Microsoft fires game test contractor who talked to VentureBeat
Robert Delaware was the only named Microsoft worker (a contract employee) who talked — without permission — to VentureBeat for our story last week on the Xbox 360 defects.
Microsoft had him fired on Wednesday. Delaware worked as a game tester at Microsoft but was employed by the temp agency Excell Data. He reported directly to a Microsoft manager, who told him he was being let go because of the VentureBeat article.
Delaware, a 29-year-old Seattle resident,… Continue Reading
Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft’s video game console woes
When his fourth Xbox 360 video game console died in April, Chris Szarek wasn’t surprised.
The Chicopee, Mass. gamer was accustomed to the hardware failures that became known throughout the Internet as RROD, or the “red rings of death” which flash when the console becomes inoperable.
A 40-year-old photographer, Szarek was a hardcore Microsoft fan who spent more than $1,000 on his games. But each time one of his Xbox 360 consoles failed, he had to spend… Continue Reading
Organic Motion uses motion capture to help sell high-end bikes
Capturing motion is a technology perfected for movie special effects and video games. It makes it a lot easier to create a computer-generated character if the artist has access to real-world character movement. Organic Motion has done well selling motion-capture systems for such purposes.
But today it’s about to embark on a promising new market in retail sales. The New York company is announcing that Swiss high-performance bike maker BMC will use Organic Motion’s technology to… Continue Reading