Geek Gestalt

During a Friday night preview of the Roboexotica event in San Francisco, which will take place on Saturday, Simone Davalos' cocktail robot 'El Espanol Baracho' applies its special elixir to a Spanish Coffee. Roboexotica, which has been taking place for a decade in Vienna, Austria, and which is visiting San Francisco, is an exhibition of robots geared to serve and mix cocktails.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Since I was one of the first people to arrive Friday night for a preview of this weekend's cocktail robots exhibition here, I was going to get the first drink.

David Calkins, one of the organizers of the San Francisco version of Roboexotica--an event that has been taking place in Vienna, Austria, for a decade--had set up his robot, Chapek, and, determining it was ready, asked me to tell the machine what I wanted to drink.

This was after, of course, Calkins had finished getting Chapek ready to go.

"Let's see if it turns on and explodes," he said, "which it has in the past."

He flicked a switch and Chapek was ready.

"Hey," he said, pleased. "It didn't."

Chapek, which is named after Karel Capek, who coined the term "robot," is a small robot with a mischievous face, wiry metal arms, and an attached control box where you tell it what kind of cocktail you want it to mix up and serve you. The choices? Gin and orange juice, a gin martini, a vodka martini, and a

Atari, which has gone from a once high-flying video game company to little more than a placeholder brand name owned by another company, announced Thursday that it has been delisted by Nasdaq.

The company, which is now fully owned by games publisher Infogrames, said in a statement that it received a letter on May 7 from Nasdaq "stating that a Nasdaq listing qualifications panel has determined to delist Atari Inc.'s securities from the Nasdaq Global Market and will suspend trading of Atari...shares effective" Friday.

The release also said that Atari plans to appeal the delisting, but that its doing so would not delay the process of having its shares taken off of Nasdaq.

On April 30, Infogrames, which owned 51.4 percent of Atari, announced that it would buy the remaining shares.

All in all, this is an ignominious step in the once-famed Atari's story. In many ways, Atari started the modern video games industry, and in the 1980s it was one of the biggest names in consumer electronics. But over the years, its fortunes fell and more recently, it has been little more than a brand name used by Infogrames.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

If you're among the fraction of Facebook users who have bumped up against the social-networking service's 5,000-friends cap, breathe easy: you might well soon be able to climb into the upper reaches of four figures' worth.

That's according to a Friday post on TechCrunch, where Michael Arrington reported that Facebook is getting ready to lift the limit.

As Arrington wrote, there are only about 1,000 Facebook users--out of 70 million--who have reached the cap, but "a disproportionate percentage of bloggers and press are at the limit, so the issue tends to get a lot more attention than it otherwise would."

The news is not official yet, but TechCrunch suggested that Facebook imposed the limit because of scaling problems.

For most people, though, this will be a non-issue. As one of my colleagues put it, "Thank goodness. I was just 4,750 friends away from bumping into that ridiculous cap."

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

Weblin is a service that allows people to have avatars that appear on the Web pages they visit and communicate with any other Weblin users who are visiting the same pages.

(Credit: Weblin)

If you're a social media addict but think that visiting regular Web sites is a lonely experience, you might want to take a look at Weblin.

Created by a German company, Weblin is designed to make the experience of surfing Web sites social--or make services like Facebook or MySpace.com more social. It does so by letting users create an avatar that they can then, effectively, take with them as they move around from site to site.

If they then find themselves on a site that is being visited at the same time by other Weblin users, then they can communicate with each other.

Weblin's main model is a small download, but it is also about to launch a light version that will require no downloads or plug-ins and will simply auto-assign users an avatar rather than them getting to choose their own.

(Credit: Weblin)

The main Weblin service is a small download that allows users to register and then create their own avatar. But next week, Weblin plans to launch a light version of the service that requires no download or plug-in and which assigns an avatar to everyone who uses it.

That means that users would have less control over the experience, but at the same time they'd be able to use ... Read more

Over on Silicon Alley Insider this afternoon, there's a piece about RealNetworks' announcement Thursday that it plans to spin off its games unit.

According to a release from RealNetworks, the Seattle company has decided that its casual games unit would be best positioned as an independent company.

RealNetworks also said it will distribute the shares in the new outfit to its existing shareholders.

The company said that it might plan an IPO for the new unit, whose name is yet to be determined. If it chooses the IPO route, that would likely happen prior to spinning off the unit, RealNetworks said in its release, and up to 20 percent of the new company would be sold to the public.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

It seems that the founder of Napster--no, not Seth Green--may have finally cashed in big time on one of his creations.

According to TechCrunch, Napster founder Shawn Fanning has sold his gaming social-media start-up, Rupture, to Electronic Arts for $30 million.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported Thursday afternoon that as part of the deal--which EA has not yet announced, "but is expected to do so soon," Fanning and Rupture co-founder Jon Baudanza will become EA employees.

For Fanning, this represents the big-time payday he's clearly been seeking for years. He never made much off of Napster, and his last start-up, Snocap, was purchased by Imeem for what is assumed to be a negligible sum.

As for why--if the report is true--EA is buying Rupture, which was working on a social-networking system for players of World of Warcraft, Schonfeld writes that EA "bought the company for its technology. Presumably, creating social networks around massively multiplayer video games is a key component of its online strategy."

That certainly makes sense, and especially so given the success of connected systems like Microsoft's Xbox Live.

It is interesting that EA seems to have chosen Fanning's company when another gamers-oriented social-media service, Xfire founder Dennis Fong's Raptr, has also been making waves. Perhaps Fong wanted too much money for his company.

For EA, though, creating its own hit MMO is mostly a dream. Though it published Ultima Online, one of the first important graphical MMOs, through its Origin Systems ... Read more

A report out from Forbes magazine indicates that the tremendous popularity of Nintendo's Wii video game console has filled the coffers of the company's former chairman, Hiroshi Yamauchi and made him Japan's richest man.

On Thursday, Reuters cited the Forbes study, and said that Yamauchi's wealth had increased $3 billion in the last year, making his current net worth $7.8 billion. That meant he had passed real estate baron Akira Mori for the country's top wealth slot.

According to Reuters, Yamauchi owns 10 percent of Nintendo, which has seen its market capitalization rise to about $79 billion on the strength of the Wii's performance.

That market cap seems likely to grow even more in the coming year as Nintendo will soon be releasing Wii Fit, an exercise game that is expected to become one of the best-selling games of all-time, according to video game analysts.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up with what I'm doing on Twitter.

According to the FTC, only 20 percent of teens under the age of 17 were able to buy 'M'-rated games in a secret shopper study.

(Credit: U.S. Federal Trade Commission)

Only 20 percent of kids under 17 were able to buy "M"-rated games in the United States this year, according to a government report out Thursday. While parents' groups might like that percentage to be higher, the video game industry is probably pretty happy about the findings.

The Federal Trade Commission report studied kids' success at buying tickets to R-rated movies or purchasing R-rated DVDs, mature CDs, and M-rated games. In every case, the FTC found, the success rate had dropped over every previous year it conducted its study.

But nowhere was the drop sharper than with video games.

According to the study, while 20 percent of under-17 kids were able to buy M-rated games in 2008, the number had been 42 percent in 2006 and between 60 percent and more than 80 percent in previous studies.

A game rated "M" by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is meant only for people aged 17 and over. An "AO"-rated game is meant only for those 18 and over. The ratings have no legal bearing, but most of the video game industry--which sponsors the ESRB--abides by them.

The study surveyed 253 retail stores in the United States. The best results, the FTC said, were at GameStop stores, where only 6 percent of under-17s were able to buy ... Read more

Over on Techdirt Thursday morning, there's a report about some angry PC users of Electronic Arts games.

The gamers are upset, according to a post in the Mass Effect forums, because EA is apparently implementing a new Internet-based digital rights management system, known as SecuROM, that they find onerous, intrusive, and inconvenient.

Techdirt writes that a new version of SecuROM being employed by EA "is causing controversy due to an online verification system connected to its CD key. The system requires a connection to the Internet during installation to check (that) the CD key is valid, and then registers the key with the users' computer. After this the game will try to re-check the CD key every 5-10 days to ensure it hasn't since been found posted on a forum, or used in some form of piracy."

Then, it seems, if the key cannot be verified, SecuROM will attempt to do so for 10 more days. If, after that period, it still cannot be verified, Techdirt writes, the game will be locked down.

Further, SecuROM seems to limit the number of times a game can be installed to three.

Systems like this are never going to be winners for companies like EA. For every copy of one of its games that it successfully keeps from being illegally copied, it's going to lose a good customer who's beyond annoyed at the way the system works and the way they feel they're being treated.

To be sure, ... Read more

'Grand Theft Auto IV' broke the all-time records for single-day and one-week entertainment industry sales. It looks like it could be tough for any forthcoming game to knock GTA IV off the top of the hill.

(Credit: Rockstar Games)

Though Halo 3 held the all-time entertainment industry record for single-day sales for eight months, it could be a long time before anyone bests the record-shattering sales achieved by GTA IV.

On Wednesday, Take-Two Interactive, which owns GTA IV developer Rockstar Games, announced that the new game had raked in all-time records of $310 million on its launch day of April 29 and $500 million during its first week. The single-day figure shattered the previous record, set last September by Halo 3, of $170 million.

And given how quickly Bungie Studios' Halo 3 was reduced to second place, it stands to reason that even the monstrous pile of cash GTA IV has earned so far--it has already sold more than 6 million copies, Take-Two said--could be in danger from some game already in the pipeline.