festival

Keep an eye on the sky the next time you're at a concert -- a cold beer might be coming your way. It's been announced that attendees of South Africa's OppiKoppi music festival will be able to order beer that comes delivered on an octocopter drone.

Called the OppiKoppi beer drone, the device is an 8-propeller helicopter that can be loaded with beer and flown over the festival, arriving at the GPS location of any person who orders a cold brew from a mobile app. Once the drone arrives at its location, it drops its cargo and a single beer attached to a parachute will make its way down to a designated campsite called District 9.

With beer intentionally flying in the air, there's some concern about a cold brew randomly hitting festival goers in the head. Darkwing Aerials, the South African company that's providing the beer drone for the festival, says it is taking safety precautions. … Read more

When Twitter first released the 6-second Vine video format, a lot of people wondered just how much information you could convey in such a short amount of time. It turns out the answer is a lot, if you do it right.

A Tribeca Film Festival competition has brought a sense of legitimacy to the new realm of Vine filmmaking. Some of the winners are wild, wacky, and just a little bit worrying.

The "Genre" category welcomed everything from Westerns to sci-fi to LOLcats. The winner, however, is definitely in the horror genre. "LazerAndDonald Close Shave" crams a lot of creepy into just 6 seconds. Juror and famous filmmaker Penny Marshall says, "The use of lighting is amazingly set for this 6 second Vine."… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- A what, where, and why primer on the Game Developer's Conference from guests Meggan Scavio and Simon Carless.

- The 15th annual Independent Games Festival opens its Audience Award voting window, now through March 1.

- Nominations open for 2013 Game Developers Choice Awards.

- Unity Engine coming to BlackBerry 10 smartphones, BlackBerry PlayBook.… Read more

Simple, nostalgic and creative, this app comes with a Halloween twist that adds to its overall fun factor. Prepare your touch-screen drawing skills because The Great Pumpkin Festival app will lure you into a virtual contest that will test your creativity in designing pumpkin heads.

The main menu of this app takes you to three primary options: Costumes, Carve, and Browse. In the Costumes option, you get to choose different clothing, headgear, and accessories for the character you are currently using, and you can expand by purchasing some extra gear through game points. The heart of the app is the … Read more

What a beautiful sunny week we're having here in San Francisco! There's not a cloud in the sky -- not even a one made from 6,000 lightbulbs.

Calgary, Canada-based artist Caitlind r.c. Brown and collaborator Wayne Garrett created the large-scale interactive sculpture by covering a steel substructure with a cloud of burned-out incandescent bulbs collected from local households, businesses, museums, and eco stations.

The bulbs attach to pull strings that together look a bit like streaming rain. The cords allow viewers to control the illumination of the structure like lightning in the lightbulb cloud, which is lit from within by 250 compact fluorescent bulbs, pulling a total power of approximately 20 amps. … Read more

Twitter may still be thought of as a place where people share what they ate for breakfast or pictures of their cats, but some think of it as a home for serious storytelling.

Already some have used the microblogging service as a home for innovative fiction projects, including Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" and a creative use of a faux-"Mad Men" narrative.

With that in mind, the company today announced the first Twitter Fiction Festival, a five-day event starting November 28 that will showcase "creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world." … Read more

If you have an iPhone, you've probably taken a photo or two (or hundreds or thousands) with the device. Maybe you've kept it casual, snapping the occasional cat, kid, and road trip photos and uploading them to Facebook, Google+, or another social network.

Maybe, like the talented Crave readers featured in our Instagram series, you've taken your iPhone photography further than pointing and shooting and gotten hooked on a photo enhancement app or two. Or maybe you've become so passionate about iPhone photography that you spend countless hours and numerous apps perfecting galleries upon galleries of iPhone creations. Most of the photographers featured in the first-ever LA Mobile Arts Festival fall into the latter category. … Read more

If you're a storyteller, wouldn't you want the chance to have "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner" auteur Ridley Scott help you with a project? And wouldn't it be great to have half a million dollars to spend on it?

That could be your future if you're the winner of YouTube's Your Film Festival, a competition to unearth the world's best storyteller that Google's video sharing site announced today.

Beginning February 2, YouTube will open up the film festival to anyone in the world who's 18 or older and has … Read more

David Forbes is a man with a fashionable vision.

After completing a working video coat with a mega assortment of color LEDs, Forbes has moved onto a smaller, slightly more practical application: an LED TV vest.

The $20,000 array is no slouch, using custom-made circuit boards that pump nearly 5 gigabits of data to 14,400 red, green, and blue LEDs.

Surveillance video technology limits the resolution of the video so content is watchable on the flexible vest, which displays content at 160x120. Battery life clocks in around 90 minutes, and runs off lithium-polymer batteries commonly used for remote … Read more