technology

$50 iBooks cause stampede!

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Henrico Stampede Yes, there really was a stampede. No one was seriously injured, but this morning’s $50 iBook sale was an insane mob scene by all accounts. Lines of parked cars started to form around 1:30am and by 7:00am, when the sale was to begin, the line was said to be more than a 1/2 mile long, while thousands of people rushed the gate for an opportunity to spend $50 on a 4-year old iBook that stood a good chance of barely being worth even that little. There are reports of baby strollers being tipped over and mangled and one old man in a walker was reportedly trampled to the ground!

One of TUAW.com’s readers, Jason Coleman, sent in this first-hand account of the scene:

“My wife and I just came from the Henrico County iBook sale. It was absolutely insane. The estimate was that about 12,000 people showed up. There were a number of people injured when people rushed the gates. [link]”

“We left after 4 hours of baking in the sun, empty-handed. There were some rumors that the actual number was something less than 1,000, but I couldn’t say for sure. However many, there were many times that in people who wanted one and the crowd control… well it wasn’t being controlled really. Just the police shouting at people to keep backing up, even though there was no where to go. Insane. Your readers should be very glad that they didn’t come. Just wait and buy one for cheap on eBay next week.

”

Phi sent in a link to some video footage. It’s not pretty.

Related link from CNN.com: Panic ensues in rush for cheap laptops

(Via TUAW.com)

Sports, Video

Very Pink Hotties Provide Football Fantasy

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Picture 1
Talk about convergence! Girls and (fantasy) football, courtesy of the advertising geniuses at Weiden + Kennedy. ESPN.com fantasy football implements a tried-and-true way to get the attention of the coveted 18-34 male demographic – babes. Link to the videos here(Quicktime).

(Via Adrants)

Uncategorized

Drudge dusts off eight-year-old picture of CNN’s O’Brien to promote himself

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Drudge Obrien2

On August 9, Web gossip Matt Drudge reprinted the cover of an issue of Small Business Computing magazine on his website. The cover showed CNN American Morning co-host Soledad O’Brien posing next to a computer monitor displaying the Drudge Report website. Drudge’s item is headlined “CNN ANCHOR DISPLAYS HER FAVORITE WEBSITE.” While Drudge presented the cover as though it were a current issue, the cover actually dates from September 1997 — a time when O’Brien wasn’t even employed by CNN. Click image to see a larger view

The item’s text proclaimed:

Soledad O’Brien knows where the latest news can be found on the Internet: The DRUDGE REPORT! The fast-rising cable news star was all smiles as she posed for SMALL BUSINESS COMPUTING magazine, proudly displaying her “favorite website.”

When the September 1997 issue of Small Business Computing was published, O’Brien was the host of MSNBC’s now-defunct daily program The Site. O’Brien did not join CNN’s staff until 2003.

(Via MediaMatters.org).

technology

Ads in games, ads not in games

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Gamefly-In-Game

Video game advertising company Massive recently signed a deal with Vivendi to integrate ‘live’ advertisements within their titles. The first title was the strategy-shooter SWAT4. As one might expect, gamers took about two seconds to find a way to block the origin of the ads. Details here. Nothing a dedicated anti-marketing gamer wouldn’t have already done to block ads on his favorite gaming sites – disallowing ads.* in your hots.etc file is an old trick to block web ads – but it’s probably not going to be long before a patch is going around to enable this with a simple Doubleclick of the mouse (pardon that ad-related pun, please) to allow the less-technical gamers to avoid these in the future.

Gamers love to hack these titles (see ‘Hot Coffee’); if in-game ad technology is going to take off, it’s going to need to be smarter about how these features are implemented. And I have to guess that there may not be too many sponsors who would be happy to see that hostage’s blood spattered on their ad if the player is too slow and the terrorists get to her first. Or maybe that’s just me.

Link: Details of how the hack was found are here.

(Via MarketingVox.com)

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