Crave

The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at CES: they fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers.

No colors anymore.

(Credit: Gizmodo)

The video is funny. The ramifications of prank will not be. The CES organizers only grudgingly gave bloggers press credentials to the conference, and even then kept them segregated into a working lounge that was a step down in amenity and luxury from the "press" lounge and work area. This prank will not endear the blogging class to either the CEA, which produces CES, or the companies that paid dearly for the right to occupy CES floorspace and show off their products.

I would not be surprised to see Gizmodo banned from the show and possibly sued by either the CEA or the companies its bloggers harassed. For journalists (in my mind, all bloggers are journalists), legal and constitutional protection does not extend to mischief or sabotage. Publishing news reports, opinion, and satire are protected acts. Physical interference is not.

I asked Gizmodo publisher Nick Denton if he was going to fire the Gizmodo crew for their prank. "No," is all he said in an instant message. He did not reply to followup questions.

Gizmodo added this apology after the post first ran, but I don't think it will mollify the victims.

It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.

There are other likely outcomes of the prank. From now on, no one with an infrared-controlled device at a tradeshow is going to leave it exposed. A few tabs of black electrical tape will thwart TV-B-Gones. Beyond that, as our security expert Robert Vamosi said about this incident, expect TV manufacturers to think seriously about building encryption into their remote controls.

(Credit: Henri Bendel)

According to the PSFK blog, Manhattan's legendary luxury department store Henri Bendel is so notoriously old-school that it launched its first Web site a month ago. But the retailer is moving a step further into the Digital Age by opening a holiday gadget "pop-up store"-- curated by bloggers--inside its Fifth Avenue space.

Last year, Bendel had a holiday shop centered on the youth-oriented mobile phone carrier Helio.

But for 2007, Popgadget, which caters to female readers who appreciate both style and function and is staffed by a team of writers around the world, has selected an array of about 20 gadgets to be sold at Bendel for the duration of the holiday season. The "pop-up store" apparently opened on Monday; I might have to go check it out.

As for Bendel, this is probably a smart move for the store. The upscale women's fashion hub, which first opened in 1895, has become closely associated with the young and tech-savvy Gossip Girl crowd, so the displays of Prada cell phones, Archos portable media players, and high-end Griffin iPod accessories won't be particularly out of place.

But if the selection (or the luxe atmosphere at Bendel) isn't quite your thing, there are other holiday tech shops that have sprung up around the city--like the Wired Store, which opened in SoHo last week.

(Credit: Reddit)

FREE BEER!!!!

That was the rallying cry for the Reddit party in New York's East Village on Saturday night, the latest stop on the social news site's "Drankkit World Tour 2007"--an event series that has made it to San Francisco and Boston so far, with Toronto, Chicago, D.C., and a few others still to come. The Gotham installment took place in a woefully undersized Alphabet City dive called The Hanger Bar, and was not-so-woefully under-publicized. Reddit had reason to keep the rabble out.

That's because the beer was free all night long. Guess that's what happens when Conde Nast snatches you up.

CrackBerrys, clockwise from left: Charles Forman, Anthony Volodkin, Scott Kidder

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

There were no costumes involved, unlike the Boston Reddit party on Halloween, Most of the people in the crowd were avid Reddit members who'd put their usernames on their name tags; they seemed to be a quirky and sociable bunch, and a few people remarked that they'd be interested in seeing what the demographic differences would be if a similar party were thrown by Reddit rival Digg. (Who knows?) Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were actively talking to their guests and keeping the scene at the bar under control (Ohanian wanted to give the bartenders a hand, but the establishment's rules banned him from getting behind the tap).

Also spotted: Alley social fixtures Nate Westheimer of BricaBox and Michael Galpert of Worth1000 were making the rounds--it's tough to show up at a New York tech event and not run into either or both of those guys. Gawker Media's Scott Kidder was also there, attempting to dissuage rumors that his employer's "Guide to Conquering All Media" had been .

Iminlikewithyou.com founder Charles Forman was making quite the social splash, wearing a name tag that said "Mark Zuckerberg" and passing out obscenely large business cards that got everybody's attention. Some interesting developments for his aesthetically impressive social networking experiment, like games and some taggable videos, are on the way.

When asked "How's business?" Forman replied, "What business?" with a laugh. If only the rest of New York could be so laid back.

A couple of local music start-up execs were in the house too, with social radio site Jango and music blog hub The Hype Machine representing. Hype Machine co-founder Anthony Volodkin was getting some light-hearted jabs for the sociological disconnect between his trademark shoulder-length hippie hair and the slick BlackBerry he kept checking for new messages. Someone told Volodkin that he should make an appareance in one of those BlackBerry ad campaigns that attempts to deconstruct the brand's uber-corporate image. You heard it here first.

The hot trend in New York's digital scene: operating a Tumblr blog. The homegrown start-up, fresh off a relaunch and new venture cash, is the latest cool way to waste time and share too much information with your friends.

The Reddit party might've seemed like a small dotcom event, but there were a few reminders of Reddit's parent company--namely, a handful of "Nasties" in the crowd. Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital (the Conde Nast division that owns Reddit), was around, as was Ted Nadeau, general manager of CondeNet, the media conglomerate's Internet division. There were also two Portfolio.com bloggers bantering about, like, the economy, or disgraced Wall Street honchos, or something like that. (Dude! It's a dotcom party! You're supposed to talk about nerdier things!)

I wasn't the only press in the house. Valleywag's local "Alleywag," Nicholas Carlson, was carrying around an imposing SLR camera and attempting to capture any potentially scandalous moments--of which there weren't many, except when a drunken brawl reportedly almost materialized outside the bar, but nobody's really sure whether that was directly related to the Reddit event anyway. We were sad that nobody from the Silicon Alley Insider was around, because then we'd have a three-way race to see who could get a quality blog recap up first.

Vimeo founder (and Tumblr investor) Jakob Lodwick and videoblogging Star magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison are indeed dating again, for the record. Lodwick reported that Vimeo's foray into high-definition Web video has been going extremely well, and that the Connected Ventures brand is considering a white-label initiative so that businesses as well as lip-dubbing hipsters could take advantage of the video-sharing technology. We also talked about 20th-century Russian literature. Don't ask.

Speaking of novelty business cards, Julia Allison's take the cake: pink, with "Julia" in a handwriting-style font on one side and the URL of her personal Web site on the other. You know, I've been thinking. That really ought to be my new goal in life: get my name recognition so high that I can carry around bright red business cards that say "Caroline" in a Roy Lichtenstein-worthy comic book font, and have everybody know exactly who I am.

Then I'll know I've made it in the big city.

(Credit: Fareastgizmos)

Crave constantly begs for more resources, like any self-respecting blog, but a robot helper isn't exactly what we had in mind.

NEC's "PaPeRo" is designed to automatically assemble multimedia features for blogs, finding relevant material online based on conversations you have with it. (We're not kidding.) Just talk to the bot, Fareastgizmos says, and it will analyze the one-way discussion and find related photos, graphics, music and other accompaniments to post along with a video recording of the conversation.

Now we don't think that bloggers are in imminent danger of being replaced by a generation of PaPeRos. But we at Crave would be less than honest is we didn't admit to feeling a twinge of insecurity upon reading about this thing. After all, a robot's diary is probably just as interesting as most blogs out there.