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CES 2013: Best in show
Selecting the best in show is no easy task, because CES covers such a crazy range of devices: refrigerators, tablets, smartphones and even technologically advanced cutlery. This year was no different. We've combed our CES 2013 coverage and narrowed it down to the biggest announcements that had us chattering at this year's show. Join us after the break for CES 2013's very best.
Macworld | iWorld Best of Show liveblog
I'm live at the Best of Show awards, where Macworld has chosen the best products from the show (hence the name). Sorry about the lack of images, you'd basically see washed out photos of a projected image. Be sure to check out the links to each product. 3:07 Just now getting started! Up first, Boinx with iStopMotion. Florian from Boinx is doing a demo of iStopMotion. As we said back in December, it is pretty nice. 3:12 A beautiful little paper cutout animation from a kid who used iStopMotion -- really cool stuff. 3:15 PDFpen for iPad is up next from Smile. Really interesting to see how something as simple as a PDF tool (and there are several on the store) can be fresh and awesome. PDFpen is basically Adobe Acrobat Pro for your iPad. But much, much easier to use. I just saw a signature from Photos applied to a tax document -- with transparency so it didn't block the field below! You can easily drag and drop text boxes and more. Oh, and iCloud storage. How cool is that? There's a Mac version as well, but PDFpen looks fantastic either way. 3:20 TourWrist is up next. They call it "remote reality" -- sort of like QuickTime VR for your iPad. The authoring side of the app is really pretty nice. It uses a simple line to help you line up your images for a full panorama, better than a gyro-based solution that automatically lines them up. 3:25 The other winners: DevMicro makes a small microphone in a cone shape that captures 6 channels of audio at once! FileThis has a service called Fetch that will gather online docs from various financial accounts and puts them together for you. Blue Microphones won for their Spark Digital microphone. It's a digital version of their analog mic of the same name. i4software has a video studio app for your iPhone. It can handle multiple cameras, which is pretty amazing. Global Delight has a product called Game Your Video, which adds effects to video (for iOS). Ryz Media has blinQ, a remote control that uses your iPhone and adds some social sharing. Not sure how this won -- there are a bunch of apps (with hardware dongles) that do this. I'll give it a whirl and see what makes it special. Adonit's Jot Touch won because it is the stylus that allows you to add pressure sensitivity to your iOS device. It's a cool product that will make you miss your Wacom tablet. Lantronix won for the xPrintServer, a product that connects to your network and makes printers available for AirPrint. 3:35 And we're done! Early! Congratulations to the winners. Check out our Macworld hub for more coverage.
Guild Wars 2 awarded Best of Show at PAX
ArenaNet has done it again. Less than one month after carrying off Best Online Game honors at Gamescom, Guild Wars 2 picked up one of two Best of Show awards from Machinima.com. It may seem a bit odd to be handing awards out to a game that doesn't even have a launch date, but the folks at Machinima.com were just as impressed as those who played it at PAX, declaring that the demo alone "plays better than most games on the market today." The award is included in the full 11-minute PAX wrapup video, beginning near the 9:30 mark. Follow along after the jump to take a look, and congratulations to the ArenaNet team!
Global Agenda closed beta to begin in July
Hi-Rez Studios just updated their Answer Center with new Global Agenda beta information. The game is expected to move to a Closed Beta phase this July. Global Agenda has been in Alpha testing for a number of months now.It looks like they're sub-phasing their Closed Beta Test as well (e.g., CBT-1, CBT-2, etc.), an approach that seems more common in MMOs these days. Warhammer Online did a series of closed beta phases, and more currently, Aion is doing the same. Each phase focuses on a different area of the MMO that needs testing and each successive phase usually brings more testers to the mix.There are pros and cons when taking this phased approach. On one hand you really get to hammer down on your areas of concern but on the other you're only testing the individual parts and not the whole. Players always seem to play a game differently when unleashed upon the full experience.In the end though, it probably won't matter to all the people who want a taste of what Global Agenda has to offer. Winning E3 Editor's Choice awards like "Best of Show 2009" is definitely building anticipation and raising expectations for this title.
Analyst: Best of E3 winners see strong domestic sales
This year's Game Critics Awards for E3 honored Fallout 3 with "Best of Show," but will that translate into sales when the game actually releases? Well, chances are, sales of the game will probably have very little to do with the title receiving the E3 award; however, according to analyst Ben Schachter of UBS, the "Best of Show" does typically go on to see an average of 2.42 million units in sales within the US.Schachter notes that every software winner over nine years has gone on to see over a million units sold (except for 2000's Jet Grind Radio). He also points out that each of the winners was either a first-party game or a console exclusive*. *Don't get nitpicky, we're way ahead of those nerdsploding and furiously typing that MGS came to the GameCube six years later.
Macworld Best of Show awards
Macworld has announced the Best of Show awards for Macworld San Francisco 2008. Besides the obligatory MacBook Air, they've acknowledged a variety of interesting products from Photoshop Elements 6 to Guitar Hero III. For the full list, check out the announcement over at Macworld. In addition, they have a video of the presentations up as well.
MacSpeech releases Dictate, wins Best of Show
For some time now speech recognition on the Mac has lagged behind Windows, particularly Dragon Naturally Speaking. Well, no more, as MacSpeech, developer of iListen for the Mac, has managed to license the Dragon engine from maker Nuance for the new MacSpeech Dictate announced at Macworld.In addition to standard speech recognition and transcription into various applications like Word and Pages, Dictate also allows you to control your Mac by voice including support for Automator and AppleScript. According to our man on the show floor, it's impressive enough that it has won a Best of Show award.MacSpeech Dictate will be available on February 15 for Intel Macs starting at $199, and registered users of iListen will be able to crossgrade for $99 unless purchased in 2008, in which case it will be $29 (iListen has been discontinued).Update: A press release has been issued with more specifics on pricing. The crossgrade price for iListen users is actually $99; the $29 crossgrade is only available until April 15 to people who purchased iListen in 2008.
Macworld "Best of Show" award ceremony open to all, submission deadline looms
Every Macworld Expo brings us the Macworld Best of Show Awards, which is exactly what you'd expect it to be - the anointing of the Expo's best, most innovative new products, as chosen by the editors of Macworld magazine. Previously the award "ceremony" was closed to the public, but this year Macworld is shaking things up a bit by opening it up to all registered Macworld attendees.If your company has something worth considering, time is running out to get your submissions in. The deadline for guaranteed consideration is December 15th, 2006, so get cracking!By opening the awards to all, companies will get even greater exposure and attendees and contestants both will get to hear, first hand, why certain products were chosen.The Best of Show ceremony will be held on January 10, 2007, at 2:45 p.m. at the Moscone Center. We'll be there. Will you?
