Posts Tagged ‘Rodney Brown’

Verizon vs. rock ‘n roll before Patriots vs. Bills at Gillette Stadium

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

By Rodney Brown

Rodney BrownSo you’re set up to show off your tech product to the press and public at one of the greatest venues in New England — Patriot Place at Gillette Stadium — before the season opening game of the New England Patriots. Crowds are milling all about you in the plaza right in front of The Hall and interacting with your street team crew by the handfuls. What could possibly go wrong?

How about a deafeningly loud sound check by a rock band?

Lansdowne

Lansdowne
Photo by Rodney Brown

That was what the folks from Verizon had to face yesterday at the house the Krafts’ built, when the Boston band Lansdowne fired up their grinding emo-esque guitars on a balcony next to the CBS Scene restaurant — across the vast echoing canyon that is the main plaza of Patriot Place from Verizon’s leather couch-enabled, 60-inch flat screen-displaying FiOS booth.

In between power chords and mic checks, Phil Santoro, head of media relations for Verizon in New England, said, “We just found out about the band two hours ago.”

While Lansdowne tweaked its sound levels — seemingly trying to figure out how to both get more volume and more clarity — Santoro shouted out the schedule for the press demo of the latest FiOS features to the assembled reporters and bloggers. When Lansdowne finally appeared to get the perfect balance of deafness and sound quality, Santoro said, “OK, we’ve got until 5:15, which is when the band actually starts playing.” (more…)

PAX says swine flu is apparently a gaming fan

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

By Rodney Brown

Rodney BrownThe folks behind the Penny Arcade Expo are bringing their gaming conference to Boston next March, but hopefully leaving the swine flu behind in Seattle.

According to the official Twitter feed of PAX, the conference, which ran Sept. 4-6, just confirmed via testing the first case of swine flu. In between sessions with serious titles like “Breaking into the Game Industry the Educated Way” and not-so-serious titles like “How can we make online gaming communities suck less?” apparently at least one conference attendee failed his saving throw versus H1N1 against his constitution (yes, that’s an old-school D&D reference).

PAX East will bring the creators of the Penny Arcade webcomic to the Hynes Convention Center March 26-28 of 2010. Penny Arcade creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins — known better to the geek community by the names of their webcomic alter egos Gabe and Tycho — say that the Boston version of PAX will share many of the elements of the Seattle conference but have enough of its own character to draw visitors from the West Coast.

Let’s hope they decide not to share the swine flu, and leave it back in the land of Starbucks and Microsoft.

Joel Tenenbaum keeping to the Pirate’s Code?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

By Rodney Brown

rodney_brownJoel Tenenbaum, the Boston University graduate student convicted in late July of illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs, has been targeted again by the Recording Industry Association of America, this time for allegedly encouraging illegal downloading.

On the site of choice for illegal downloaders, The Pirate Bay, a download appeared a few weeks after Tenenbaum was convicted and ordered to pay $675,000 in restitution to four record labels. The name of that file — “The $675,000 Mixtape.” It contained all 30 tracks for which Tenenbaum was convicted of obtaining illegally, and even featured a promo image of Tenenbaum and claimed to come from “DJ Joel.”

0903-dj-joelAccording to a report by the Boston Globe, Tenenbaum said he did not create the file with its picture of him and the phrase “Approved by the RIAA,” and is not responsible for promoting it on a Twitter feed called JoelFightsBack. That Twitter feed was created by his legal team, spearheaded by Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, he told the Globe. The Pirate Bay users have taken the mixtape to heart it seems, and reports say there are around 900 seeders all sharing the file, potentially making the download of the file one of the most popular and one of the fastest in The Pirate Bay’s listings. So it is certainly possible that Tenenbaum had nothing to with the file, even if the question of where the photo of him with his arms crossed came from is still unanswered.

Yet in his testimony on the stand in his July trial, Tenenbaum allegedly not only admitted to the illegal downloading and sharing of the 30 separate files, he admitted he had not been truthful about it in his depositions in September of last year. So smart choices are not always on his menu, clearly.

While the RIAA has been lambasted for its heavy-handed tactics and head-in-the-sand business practices by Mass High Tech before,  if Tenebaum were so foolish as to have even participated willingly in the creation of the mixtape, he has no one blame for potentially losing his upcoming appeal of his conviction but himself.

Breaking News: Fluent Mobile launches iPhone app, Semilab restructures, Yahoo shuts down Maven

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Staff writer Galen Moore breaks the news that Post Office Square-based Fluent Mobile, founded by a former UMass professor, has launched  its news aggregating iPhone app. 

The application is a news search engine and aggregator designed to find only news content that is optimized for reading on mobile devices …

Adler said he started Fluent to apply some of the search capabilities developers discovered while building CourseAdvisor, an online course catalog tool for students. Adverplex, a second company Adler helped found, is still a going concern, he said.

Meanwhile, one cube over, staff writer Rodney Brown breaks the news that Hungarian chip-maker Semilab has merged its three US subsidiaries into one company called Semilab USA.

Semilab USA has 57 employees, with about 21 in Massachusetts, according to [CEO Chris] Moore. Semilab, founded in 1990, makes technology used to measure primarily materials used in the manufacturing of chips. It serves three major customer areas — academic and institutional research, semiconductor manufacturers and photovoltaic and solar cell manufacturers.

TechCrunch, citing an unnamed customer, has the news that Yahoo has shut down Maven Networks, which it acquired less than a year and a half ago.

MHT on NECN: iPhone 3GS creates opportunity for apps

Monday, June 29th, 2009

MHT’s Rodney Brown talked about his story on local coders making apps for the latest iPhone on New England Business Day Friday.

In the report, Rodney checks in with Char Software, Raizlabs, ThinkFlood, Apperian and Scvngr.

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