stern

Early tech blogger and entrepreneur Allen Stern dies

Allen Stern, a respected tech blogger and entrepreneur who shifted his attention to helping others improve their health, has died, prompting an outpouring of condolences and tributes on the Internet.

Stern, who founded tech blog CenterNetworks and startup CloudContacts, died last week, according to a message posted yesterday to his Facebook page by his sister Sari Rosenberger.

She did not discuss the cause of death, but Stern had struggled with his weight for many years and had recently lost more than 125 pounds through diet and exercise, according to friend Louis Gray. His age was not immediately clear.

Stern began … Read more

Stern's home pinball tables have hacking in their future

LAS VEGAS--In the last few years, Stern has been making geek friendly pinball machines based on popular franchises like Transformers, Iron Man and The Avengers. But priced at $5,000 to $8,000, they've been out of the reach of people to own at home.

The company's newer models buck that trend, and come in at a smaller size, weight, and price tag at around $2,500.

Two of those were out for play here at the Digital Experience event, a smaller showing by the company that is also debuting its latest creations in the Las Vegas Convention … Read more

iPad Mini sales likely hurt by supply problems -- analyst

It's good to be in high demand, but not when there's not enough supply to go around. That's the case for Apple's iPad right now, Sterne Agee says.

The firm has joined the growing chorus of analysts worried about sales of Apple's popular gadgets. In Sterne Agee's case, the firm feels pretty bullish about iPhone sales but is more concerned about the iPad.

While the iPhone could surprise to the upside amid improving iPhone 5 supply, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said, iPad sales may prove to be a bit disappointing. That's because … Read more

Sirius Satellite Radio still sounds awful after all these years

I've been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber for ages, but I'm ready to pull the plug. I still think some of the music and talk channels are pretty good, but the sound quality has always been iffy. The treble sounds like it's underwater; it "swishes" and sounds garbled. I got around that by playing Sirius over my Tivoli PAL table radio, and since the PAL doesn't have a tweeter it softens the sound enough to make Sirius less irritating. The Tivoli is also on the other side of the room, and that helps to … Read more

X-Men pinball delivers mutant mayhem

Stern Pinball has officially started churning out the X-Men pinball game it hinted at back in June.

The machine comes in three different flavors. The base model is the X-Men Pro ($5,699) and includes a backglass graphic with all the X-Men mutants crammed together in an explosion of awesome.

Then you have the two X-Men Limited Edition machines ($7,999) which include a few extra playfield options, such as a motorized "Ice Slide" ramp, pop-up Night Crawlers, color-changing LEDs, and a magnetic spinning disc that basically rules. The two versions of this machine include an edition with … Read more

Google TV to get Howard Stern, Sirius XM

Google is hoping to give its foundering Google TV effort a jump start from shock jock Howard Stern.

Satellite radio provider Sirius XM told Reuters that it will make all of its programming available on Google TV through a new app that will allow listeners to pause live programs and play back up to five hours of content. Sirius XM is expected to announce the deal tomorrow at Google's I/O developers conference in San Francisco. (Update, June 27 at 7:25 a.m. PT: It's official: SiriusXM says it's coming soon to Google TV.)

The app, … Read more

Finally, a chance to tweet to aliens

I have so much to say to aliens, I really doubt I could keep it to 140 characters. But if I'm going to go the "Tweets in Space" route to speak to potential life forms on GJ667Cc, I'll need to keep it short.

The experimental art project will beam real-time tweets toward the exoplanet 22 light-years away during performance events at the 2012 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in New Mexico.

"Simply tag your Twitter messages with #tweetsinspace, and your phones, laptops, mobile devices -- anything with an Internet connection -- will be transformed into an alien communicator," says San Francisco new-media artist Scott Kildall, who is collaborating on the networked performance project with Nathaniel Stern, an associate professor in the Department of Art+Design at the University of Wisconsin's Peck School of the Arts. … Read more

Report: Howard Stern linked to pirated 'Super 8'

Perhaps you failed to see the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg movie "Super 8." It is 82 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so it must be good.

This might explain why there is some enthusiasm for pirated versions of it online.

Interestingly, Torrent Freak reports that there exists one especially high-quality version that has reportedly appeared in several very fine P2P groups. However, each iteration seems to have come from the same DVD screener.

Here is today's vast controversy: the film is reportedly watermarked "H Stern."

This highly incriminating watermark runs through the whole of … Read more

Bitly gets a new boss

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month. And it's done all that without anyone running the company full time.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is Bitly's first official CEO.

He's taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch Bitly as one of his incubator's projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an e-mail start-up that Facebook "acqhired" last fall, … Read more