boxing

Sacramento, Calif.-based "Mr. Simo" makes one-of-a-kind speaker facades out of old suitcases. They look amazing, so I got in touch with the company's owner, Dominic Odbert, to learn more about his designs.

Each BoomCase is a unique creation, so if you see one on Odbert's Web site that catches your fancy, don't think about it too long, because once it's sold, there's never going to be another one exactly like it.

Odbert's has a background in fine art, and he's been building audio gear since he was a kid. Odbert … Read more

The team of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, a duo since the go-go Netscape days of the mid-1990s, is on fire.

Today, their 3-year-old venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, announced that it has closed its third fund--this one, $1.5 billion, brings the total amount they've raised to $2.7 billion, which isn't bad for a time when VC returns have been lackluster, at best.

Andreessen Horowitz now has stakes in 90 consumer and enterprise businesses, including some of the hottest names in tech: Zynga, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Foursquare, Box, Groupon, Fab, Uber, and on and on. … Read more

Boxee Box users now have a way to watch traditional TV as well as online content.

The company has just started selling its new $49 Live TV tuner, which connects directly to the Boxee Box to deliver over-the-air broadcast television channels, potentially making it a useful option for cable TV cord cutters.

Of course, as CNET's Matthew Moskovciak pointed out in a column in November, all HDTVs these days include a built-in ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) tuner, so most cord cutters already have a way to grab broadcast TV without coughing up extra dough.

Still, the folks at … Read more

While dodging a question about Apple's plans to get into the TV business, the company's chief executive pointed out that its more than year-old set-top box is doing just fine.

Answering a question about Apple's strategy for the living room from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, Apple CEO Tim Cook replied by pointing to the fact that in this past quarter, the company sold half as many Apple TV set-top boxes as it did during all of last year.

"The Apple TV product is doing actually very well," Cook argued. "In last fiscal year … Read more

During CES, I got a chance to hook up with Engage, the company behind Unity, a well-built home theater system.

Unity is the brainchild of Todd Beauchamp, an ex-Apple audio engineer (he worked closely on iPhone acoustics, for example) and Mike Fidler, an individual with a strong marketing and engineering background in Sony.

The sound system looks familiar because it has a design similar to the many sound bar and subwoofer combos out there, but stacked on top of each other. Unlike most sound bars, Unity's modular design has a depth to it that can support a 60-inch TV.

I quickly learned that the idea is a "system that can be set up in little as 15 minutes," Beauchamp said enthusiastically. You can tell that a lot of time and dedication went into the first version of the home theater and future versions could be compelling as the design evolves. … Read more

Old-school gamers will remember an age when there were no continues, no checkpoints, and no respawns. If you died during a level, that was it--you went back to the beginning of the level to do it all again. The craziest thing about it? You liked it even though it drove you crazy.

These days, a gaming purist might say games have gotten too easy and gamers have gotten too soft. When dying in a game doesn't mean anything, how can you truly enjoy the game? I'm not sure it matters, but I can see both sides. Maybe after checking out this collection--if you don't throw your iPhone through your computer screen from frustration--you can tell me what you think in the comments.… Read more

Oracle yesterday deployed 78 different security fixes aimed at patching holes throughout its various database products.

As part of the company's January critical patch update, 16 of the 78 fixes were considered critical, meaning they could be exploited remotely. The fixes stretched across much of Oracle's product lineup, including Oracle Database Server, Fusion Middleware, E-Business Suite, Oracle Sun products, MySQL, VirtualBox, and PeopleSoft.

One of the patches addresses a major flaw that could compromise the security of Oracle database systems. Initially researched by InfoWorld, the flaw was shared with Oracle before the tech publication went live with the … Read more

Like newspapers to the Web, many business software vendors are now reluctantly dragging themselves into the cloud-based enterprise. If they aren't nimble enough, a new generation of companies is ready to take their place.

While major enterprise IT vendors continue to deliver so-called features that keep users tied to their desks and legacy software, companies like Box and others have figured out that the industry is changing right before our eyes. The new enterprise takes the best aspects of consumer applications to make business-critical data available anywhere, anytime.

The majority of the fawning stories about startups that come out … Read more

Facebook updated its Comments Box social plug-in for mobile to improve user functionality on mobile sites, the social-networking giant announced today on its Facebook + Media page.

The Comments Box, already in use on many media sites, uses social signals to highlight the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and those that are most liked and active in discussion threads. Users can then share the comments on their Facebook friends' News feeds, including links to the original site.

The updated plug-in will automatically appear on the mobile versions of sites that have Facebook's Comment Box enabled. The mobile … Read more