Entertainment

Mash, Yahoo's way of quietly saying farewell to Yahoo 360, is at first glance a somewhat uninspired attempt to catch up with Facebook. Even the name is boring--Mash. Don't mix it up, by the way, with Mosh, Nokia's mobile networking site (currently in beta) and Mashable, the social-networking blog. Mash (invite-only as of now) looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace and Netvibes--and it also has a bit of wiki DNA: Anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile. Besides that, nothing new.

To be … Read more

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Final Four matchups here.

Get it now! Your updated, printer-friendly tournament bracket.

This is why they call it Late September Lack-of-Sanity. Upsets, upsets, upsets were the theme of last week's nonviolent robot vote-battles, and only two No. 1 seeds are still in the mix.

Which nonviolent robots will win their division finals and go on to the Final Four? Vote for the winners right now; you have until Sept. 23 to vote on these Elite 1000 matchups.

The battle for net neutrality might be in its infancy, and already we're seeing casualties. There have been murmurs that Comcast has been capping bandwidth usage on its all-you-can eat high-speed subscribers that have simply used more of their connection than Comcast is comfortable with, along with evidence the ISP has been monkeying with people's BitTorrent usage. Last week GameDaily BIZ got in touch with Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation who confirmed that the company was indeed capping monthly downloads of its "excessive" users.

The actual ballpark figure Douglas gave GameDaily BIZ was "… Read more

The words "inflatable" and "robot" rarely appear next to one another in a sentence, but there's a first time for everything.

The sub-$40 Mega Mech Airmagination radio-controlled robot may be full of air, but as the photo that accompanies this story shows, it's also full of enough awesomeness to cause amazed facial expressions from mulleted youngsters.

The robot has a built-in voice chip that spits out pre-loaded phrases, as well as wheels in its feet that let you drive it around RC-style.

Like most cutting-edge robots, the Mega Mech Airmagination is available at Walmart. … Read more

Of all the things a robot should be able to do--smashing things, shooting stuff with lasers, lifting large objects, transforming into a 18-wheeler--making you feel like you're the world's best comedian should be pretty high up on the list.

And hopefully, you're willing to pay $3,000 for that privilege.

The Speecys "Mi-Rai" PC-101C robot is notable because it boasts facial-recognition skills and an open-ended software platform that lets developers write applications for it. More importantly, it also goes friggin nuts when you tell a joke. For evidence, watch this video.

[Via GeekAlerts.]

According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can't be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it … Read more

The coolest after-dark attractions just have to be across the pond, don't they? I'm drooling over screenshots of Twentyfour, which looks pretty darn awesome (though who knows what the crowd's like). With over a thousand LED color combinations available, this is one place where the decor won't get boring--and did I mention the walls are actually projection screens?

The video walls kind of remind me of the Nokia flagship store in Manhattan, but from what it sounds like, they're a lot more functional. Bar patrons can control, or even contribute their own scenery somehow--I should … Read more

We reported back in July that MySpace in the midst of a deal with the creators of the movie Blood Diamond to create a new Web-based program called Quarterlife. At the time, it wasn't confirmed, representatives from the parties involved declined to comment, and quarterlife.com was password-protected.

Now, it's official: a release from MySpace has confirmed that Quarterlife will debut on its MySpaceTV platform on November 11. A project of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who created the TV shows My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething in addition to Blood Diamond, the new Web show will follow the … Read more

Rising up out of the chaos and career collapse that was Britney Spears' performance on Sunday are MTV's traffic numbers.

The cable channel's Video Music Awards were bad for Britney but a boon for Viacom, MTV's parent company. Users flocked to MTV.com to watch Spears' on-stage misadventures.

On Sunday, MTV.com saw 2.6 million visitors log on, a tally that smashed the site's previous record for daily Web site traffic. The site also delivered 7 million video streams on Monday as of 3:30 p.m. ET, which topped its previous best day of … Read more