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Technology speeds disaster alerts - 0 Minutes Ago: Despite major advances in technology and social media, weat...

Only two more days until Microsoft's big Xbox reveal, where Call of Duty: Ghosts will be shown live to the public for the first time. In order to keep the millions of fans of Call of Duty on the edge of their seat, Infinity Ward decided to drop a short teaser. The handful of frames packaged into a Vine video may not be what you're expecting, but for fans hungry for anything... it'll serve. Rather than showing a brief moment of gameplay or story or... well, whatever, what they do show is Call of Duty: Ghosts' skeleton. A mish-mash of images taken from development showing off character frames and animations -- what's likely to be the engine behind the game. If Infinity Ward is showcasing its tech before its gameplay, they must really think they've got something special lined up for next-gen. Call of Duty: Ghosts is planned for release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 starting November 5. It'll then come to next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 4 and the next-gen Xbox, at a later date. Tune in Tuesday for the live reveal of the next Xbox and our first look at Call of Duty: Ghosts live. Comment on this article (1)

No you aren't misreading anything; IBM really is updating COBOL with XML and Java support. The first reaction would probably be a resounding "Why?", so IBM put it into perspective by pointing out that there are still over 200 Billion lines of COBOL code still running all over the world. To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all in one hit. Comments

Last week I attended a demo day at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus. The event, the US finals, was part of the Imagine Cup series of events, a global competition that Microsoft hosts for students, allowing young teams to win money and receive mentorship for their companies. I was curious to see what the students had built. Having been to innumerable demo confabs in which adults have crashed on stage, how might students comport themselves under a spotlight and in front of a battery of judges? Quite well, it turned out. I can’t touch on every group that presented, but a few stood out that are worth noting. Naturally, the team from my university was my favorite, even if they didn’t win the day; they walked away with $5,000. To the highlights. Project Sam Project Sam, from the excellent University of Chicago has built an ingenious system for using SMS messages to help medical centers in Latin America stay stocked. It’s an issue that poor or lacking communication can leave locations that dispense often vital drugs simply out, as there is no clear conduit between themselves, and those that dispense the medicine  I can attest to this issue, having run into the problem when I lived in Mexico and needed a reliable source of tetracycline. The group won $5,000 at the event, but didn’t clinch the top prize that would have sent them to Russia. The following clip is required viewing: Team Gigaloth: Produce Wars Team Gigaloth is the company, and Produce Wars the game. This app won the games category, taking down $5,000, and won another $5,000 for having the best demo. It deserved both. Produce Wars is a game that, coming first for Xbox and Windows, is a betterment of Angry Birds. To be frank, the game looks like a damn load of fun. It takes the classic idea – made mainstream by Rovio – of shooting objects at targets, and adds a neat barrel function. But more than that, its creative structure breathes fresh life into a stale genre. I won’t speak any more. Enjoy: Pitch Pitch is a neat Windows 8 application that allows users to quickly throw together a virtual space for file sharing. Imagine a dozen people at a meeting, and they need to access the most recent draft, and a logo asset, from two different people in the room. An email chain? A new Dropbox folder? Pitch is simple: Create a room in second, and drop the file in. Everyone inside the room on their device will have instant access. Simple. It’s coming out soon. Frankly, it’s a neat tool. Help Me Help The winner of the day was Help Me Help. The company has a free mobile app that helps people in the case of an emergency, such as an earthquake. A central website receives the data, helping administrators track where issues are, and their real-time severity. In short, it puts reporting capabilities into the hand of every person, greatly increasing the amount of information that flows to those with the power to help. Here’s a shot of what it could look like in action, provided there was The Coming Quake in San Francisco: Let’s all hope that we are on vacation when that happens. The Help Me Help team is heading to the world finals of Imagine Cup in Russia. Good luck to them. Students built this stuff. The future looks bright. Top Image Credit: Joseph McKinley

Prime Instant Video Edges Closer to Netflix with Hannibal -

Julian Assange is the man in the middle of Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Focus World Warning: plot points of We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks are discussed in this Q&A. Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't shy away from controversy. In fact, he may gravitate towards it. His previous works cover the fall of Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Elliot Spitzer saga (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer), and torture during the war in Afghanistan (Taxi to the Dark Side). For his latest documentary, Gibney focused on the story of WikiLeaks—from its successful beginnings in Iceland all the way through Julian Assange embracing Ecuador. The film itself is an extremely thorough look at a complicated tale that still hasn't finished, with both Assange and Bradley Manning currently existing in a sort of legal limbo. It challenged Gibney to craft an ever evolving narrative and inspired him to consider doing a dramatic film about Manning in the future ("We're working on it, I wouldn't say more than that," he told Ars). Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Warning: potential spoilers ahead in this film review. Alex Gibney's new documentary hits select theaters on May 24. All movies have heroes and villains and Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, felt like vintage silver screen. Two-thirds of the way through, the film established clear roles. Our protagonist is Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and underdog hacker hero. His evil nemesis is actually information-silencing bureaucracy but the US government largely plays this role (voiced often by Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and CIA). It's a classic conflict: a battle waged over censorship and the public's right to know. We Steal Secrets begins with point-of-view shots from above the Earth and this could loosely be seen as the start of a hero's journey. The satellite Galileo is orbiting as Bryant Gumbel, Ted Brokaw, and other talking heads read news of the WANK digital attack on NASA. The film later ties Assange unofficially to this Melbourne hacker collective that penetrated 300,000 NASA computers during the incident. (WANK's slogan, "You talk of peace for all and then prepare for war," is a lyric from one of Assange's favorite songs.) So here is the talented but misguided young hacker, shown at one point being charged in his home country for actions under his past Mendax moniker. WikiLeaks represents the realization of his potential. One talking head comments that it's something he would have screwed up 20 years ago, but the timing is right now. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A few years ago, then 13-year-old Nicky Bronner woke woke up the day after Halloween to find that his dad had taken away a big chunk of his Halloween Candy. He was outraged. So he set out to prove his father wrong, but he soon realized that his dad was right. Candy is bad for you. "It's the only time I ever admitted to him he was right," Nicky tells us. "I asked him why it couldn't be done with just peanut butter and chocolate (Bronner's favorite candy). That's where the basis came from. We wanted to do [candy] the right way." Now 16 years old, Nicky is managing the task of co-running a startup with his father, two-time entrepreneur and angel investor Michael Bronner. UNREAL offers a line of candies that are just as delicious as their mainstream counterparts, but without all the junk. UNREAL doesn't use any corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, artificial ingredients, genetically modified organisms, or preservatives. Instead, it uses all natural ingredients and is made with 40% less sugar than candies from major brands. But just because UNREAL's candies are healthier, it doesn't mean you should wolf down an entire bag of them. "It's still candy," Nicky says. "It's better but we still prefer that when you want something to eat, you grab an Apple. But we've done our best so that when you want a candy bar, it's a nice alternative [to traditional candies]." Since Nicky is home-schooled, he's not able to work full-time on the company, but hopes to become more involved in the company's marketing efforts. But thanks to Bronner's connections, UNREAL Candy already has a pretty impressive roster of celebrities who stand behind Unreal's mission to unjunk candy. That includes musician John Legend, Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, actor Matt Damon, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, and football player Tom Brady. "People respect it so they want to get behind it," Nicky says. In a little less than a year since launching, Unreal has made its way into about 18,000 stores nationwide, including major retailers like CVS and Target. It expects to be in 25,000 stores by the end of this year. Other than celebrities, UNREAL Candy has also attracted some venture capitalists. Its raised "tens of millions" of dollars from Khosla Ventures and Raptor Consumer Partners. Over the last year, investors have put in nearly $350 million into food startups. In the future, UNREAL plans to move beyond candy and unjunk traditional snack foods.SEE ALSO: VC Slams Analyst Who Questions $350 Million Investment In Food Startups Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Nikola Tesla. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Last night I tweeted a link to this video, about the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla pitching Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and commented that the truth is sometimes funnier that comedy. And I was surprised by the sheer number of people who agreed with that sentiment. I went to sleep thinking about that reaction, and also thinking about it in the context of the decline of long-term thinking in our society. If Tesla (I assume you know who he is) did indeed walk into a VC meeting, he wouldn’t get the attention or the money for his idea because it wouldn’t fit the time-scale of what venture-capital investments have become. Having followed the business of technology for a long time, I have seen that time-scale get shorter and shorter. I guess it’s the price to be paid for the excesses of the internet bubble of the 1990s. The Bubble After Effects During that time the business changed from funding innovation to funding concepts and eventually to projects. The fallout of the internet bubble was that venture-capital firms shifted focus. This shifting time-frame is one of the main reasons we are seeing fewer and fewer investments in hardcore technologies and more of the dollars being shifted to the softer aspects of technology. Yes, bloggers like me like to harp on the fact that many investors are infected by short-termism. But let’s not forget that some of these folks have taken big risks, and sometimes have failed big, too. Cleantech has ruined many reputations and resulted in billion dollar loses. Yes, there are a couple rare big bet successes that will come out of cleantech, like Tesla Motors and Nest, but the overall trend has been losses. Now many of the investors that aggressively backed cleantech are trying to find a more cautious approach to cleantech that more closely aligns with the traditional short VC time frame. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, which lead the charge on cleantech investments only to be left wounded, has recently changed tact in many ways, and in particular to go after social so it can get back into the quick returns on its investments. That’s the trend that all investors, in some respects are, moving toward. They’re all looking for the next Facebook or the next Twitter, but no one wants to look for the next Juniper or the next Intel or even the next ARM. I am not saying Facebook and Twitter are not great companies and have not scaled dramatically and impacted the world. What I am pointing to is the fact that Silicon Valley funds fewer and fewer silicon companies. Why are we assuming that we are all done with developing new kinds of chips for uses that we are not even imagining yet? Are we done inventing the routing technologies of the future? It’s hard to invest in the future Think of it this way: Had Vinod Khosla not backed Pradeep Sindhu to work on Juniper, we would all be living in Cisco’s vision of the internet future and using its hardware, which it would have made and sold at its own pace and at its own prices. Today, if you need to build a big company like that, you need to have deep pockets. Luckily Andy Bechtolsteim has those and that is why Arista Networks exists and is proving to be a major disrupter. The point is not to just rant, but to note that there is a lot more innovation to be done. All of today’s stars — from Dropbox to SnapChat to every little hot company that pops up — is built on those basic building blocks, and we have to continue to make better, cheaper and beefier building blocks. Yes, I understand that there is a chill around chip stocks, and Wall Street investors are showing more interest in pokes than petabyte speeds. I don’t necessarily think that this kind of rational thinking is bad for the investors, but when it comes to fundamental innovation, it points to a a real challenge ahead. And forget what Wall Street thinks, isn’t venture capital rea

This would have to be the ultimate marketing strategy to entice you to buy Domino's Pizza. Using rented DVD movies to tempt your senses, Domino's Brazil is teaming up with video stores to test out a very new type of advertising and if it is successful, you may be smelling pizza with your next rented movie. Comments