Crave

SAN FRANCISCO -- First-person shooter games don't appeal to Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology guru and the guy who created JavaScript nearly two decades ago. He doesn't let his kids play them, either, he says. But he was so excited on Friday about showing off the potential of a new browser codec called ORBX.js at Autodesk's One Market Street offices here that he began playing Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 "Sanctuary" level in a room of 20 or so witnesses.

As Eich maneuvered somewhat awkwardly through the onslaught of opponents, Jules Urbach, CEO … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Whether you're an adult looking for a cool place to have your kid's birthday party, or a kid wanting to get your hands messy with science, the Exploratorium has been a favorite for all ages since it first opened its doors more than 40 years ago. But it eventually faced a problem: space.

Originally located at the Palace of Fine Arts, the only building left standing in its original location from San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the Exploratorium had outgrown the Beaux Arts house and began planning to move. Now completed, the Exploratorium will reopen to the public on April 17.

Its new space straddles the city and the bay at Pier 15, an overhauled warehouse located near the heart of downtown San Francisco. The hands-on science museum, founded by J. Robert Oppenheimer's physicist brother Frank in 1969, is using its new location to drive its popular mix of art and science into the 21st century. And it's huge. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--You are the blob. And you are the paint, too, if you let the art collective here known as Anticlockwise Arts have its way with you.

Last night at the Academy of Sciences' weekly NightLife event, the group debuted a new project called "Watercolor Walls" that mixes basic tech tools and audience participation to give new life to your stodgy old silhouette.

As one of the nearby DJs spun remixes of pop hits from the likes of Justin Timberlake, the crowd of more than a thousand walked, strutted, and shimmied between Watercolor Walls' camera and projector and a 15-foot-tall screen on its way from one end of the museum to the other. Using infrared light, the camera and projector would outline the silhouettes of people moving in front of the screen -- but there was more to it. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you could play high-end, 3D games in your browser at the same speed as on a console, would you? Here at the annual Game Developers Conference, the maker of Firefox revealed a plan to get you to do just that.

Mozilla's current holy grail is getting the mix of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS that powers the modern Web to run apps at speeds that rival native code, the operating system-dependent languages underpinning apps on iOS, Android, Windows 8, and other proprietary systems.

The not-so-secret weapon in Mozilla's plan is something called ASM.js, said Director of Engineering Vladimir Vukicevic. "It's a dialect of JavaScript that can optimize [code] much better. It's around two times as fast," he said.… Read more

AUSTIN, Texas -- Without a doubt, Grumpy Cat was the most talked-about sensation at the Mashable tent here at South by Southwest Interactive over the weekend. Editorial cartoonist Shannon Wheeler has been "live-tooning" the show for VentureBeat, and he chronicled his experience of not being able to see the diminutive feline.

The line for Grumpy Cat was the longest line at the show this year, winding around the block and requiring several hours of waiting. Wheeler, for his part, noted accurately that, "Grumpy Cat is more popular than Al Gore."

AUSTIN, Texas -- If a Web comic about bears, beastiality, righteous indignation, and Nikola Tesla tickles your funny bone, the place to be at this year's South by Southwest Interactive was Exhibition Hall 5 in the Austin Convention Center.

Matthew Inman, creator of the Web comic The Oatmeal, entertained a packed room at the close of the Interactive segment of the festival. Inman might appear to some as an unlikely hero of the Internet and an unusual choice to deliver a closing keynote address, but he found himself right at home on stage.

"I'm not a cartoonist. … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--The annual South by Southwest conference here prides itself on being a place for "disruption," but the only real disruption during a fairly pedestrian conversation between the founder of crowd-funded Ouya and the editor-in-chief of The Verge today were angry tweets followed by empty seats.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman got on stage with The Verge Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky to discuss her company's enormously successful Kickstarter campaign and the product it funded: an Android-based, open-source gaming console. The torrent of Tweets that followed revealed the audience members to be critical of just about everything except the room … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas -- Following a catastrophic server crash that occurred hours after Marvel Comics and Comixology announced a massive giveaway, Comixology has suspended the promotion.

Comixology CEO David Steinberger acknowledged that his company had "let down" customers. Previous orders under the "Marvel Comics #1" promotional, time-limited giveaway would be honored, he said, and he asked fans to fill out a form so they could be alerted when the promotion returns.

Because of Comixology's unique place in the digital comic-book distribution business as an iTunes-style marketplace with few, if any, direct competitors, other publishers' sales were … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Marvel Comics announced yesterday at its 1 p.m. South by Southwest panel here that it was giving away 700 first-issue comics, spanning its entire publishing history, via its Comixology-powered app.

Barely six hours later, Comixology tweeted that its servers had buckled under the traffic load.

The comics deal was slated to last only until the end of SXSW Interactive on Tuesday, giving fans of Spider-Man, Wolverine, the X-Men, and the Avengers around 60 hours to download as many of their favorite No. 1 comics as possible.

Both Marvel Comics and Comixology declined to comment for this story. It's currently not known when their servers will be back up, or if the giveaway might be extended.… Read more