Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
ie8 fix

teller

TechCrunch50 kicks off: Let the games begin

SAN FRANCISCO--The fall season has officially begun. Starting Monday morning, the annual TechCrunch50 conference took over the San Francisco Design Center for two days of start-up pitches and presentations; the conference's angle, as co-hosts Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis reiterated, is that all 50 companies on the roster are completely new and launching for the first time.

Start-ups presenting at the conference, which were chosen through a behind-the-scenes elimination process, were grouped into categories. The first of the day was "Youth & Games," with an array of kid-focused and entertainment start-ups.

The day had already begun with … Read more

Entertaining word game

As children, many of us had fun with Mad Libs. You remember these; the game asks for a set of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech, which are then inserted into a story with hilarious results. StoryMaker operates on the same basic premise, and is just as much fun.

The program's interface is rather unattractive, but it is simple and can be easily navigated by kids. There are large buttons for the program's four main functions. The first button let users play the game. The program asks for words in various parts of speech, and at … Read more

Robotic fortune teller is worse than clowns

If animatronic heads like the "WowWee Alive Elvis" freaked you out, we don't recommend reading on with this post. As if the turban-wearing mannequin in Big weren't bad enough, "Zultan"--an "animated speaking fortune teller"--brings carnival creepiness to an entirely new level.

The baritone-voiced Zultan's head, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Linda Blair's possessed noggin in The Exorcist when it wasn't doing 360-degree pirouettes, remains hidden behind a curtain until it detects sound or senses someone approaching. Then the fortune teller emerges from the shadows as its &… Read more