog, Totally Looks Like and other silliness – recently raised $30 million in funding. You would think everything is smooth sailing for the company and its CEO Ben Huh, and that its employees are all shiny and happy people these days, but nothing could be farther from the truth. This reveals a hard-hitting report by NMA.tv, the Taiwanese news organization also responsible for breaking the news about Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently throwing ninja stars at airport personnel and Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged love affair with actor Justin Timberlake.
According to the report, Huh is known to hit Pet Holdings employees, depicted as cats in order not to reveal their true identity, with a stick to make them create content faster. Sometimes, he’ll even throw them in the trash can. No wonder some people want to hit the ‘Flame’ button on him. Strata 2011: Telling the Story with Data. [infosthetics@strataconf 2011 by guest blogger Collin Sullivan] The above graphic is 150 years old, and it popped up more than a few times on Wednesday, which was Day 2 of the 2011 Strata Conference. Charles Joseph Minard designed it in 1861, and it depicts Napoleon's ill-fated march to and from Russia nearly 50 years before.
The line is light as Napoleon and his army march toward Moscow, and solid black as they retreat. The line's thickness depicts the size of Napoleon's army at the corresponding place on the map, and we can follow along as it thins dramatically over time. [see it also here] Minard's graphic is a classic in the field, as it should be. It is considered both beautiful and parsimonious; from just a small amount of space we can glean a lot of information.
Pete Warden of OpenHeatMap believes that humans are natural storytellers. It makes sense. But as is true with all types of storytelling, some approaches are more effective than others. Hollywood and tech leaders invest in GeekChicDaily. Email newsletter GeekChicDaily is announcing today that Hollywood movie executive Joe Roth and Seattle internet investor Mike Slade have led an unspecified round of investment in the publication. GeekChicDaily has an audience of people with an interest in both tech and entertainment, so it’s no surprise the company has recruited new investors from both of those realms. GeekChicDaily calls itself a “shot-in-the-arm for all things popular culture,” covering comics, video games, film, TV, toys, collectibles and applications. It debuted in October 2009 and was co-founded by digital media and game veteran Peter Levin, former Sony Pictures chief Peter Guber and Gareb Shamus, founder of Wizard Entertainment. Also joining the round are game veteran Mark Surfas, founder of GameSpy; former Activision executive Kathy Vrabeck, currently president of Legendary Digital; and Machinima chief executive Allen DeBevoise.
Freedom to Create Brings the Power of Expression to Muzzled Societies. Art can change the world. Just ask the artists who have submitted works to Freedom to Create, an arts and culture foundation that leverages the power of art to address injustice in places where there is no freedom to express it otherwise. This Thursday, March 24, the organization is bringing an exhibition of some of the top selections from the 2010 Freedom to Create Prize--an annual competition for artists who address social injustice--to New York City. "Most countries we work in are places where the political regime does not allow people the freedom of expression. Art has allowed them to talk about what's going on.
It's a great way to build awareness about what's going on in a country," explains Priti Devi, VP of Freedom to Create. Prize winners receive $125,000 to further what they are doing. "We don't believe in pure philanthropy. Freedom to Create's 2011 prize competition also kicks off this week. Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage. With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers. Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor.
You can then share the page on Twitter or Facebook through its customizable URL and let other people edit or make changes which are tracked. The page editor tool itself is extremely intuitive to use, and is pretty fun if you’re creatively messing around with web pages and pretty useful if you’re trying to complete actual work like A/B testing site code changes or codelessly trying out different headlines, images and fonts on a content page.