Rafat Ali (left), founder of PaidContent with Robert Scoble (right) and his Nokia N95 We ran into former Microsoftee and current FastCompany.tv man and ubiquitous Web 2.0 presence Robert Scoble at Hollywood & Highland today, in front of Level 3 Nightclub, where Community Next: The Next Generation of Media and the Web is underway. After being caught on Scobleizer's live streaming Qik-cast, we took him and his Starbucks aside and drilled him about tech......

This past week, LAist got a chance to travel up to San Francisco to check out the Game Developers Conference. GDC is universally known as one of the most fun and exciting of the industry's gatherings, where publishers, press, and lecture attendees convene to discover the latest in gaming technology. This year we got to see a ton of kickass stuff, including an exclusive look at the new Street Fighter title from Capcom and......

As we reported earlier, the two-month Writers Guild of America strike is nearly over. WGA-East members voted heard about the proposal earlier and West members weighed in at 7 p.m. Some are already questioning the deal, but most expressed relief that the work stoppage is about to come to an end. Stay tuned to LAist for excellent coverage. A man was shot this morning in North Hollywood by an alleged gang member who approached......

As you might have guessed, we're pretty big into gaming over at my house -- our console set-up includes the both generations of the Xbox, not one but TWO PS2's (one for the living room, one for the bedroom), a Dell XPS with a wide-screen monitor (for PC gaming), a Nintendo Gamecube, a Nintendo 64, an SNES, and a Gameboy -- oh, and possibly a Sony PSP floating around somewhere. Our 50" big-screen is optimized......

In honor of what would be Jimi Hendrix's 65th birthday today, I am posting my impressions of The Experience Music Project in Seattle. Last November I visited the Experience Music Project. Many of my Seattle friends are boycotting EMP because of its founder, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. He pissed off a lot of people by building Qwest Field with taxpayer dollars after it had been voted down twice. The building is another strange......

It's too hot for C-SPAN: Bush rocks out -- slightly -- to a band playing “Guantanamera” at a Hispanic heritage month event. "It's time to end the tradition of holocaust denial that has only deepened the pain of those whose parents and grandparents suffered the unspeakable horror of ethnic cleansing," Mayor Villaraigosa said about City Council's calling the 1.5 million Armenians killed a genocide. "When we don't speak up, when we are silent, what......

Guitar Hero was in full-effect at E-For-All I must admit that after three bleary-eyed, sore-footed days stumbling around the Los Angeles Convention Center like Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas -- to objectively write about the E For All experience is difficult. On one hand, the inaugural show has been rightfully panned by most mainstream media outlets for a variety of reasons. Many big gaming companies, Sony, Microsoft, Activision, and Square to name a......

Who isn't a Halo fan-boy at this point *cough* me, 'cause I heart my trusty Wii, but maybe I could still get down with some Halo-the-movie live action phun. Description: Fans of Halo eagerly await the feature film version of the hugely popular Xbox game from Microsoft and its subsidiary Bungie. Neill Blonkamp will make his directorial debut from a script by Alex Garland (The Beach). Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh will serve as......

Sure, the inaugural E For All doesn't really hold a candle to the bloated spectacle of old E3, but then again, the new low-key Santa Monica-based E3 doesn't hold a candle to the old E3 either. And sure the big guns (Sony, Microsoft and Capcom) didn't show up, the LA Convention Center's South Hall is only half full with exhibits, crowds have been disappointingly light and the power went out Friday night, ending the......

If you happen to find yourself driving around at 11pm tonight, you'll likely see long lines of (mostly) men standing outside of Best Buys, EB Games and Gamestops all over greater Los Angeles. Do not be alarmed. It's just the hardcore gaming faithful lining up to claim their midnight copies of Halo 3, the biggest video game of the year. For the completely uninitiated, Halo is the sci-fi shooter franchise that is basically the......

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pissed about the "hundreds of billions" of dollars swallowed by piracy and counterfeiting and it has taken the outrage to our fair City of Angels ("...and Demons," as the press release says). The Chamber has released results of a Gallup survey, coinciding with this week's Counterfeiting and Piracy Awareness shenanigans claiming that one-quarter of all Angelenos are admitted pirates. But we're certain that percentage is far greater. In fact,......

Don't forget to head out to the LA Tofu Festival and Sunset Junction Street Fair this weekend! Several large Japanese corporations are working with Japanese American community organizations in L.A. to bring a massive float to the U.S. for the first time. The very "principled" Republicans senators in the California legislature are citing fiscal sanity and their constituents as the primary factors driving their continued stalling on the budget bill. A man was hit......

RIP: Veteran KTLA newscaster Hal Fishman passes away at age 75. Southern California's 11 bridges are A-OK, officials said based on recently completed emergency inspections. To reward him for his groundbreaking and much talked-about late night show "Last Call", NBC has decided to give Carson Daly a two-year extension. Way to secure last place, NBC. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has decided to resign from DreamWorks Animation SKG's board of directors and to sell close......

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Here's some tech news that made the cut this week: • Professional social networking site Linkedin has seen its traffic spike over three hundred percent in the last year. I wondered why I started getting all those Linkedin invites recently. • Speaking of social networking, watch out for the Facebook backlash. And, in a related story, what's a site like Facebook worth anyway? • Intel has joined the $100 group (aka one laptop per......

Thousands of video game addicts, cosplayers and booth babe fans shed tears last year when the Entertainment Software Association announced that it would be scaling back the size and focus of future E3 Expos. The game industry and fan bacchanalia had previously attracted a record attendance of over 60,000 visitors and 400 companies in 2006. Instead of being held at LA's own Convention Center, the "more intimate" show will take place this year in......

Welcome to the latest edition of 'Ask the MACist', the column where I answer your Macintosh and other technology questions. Our question this week comes from Mark in Santa Monica. He asks: I'm new to the Mac and was wondering which web browser I should use. Safari, Firefox or something else? Which web browser to use can sometimes be a hard question to answer. The three major ones for the Mac that I use......

Some tech tidbits that caught my eye this week. • Yahoo and Microsoft are getting cozy. Is there a marriage in the works? • Wally Schirra, pioneer astronaut and 5th man ever to go into space, died of a heart attack this week. He was 84. • Digg has a bad couple days. Is the honeymoon over? • Speaking of obscure digits that unlock encrypted HDDVDs, the guys who are fighting to protect their......

In like a fox and out with a yodel? Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $50 billion. Many have speculated that Microsoft would eventually spring for big Y, as a marriage with the online media giant increasingly appears to be the most viable option to compete with Google in the great war of search and online advertising. Always a fun rumor to kick around, but today it's being corroborated by the WSJ, and considering......

Some interesting tech-related news from around the web this week. • Imitation may be a form of flattery (the sincerest kind, so they say) but AOL, I think you might have taken it a bit too far. • AT&T Chief Edward "Moneybags" Whitacre is retiring. His going away present? $158.5 Million. Not a bad present. I bet he won't try to return it. • Apple issues a fix for the battery issues that plague......

Welcome to the latest edition of 'Ask the MACist', the column where I answer your Macintosh and other technology questions. Our question this week comes from Will in North Hollywood. He asks: I know there's a method for updating Mac OSX all the time and sometimes I get the window popping up saying I have updates. Should I always update when it tells me to? That's a good question and an important one to......

Today we interviewed a top online news editor and wanted to share the goods. This interview was conducted by LAist during the Knight New Media Centers Politics and Cyberspace conference. Does anyone really still call it "cyberspace?" Dave Herman is the daily editor of the MSN.com homepage. We discussed the hits and misses on the evil empire's Redmond, WA-based portal, including the Janet nip-slip and the Virginia Tech massacre, before we were rudely cut off.........

Some interesting tech-related news from around the web this week. • Blackberry service had an outage this week in many parts of North America and for several tense hours, millions of users had to find something else to do with their thumbs. I feel their pain. But oddly, not in my thumbs. • Despite spending a boatload of cash to advertise Windows Vista, Microsoft has only managed to sell 244 legit copies of the......

Google Voice Local Search, or Google 411 Experimental -- as the robot's greeting would have it -- is live. In Google's ongoing efforts to take over the world, this service is free, no ads and it connects you directly. The Googleplex also managed to push the product live (experimental) less than a month after Microsoft announced their acquisition of voice query software developer TellMe. 1-800-GOOG-411 It's all computerized on their end, however, with no human......

• Apple makes a deal with Music giant EMI to offer music at the iTunes Store with no DRM. If you don't know what DRM means, don't worry. It may not be around much longer. • Like Apple, Microsoft is apparently going to be making a deal with EMI for no DRM music too. Microsoft copying Apple? I'm shocked. • The saga continues for VOIP provider Vonage. First, they lose to Verizon. Then, they......

• Its official, June 11th is iPhone day. Start saving now. • Is Google too powerful? Business Week speculates that it might be. • The Treo 755p in the wild. If you still care at all. • SonyBMG music retires the requirement for new artists to submit a demo tape -- at least in Europe. Now, artists can upload demos to the company's website instead. They will probably still be rejected but at least......

• Apple, Inc. takes another step into your living room with the AppleTV -- which started shipping this week to eager early-adopters (like me). Should you get one? I'll let you know very soon after I beat up on it for a few days. • Speaking of AppleTV, over at 'Make', one of my favorite "do-it-yourself" sites, they show you how to violate the warranty on your shiny new AppleTV in four easy steps.......

Welcome to the latest edition of "Ask the MACist" the column where I answer your Macintosh and technology questions. Our question this week comes from Larry in Culver City. He asks: "I've got a Mac and I've got an XBox 360. Is there any way to get them to talk to each other?" Like Larry, I to am an avid XBox 360 user as well as a Macintosh lover so I have also been......

Welcome to the LAist weekly tech news roundup. Each week I'll be bringing you the latest, and hopefully most interesting, technology news from around the city, the state, the country and the world. Also, if you have any news, tips or things of interest you want to point out, feel free to drop us a line at: themacist [at] gmail dot com. Ok, let's get to the news: The Bush administration is at it......

Welcome to the LAist weekly tech news roundup. Each week I'll be bringing you the latest, and hopefully most interesting, technology news from around the city, the state, the country and maybe even the world. Also, if you have any news, tips or things of interest you want to point out, feel free to drop me a line at: themacist [at] gmail dot com. Now, let's get to the news: Microsoft was ordered by......