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I was in San Francisco this past weekend, covering the Singularity Summit. You probably know what the Singularity is. If I was 100% sure that you knew, I wouldn’t try to explain what it is. But a sliver of doubt remains, so here goes. Every once in a while human civilization reaches a moment when [...]

BOSTON—-The Singularity is Near, A True Story About the Future, by filmmakers Anthony Waller, Ray Kurzweil, Ehren Koepf and Toshi Hoo, with Executive Producer Martine Rothblatt , makes its international premiere on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at the 34th annual Montreal World Film Festival.

On paper, “Singularity” is a fairly standard FPS with a quirky physics gimmick. However, the actual game is a little more interesting than that. The game is decent and reasonably fun, but not anything particularly outstanding.

At the first day of the Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco, author and biophysicist Gregory Scott shares his macro-evolutionary perspective on the singularity, proving the concept itself is…

We are writing this aboard the Virgin flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco. We are not sitting next to James “The Amazing” Randi, though we are ostensibly his escorts. Nor are we s…

As with many shooting games, the vibe of Singularity owes a debt of gratitude to the movie Aliens . In Aliens , Sigourney Weaver travels to a foreign land to engage in a hallway-by-hallway battle against yucky aliens. In Singularity , you portray a U.S. soldier who travels to a strange Russian island, where you engage in a hallway-by-hallway battle against yucky zombies (and well-dressed Soviet …

Humans merging with machines? Radical life extension? On the eve of the Singularity Summit, let’s look past some of these scarier notions to understand what lessons this movement can teach us.

So there I was reading a jolly little “silly season” BBC Online story about the man who says he’s cracked a core problem with the Rubik’s Cube – when I came upon a sentence that slightly chilled me, and also makes me wonder yet again what the hell Google is up to: “Google stepped forward and offered to run the computation…

Rent It Shown in private demo at last year’s E3, Singularity looked to be a promising time travel themed title, even in the overcrowded first person shooter market. The game pits an American soldier by the name of Nate Renko in the middle of time bending tale against an enemy revived from the Cold War, the Russians. The quest for power in this timeline revolves around a source of unlimited power …

Good novels have a habit of reading their critics’ minds. Last week Room, the seventh novel by the Irish-born writer (and now Canadian citizen) Emma Donoghue, reached the long-list of the Man Booker Prize. Even before the selection it came trailing clouds of expectation: the bidding war, the rights deals, the talking-up and talking-past that can smother a book with its own renown even before it …

Filed under: Biz , Starcraft II , World of Warcraft , Call of Duty: Black Ops Activision Blizzard is the latest publisher to offer up its financial results, this time for the quarter that ended on June 30. In that time period the company brought in $967 million in revenue, slightly down compared to $1.04 billion for the same period a year ago. Activision released three PC games in that quarter …

NEW YORK — Activision Blizzard posted a higher net income for the second quarter Thursday as development expenses and other costs declined.

Publisher reports 7% decline in April-June revenues as digital sales surpass retail; Hong Kong-set sequel bumped to 2011.

Accelerating technological change: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet By Steve Borsch | Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010 When you consider the technology changes your great-grandparents, grandparents, parents (and even you) have experienced already, I can only imagine what we’ll see in decades ahead. Hang on to your hats it’s gonna be a heckuva ride!

Activision outlook lags Street, shares fall

Activision Blizzard Inc. posted a higher net income for the second quarter Thursday as development expenses and other costs declined, but fewer game launches pushed revenue lower, shy of Wall Street’s expectations.

A weaker-than-expected outlook for the current quarter sent shares of Activision Blizzard Inc. lower in after-hours trading Thursday, though the video game publisher reaffirmed its outlook for the full year.

Downloads for Call of Duty and World of Warcraft offset poor sales for some of the video game maker’s new offerings. Despite launching four new games last quarter, video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc. continued to see a pair of older titles account for most of its business in its most recent quarter.

COD and Blizzard more than make up for it. Poor sales of Bizarre’s racer Blur and Raven Software’s shooter Singularity between April and June were offset by the continued gargantuan success of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, publisher Activision Blizzard has said. “Singularity fell short of meeting what is an exceptionally high bar within the shooter genre,” said chief financial officer …

[Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander looks at the apparent recasting of a female protagonist to male in what would become Activision's True Crime 3, asking whether this is symptomatic of larger issues around focus testing and female character representation in the industry.] Games with female leads don’t sell. At least that’s what Activision believes, looking at top software sellers in any given year …