Entertainment

It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.

SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based … Read more

CNET's Gamespot posted a news blurb today on a report that, "Microsoft has entered into talks with Sony to bring Blu-ray to the Xbox 360." The report comes from a Financial Times story that quotes an unnamed "senior executive," who says that Sony and Microsoft "are not simply discussing a successor to the Xbox 360's now discontinued, dirt-cheap external HD DVD drive," but that "there is also the possibility of an internal Blu-ray drive being incorporated into a new, more expensive 'premium' 360 model."

At the Consumer Electronics Show in … Read more

Now that Blu-ray has won the format war, the public and security industry will get a chance to see how well the novel encryption scheme that Blu-ray publishers and manufacturers works.

What makes the strategy somewhat novel is that is relies as much on consumer tastes and behavior as it does on technology, according to Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, which helped devise the strategy.

Since some of you might now be gearing up to buy a Blu-ray player, here's how it works. Studios will hire software developers … Read more

Whether you're going to Austin, Texas, next week or not, it's always good to update your music collection with bands appearing at the annual South by Southwest music conference and festival. There are a few big names like R.E.M., Paramore and Talib Kweli playing this year, but this isn't Lollapalooza (or Austin City Limits for that matter). SXSW is all about discovering new music, and with more than 1,600 bands booked this year, you may need a bigger iPod.

To see a list of bands that we're excited about this year, check out … Read more

Now that Blu-ray has won the high-definition disc format war, the industry is moving on to the next step: recruiting companies to produce players and media.

And to help that process along, MPEG LA, the standards and licensing group, is floating the concept of a creating an organization that will be able to license all of the patents necessary to make Blu-ray products.

The idea was discussed back in early 2007 during a meeting of 18 of the holders of necessary Blu-ray patents. With the format war over, MPEG LA is once again talking up the concept. The mechanisms and … Read more

Industrial giant General Electric has invested approximately $4 million into Think Global, the Norwegian company that specializes in electric town cars.

The investment exists, in part, to aid another investment by GE in lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems. GE has invested $20 million into A123, which is working with General Motors on the Chevy Volt. Think, which has been getting its lithium-ion batteries from a company called EnerDel, has now signed a deal to also get batteries from A123.

Think started rolling cars off the production line late last year. The company's first car is a resurrection of an … Read more

Oh, St. Patrick's Day. To a self-respecting Irish-American like myself, it's such a catch-22: On one hand, it's a celebration of the fact that our culture knows how to have a damned good time; on the other hand, all the gross-tasting green beer and sequined leprechaun hats kind of make us cringe sometimes.

We also have to deal with all kinds of ridiculous St. Patrick's Day marketing tie-ins, like this new ad campaign for the Irish Spring soap brand (which I believe was created by the U.S.-based Colgate-Palmolive Company). It features a new Web … Read more

Who wants to believe? TechCrunch reported Monday night that Steven Spielberg is developing a new social network where people can talk about their encounters with the paranormal and extraterrestrial.

Spielberg, creator of sci-fi classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Men in Black, and the War of the Worlds remake a few years ago, is reportedly himself a believer in paranormal phenomena. In creating a social network for fellow enthusiasts as well as people who claim to have encountered the otherworldly, Spielberg is tapping into a lifelong passion.

But its exact ties to tech and entertainment are … Read more

News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV are partnering again, and this time it's on a weekly TV show. But the program, a countdown show called MySpace Chart, will only air on the U.K. network MTV Two (the equivalent of the U.S. MTV2 channel) and there are no plans yet to bring the show stateside, an MTV Networks representative told CNET News.com.

Members of the social network, which initially gained traction as a way for independent music artists to gain buzz, will vote on select music videos each week that will then be showcased in … Read more