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Ecco the Dolphin 'Big Blue' Kickstarter fails, trying again with 'Little Blue'
Oceanic adventure game Big Blue, put together by members of the team that made Ecco the Dolphin, has failed its Kickstarter bid. The game raised just under $56,000, falling well short of its $665,000 goal.Creator Ed Annunziata isn't giving up though, and has already announced plans to launch a second Kickstarter campaign.Annunziata admitted that "it is hard to get people to see how compelling a game like the Big Blue will be," and revealed plans for Little Blue, which will essentially serve as a "slice" of the original project. Little Blue will require a "much lower" level of funding, and should serve to properly convey Big Blue's full potential to players. The game will be less ambitious, featuring significantly fewer environments and creatures, though one of the two playable creatures is promised to be a dolphin.Assuming its funding is successful, Little Blue will be launched for free and contain a link to forward players to another Kickstarter for the full-fledged Big Blue. For the moment, the launch date for the Little Blue Kickstarter is still murky.
'Big Blue' from Ecco the Dolphin team makes a splash on Kickstarter
Some of the original Ecco the Dolphin team are reuniting in the hopes they can create a new adventure game through Kickstarter funding. Big Blue is an oceanic adventure game set one million years in the future, in which players can control every creature in the game world – even many creatures at once. There will also be a breeding mechanic, necessary to complete certain quests. The Kickstarter campaign for Big Blue also promises a dynamic music engine that will run continuously in the background as you play. "Parameters and player's interactions will drive music and keep it fluid and in emotional context with the visuals and events that occur in the game," creator Ed Annunziata says in the Kickstarter post. Spencer Nilsen and Bear McCreary will team up to handle the score.April 22, 2014 is the planned launch date for Big Blue on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. "If we exceed our goal by 50% the game will get multiplayer, cooperative game play. Players will be able to share environments, creatures, and complete quests as teams," Annunziata says. "If we reach 2X our goal we will be able make the Big Blue an MMO." Annunziata added that once "the first version" of the game is complete, he will approach Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for possible console ports.
IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier
Ten-core, 2.4GHz Xeons? Pshaw. IBM is used to the kind of clock speeds and brute force power that lead to Europe-dominating supercomputers. Big Blue has no intentions of letting its guard down when it unveils its next generation processors at the upcoming Hot Chips conference: the company is teasing that the "zNext" chip at the heart of a future System z mainframe will ramp up to 5.5GHz -- that's faster than the still-speedy 5.2GHz z196 that has led IBM's pack since 2010. For those who don't need quite that big a sledgehammer, the technology veteran is hinting that its upcoming Power7+ processors will be up to 20 percent faster than the long-serving Power7, whose current 4.14GHz peak clock rate may seem quaint. We'll know just how much those extra cycles mean when IBM takes to the conference podium on August 29th, but it's safe to say that our databases and large-scale simulations won't know what hit them.
Watson now hunting down patent trolls, plans Ken Jennings' elaborate demise
The Watson supercomputer used its speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and data mining abilities to crush puny human Ken Jennings' dreams of winning at "Jeopardy!", but now Big Blue has it chasing down medical patent trolls for fun. Incorporating the Strategic IP Insight Platform, IBM has now programmed Watson to scan millions of pharmaceutical patents and biomedical journals to discover, analyze, and record any info pertaining to drug discovery. SIIP can then look for the names of chemical compounds, related diagrams, the company and scientist who invented and works with the compounds and related words to determine a patent's rightful owner. The SIIP function can also highlight which patents could be targeted for acquisition by trolls looking to control a property via a lawsuit or licensing agreement. Click past the break for a video outlining the project, along with Watson's announcement of its engagement to "Skynet".
IBM turns 100, brags about bench pressing more than companies half its age
IBM is quite possibly the only tech company around that might have genuine difficulty whittling a list of its industry defining contributions down to a mere 100. And it's an impressively diverse collection at that, including the floppy disk, the social security system, the Apollo space missions, and the UPC barcode. All of this self-congratulation is not without cause, of course. IBM was born 100 years ago today in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a merger between three companies, all peddling different technologies. That diversity has helped define IBM from its inception, and has offered a sense of flexibility, making it possible to keep in step with technology's ever-quickening pace for a century. In 1944, the company helped usher in modern computing with the room-sized Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, and 37 years later, it played an important role in defining the era of home computing with the much more manageable IBM Personal Computer. In 1997, IBM introduced a machine that beat the world's reigning chess champion, and earlier this year, it created one that trounced two of the greatest players in Jeopardy history. These days, when the company is not building machines dedicated to outsmarting mankind, it's looking to promote sustainable development through its Smarter Planet program. So, happy centennial, Big Blue, and here's to 100 more, assuming your super-smart machines don't enslave us all in the meantime.
