The other night I went downtown to take a photo of this sign:

This is Infinium’s sign that (for now) still graces a building in downtown Sarasota, Florida. The company moved to Seattle some time ago.

Infinium Labs was the former name of Phantom Entertainment Inc., the company behind the Phantom Game System. Aptly named, it was one of the biggest examples of vapourware anyone has ever seen.

The company burned through $75 MILLION dollars of investment capital with nothing to show for it, except a laptop keyboard that to this day has not materialized.

» Continue reading “The $75 Million Keyboard: Infinium’s Phantom”

Do you make the same common mistakes when naming college courses as most other loser professors? Do you want to bait more students with catchy course names? The secret of college course naming conventions are finally revealed thanks to the headline formulas of Neil and Brian Clark. Now you can write great class names and land even more tenure like a pro.

Here is a list of UF honors college courses that could be sexier if only they were written with class-bait in mind:

» Continue reading “22 Sure-Fire Ways to Increase Your Class Size and Land More Tenure”

With all this talk of personalization and delivering content based on your preferences - I can’t help but consider the consequences.

I (and apparently a small minority of others) agree with Graywolf - I don’t want Google to make assumptions about me, who I am, or what I will like. I want to be exposed to new things, ideas, points of view, etc. Personalization, while great in theory, is not optimal in creating a diverse and open-minded society.

» Continue reading “Somewhere Out There, a Computer is Stereotyping You”

“Fryman, we’re full of religion now. Everyone, bow your heads and pretend to be serious.”
- Ignignot

In case you didn’t hear about it yet (story) - Boston officials called out the SWAT team to investigate some devices that turned out to be Cartoon Network’s guerrila marketing effort - LED boards with the images of Mooninites (Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters) scattered across the city.

» Continue reading “ATHF is da Bomb”

Flickr (who are now owned by Yahoo) just made a huge mistake. Yesterday they announced a number of changes to the Flickr service, which have received an overwhelmingly negative response from their community. Among the changes:

• You will now be required to have a Yahoo ID to log on. Users will now be forced to have a Yahoo account.
• The number of contacts a user can have is now limited to 3,000. There are no grandfather clause exceptions - if you have 5,000 contacts, you have to delete 2,001 to be able to add one more.
• Each photo is limited to 75 tags. Personally I don’t think this one is a big deal.

» Continue reading “Virtual Riots Rock Flickr - Will Zoomr Take Over?”