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nVidia and Infinium to Partner at CES
JonLatane writes "It seems that nVidia is going to allow Infinium to demonstrate their Phantom "game service" at their CES booth. Since its inception, Infinium has proven to be rather belligerent about its product and will probably stay in court for a long time."
They probably won't take up much space.
There is no "partnership." Total anti-NVIDIA BS some sites are putting on this. The fact of the matter is that IL is a customer of NVIDIA, as the machine has an FX 5600 in it. It also runs WinXP Embedded, so it's being demo'd at the MS booth as well as they announced a while ago (PDF).
Phantom, the rumors, etc, this IS the game. Just look at all the entertainment we've gotten out of it. You'll go buy the console and open up the box and there will be a nice note thanking you for playing.
In other news, Infinium Labs' stock tumbled 11% today.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
client.
This is just a case of a vendor allowing a client to do some free advertisement for them, even if the thing is vaporhardware.
All your base are belong to Google.
News on the Phantom? I guess its killer game will be Duke Nukem Forever.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Just like everyone else, I have read about this system and laughed at all the jokes we have had at its expense. I have to ask, though, what benefit does this company get out of constantly hyping this seemingly nonexistant product? Is it that they had some idea that they boasted about before realizing it's not quite so easy to just build a new gaming system, or is it that this is some bizarre, ass-backwards means of getting publicity for future products? I agree, though, with an above poster. The fun seems to be in watching this company constantly hype a phantom product (pun most definitely intended) and making jokes about it.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
Ohhh like "Spyware Hunter", or that trojan horse simulator game, or my favorite "WormHammer 2005" by Symantec.
You know, at first I was all like "What?! This is a bad idea nVidia; what are you thinking?" like a concerned parent....
But then I realized you know it's probably okay cause Infinium probably won't even show up.... so
Far be it from me to call B.S. on something before having seen it, but lately hardware manufacturers seem to be relying more and more on "Press Releases" and benchamrks to garner attention, and thus investor money rather than truly innovating as was the norm only a few years back. Tom's hardware got sick of pandering to the hardware companies claims and said they were going to put an end to it.
x .html
http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20041011/inde
This reeks of a venture capital marketing strategy to me, but I suppose once the show is over and we see what they have to offer, I might change my mind. At the moment though this press release seems more hype than anything else judging from past experience with Infinium.
Reading the article, it seems that Venture Capitalists have given this company $25M without a product, business plan, or even a physical place of business.
The '90s are BACK, baby!!!
Before you comment, you should understand how the Phantom is intended to work. It won't have a cd-rom / dvd-rom drive, instead all games will be purchased via the as yet immaterial phantom gaming network, also known as the Black Knight network (or something like that). The games will then be streamed to your consoles internal hdd where the intent is that you can begin playing the game before it's fully downloaded. With no way to remove items from the HDD, eventually some of the games you 'bought' will have to be downloaded again as they will have been deleted and replaced by something else. Furthermore, should Infinium manage to actually bring a product to market and then fold, you have a console and games you've purchased but can't play since the network is required (no offline mode like steam has), not that steam is necessarily superior but atleast you can play games you've downloaded such as HL2 in offline mode.
ATI has announced that Infinium will cancel the product and declare bankruptcy at the ATI booth the day later.
I dont care what people say, the Infinium and the Phantom console will be a household name in a year. Kind of in the same way Enron was.
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
It plays PC games, so that is basically BS meant to make it seem like they have some support. Nobody is making "Phantom Exclusive" games yet...it plays PC games so thats that.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I think the real question is, why is Microsoft and nVidia giving his thing any free press? Or, why is MS and nV giving up booth space at CES? If and when this thing ever comes out, it has all the earmarks of being an XBOX competitor? Perhaps they are thinking buyout, but of what; Does infinium own any patents? And, are they concerned about the well known flap between Infinium and [H]ardOCP.
r/dcviper
Ummm, err, say what, now?
From the Yahoo article:
The Phantom Game Service will be delivered over broadband to a Windows XP Embedded-based receiver that sits with other devices in the room where family members go for entertainment.
Nearly two dozen leading game publishers have committed to provide content for the Phantom Game Service, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos and Vivendi Universal.
Show attendees can also see Phantom in the Microsoft Corp. booth in the Central Hall, No. 7145.
Whatever they've got, they've managed to get whatever a "commitment" is worth out of some pretty solid game publishers as well as space in NVIDIA and Microsoft booths at the show. It also looks like they're letting game publishers cut a lot of middle-men out of the way (except for the publisher, of course (like Valve didn't do)) by putting games over broadband. They've got that going for them at least. Before Half-Life 2 went out over Steam this was never on such a scale before.
Plus they've already managed to sue a few people which shows they've got some dice. They'll get along really pretty with the likes of that crowd. Unfortunately though, I remember when it was first announced, and I remember Linux being mentioned. Now it'll sit in a MS booth which may be awesome for them but is a little tragic for everyone who hoped getting a Linux console out there would lead to better Linux game support.
Direct away from face when opening.
That was suppose to be Sun Microsystems, Sun Microsofts, thats a nightmare I don't want to even think about.
NVIDIA, of all companies, should know if this thing is real or not. If they filled an order for a ton of GPU's and such for Infinium, they'd have reason to believe the aptly named "Phantom" is real. Or maybe, they like everyone else here, seems to think it doesn't exist, and is taking an opportunity to publically call out Infinium and prove it.
Only the purest of souls seek enlightenment. Everyone else just wants power.
I wish my stock (AVN) would split that often for no good reason. AVN gets good news from successful drug trials and barely budges.
Infinium looks like it might be good for day trading if you have money to throw away. When the stock is trading under $1 and losing money it's a really bad sign. It's also "over the counter" which means it's not actually being traded on the major markets.
I would need really good positive information before putting anything on it. At this point it's pure gambling since the value of the stock is based purely on investors and not on any sort of product and consumer market value. There's no product for people to buy to raise the value of the stock. The only product is the stock itself.
Work Safe Porn
Startups are not allowed in the US anymore? True some mistakes were made by IL. Too bad Kyle can't understand that companies have to start somewhere when they don't start with a couple billions.
Ah, thank you for that wonderfully misinformed opinion. This gives me the opportunity to point out the obvious lies, deceit, and chicanery(thank you Penny Arcade) produced by the Infinium Labs 'company.' Please, observe the Infinium Labs HQ--yes, that is a mail depot.
It's one thing to sell your product broadly.
It's another thing to ACTIVELY PROMOTE this type of company by putting them in your trade show booth.
These companies can do better.
Send a little note:
We don't care who you sell your product too, but don't actively promote scum like infinium.
Who's side are you on? The nice guys, or the litigation prone?
Mention the Nvidia CES booth.
I'm including some address below.
Carrie Cowan
Consumer/Games/Partner PR Manager
ccowan@nvidia.com
+1 (408) 486 7330
Brian Burke
Desktop PR Manager
bburke@nvidia.com
+1 (512) 401 4385
Bryan Del Rizzo
Platform Products PR Manager
bdelrizzo@nvidia.com
+1 (408) 486 2772
Infinium is the company that is suing an enthusiest site and its operator personally for $20,000,000 for providing what appears to be basically accurate information about its products.[1]
The gaming / enthusiest market is a core market for Nvidia. Not only does Nvidia have to wake up in the morning knowing they are supporting a litigation prone (and otherwise apparently unsuccesful) company (infinium), but they also have to live with the business decision of actively supporting a company that is engaged in litigation with the very folks who buy and promote their product! And that the litigation appears to be pretty unjustified.
[1]
PLEASE READ THE LINKS IN THE ARTICLE AND REACH YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. THESE ARE SIMPLY OPINIONS BASED ON A QUICK REVIEW OF THE LINKED MATERIAL.
Infinium's business plan:
1. Profit!
2. ???
3. Bankruptcy
Wouldn't really matter. To repeat a rehash of an old joke:
Q:"What do you get when you cross Microsoft and Sun?"
A:"Microsoft."
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
By "launched" you mean he was one of the people working in some capacity with the Xbox at Microsoft, right?
That press release on Yahoo tries to claim he's the creator of the Xbox. I think Seamus Blackley may have a different opinion.
The bottom line is this: we have seen JACK from Infinium Labs so far, except for stellar promises, and lawsuits against naysayers who dare to actually poke into the public record background of Kevin Bacchus and his buddies to either substantiate his claims (like where he tries to claim he built the Xbox) or disprove them.
Any goofball with a bunch of seed money can walk up to a company like Nvidia and negotiate an order for a bunch of chips, and parlay that into a joint promotional junket. Whether or not they do anything useful with the chips after they get them is another matter.
If you think that getting a big company like Nvidia to be happy in the same physical space as you is an excellent indicator of "real", try this one on:
A place I once worked had convinced IBM to fly in all of their senior guys in western Canada for our product demo. We had about 20 guys from IBM on hand. Senior managers, VPs, etc. We did the product demo in a building we were planning on buying, but at the moment didn't own, and was in fact still for sale. The company talked a great game to the realtors and current owner of the building as well, so we got to use the building pretty much like it was ours for almost a half year since they were fully convinced we were buying it outright any time now.
The company talked a great game, and the IBM guys drooled so much over our pie-in-the-sky visions we almost had to use a mop. At the end of it all they extended us a bottomless line of credit for whatever we liked, LOANED us an s/390 worth $600,000 so we could "play with a few things on it", and were desperate to get in on the ground floor with us. Becuase, you see, we were going to "Change the World!". The s/390 wasn't even central to our plan, it was just a "Hey maybe we could use the VMs on the s/390 for X" that we tossed out there and IBM practically begged us to take one back to our office and try it out. There were only a dozen people in Canada at the time who even knew how to run Linux VMs on the things, and IBM flew one of them into town just for us.
8 months later, the company laid 65% of its staff off, merged with another failing company, and I believe is currently lurching along zombie-fashion with a single salaried employee today in addition to its two "directors".
But for a few months there, we could have had IBM send down guys to do anything for us because of what we "showed" them we were going to do.
Aaah. The power of vapor.
Believe NOTHING unless you see it actually work. For real. Not a company run "demo".
Nvidia doesn't really have anything to lose from this anyway. Industry insiders already know that the Infinium box is not likely to see the light of day much less be successful. While the general public and the less informed are not even aware of the Phantom or all of the controversy surrounding it. So as long as the demos themselves don't suck, Nvidia and MS won't mind. I would assume that putting together a decent demo is much easier than launching a successful product!
You know, if the Infinium debacle plays true to form, someday any and all things Infinium might fetch a nice sum on eBay!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
But seriously, why is Slashdot giving these guys continual press coverage?
And it'll be worth more than the Phantom.
This thing has a Geforce 5600 in it, and it downloads the game as you play it. It will completely bomb at release, and the only guy that will end up winning is the "CEO". He's made something like $10 million off the investors.
This thing will tank like those Divx players at Circuit City tanked. You could give one as a birthday present, and the receipent would act the same as if you had sqat down and pinched a loaf in the box and wrapped that.
This is what is so awesome about marketing. Investor beware.
Watermark all installs and patches that are downloaded.
Doesn't prevent fair use, allows tracking of infringers.
It allows disconnected clients to work without ever having to connect to the Internet at large, and doesn't depend on having a Windows client to connect to the net.
I happen to live in Sarasota FL, less than 2 miles from the building where Infinium Labs has its main office. A while back (around the time the whole H-OCP vs Infinium thing started) I went by the building with my camera and snapped some pics.
Details:
The office is located on the 3rd floor of the Center Pointe building, which is in central Sarasota, not far from downtown (located at the corner of US 301 and Main St.).
Trivia item: the law firm that Infinium Labs uses takes up the top 2 floors of this building. Kinda convenient eh ? (see inf4.jpg) Not shown: the big glow in the dark/changes color sign that is on the top west side of the building. Said sign cost US$ 300,000 according to rumor.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/mreboy/inf1.jpg
filenames are inf1.jpg through inf8.jpg, each about 300k / 1280x960.
MRE
http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL, USA