I’m at the 2009 E3 Expo in LA

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been pretty busy in the last little while and now I’m at the E3 Expo in LA with the Futurelooks Team. The crew is staying at the Wilshire Plaza Hotel in LA and it was going great till we discovered that another media outlet, Area 5 (The CO-OP Video Game Show Guys on Revision3) decided to setup a Mac Pro in their room to upload their videos, sucking up all the available bandwidth. At one point, I saw about 10 MacBooks on the network, probably uploading and rendering video onto that thing. Luckily the connection is far better at the E3 Media Lounge.

Yesterday, we put together a quick video of the things we really want to see on the floor. Check it out:

As you can see, there’s going to be quite a bit more console coverage at Futurelooks at E3. It’s pretty much a Michael Kwan show at this point, but Jason Landals and Eric Garay are both doing their best to find stuff for PC Gamers. Definitely follow Futurelooks on Twitter to see what we’re up to. We’ll also be doing a daily wrap up video so keep an eye on our Fututurelooks YouTube Channel as well.

Kingston Technology Gives Futurelooks a Big Upgrade

This is definitely one of those times where the saying “If you ask for it, you just might get it” totally applies and then some. In this case, we asked for a small RAM upgrade to one of Futurelooks’ servers (Futurelooks Apache One to be exact). The server has been acting all shades of weird over the last few weeks as traffic has been climbing steadily. After a while it became apparent that the problems were caused by not having enough RAM.

I gave our friends at Kingston Technology a shout to see if they could help us out. I totally expected to pay for the RAM since I would be getting some anyway. I was just hopping for a deal and a couple more gigabytes to keep the machine from dying. Our man over there, Dave, has always offered to help us out with whatever we needed. We’ve just never needed anything aside from the usual review products that we check out on occasion. Instead of giving us what we needed, he went above and beyond and made sure we’d never need RAM again…

So that means we’re going from a measly 2GB of ECC DDR2 to a whopping 12GB’s of ECC DDR2 RAM! Want to see what 12GB’s of RAM looks like going into our DELL PowerEdge 1850 Server? Check out the video below…

Wayne Au from Auphan Software gave me a hand with the upgrade. Despite the fact that he’s successful and busy as hell, he still took the time to help me out with the servers (at 1AM in the morning no less) so I’m really thankful for his generosity. His company builds some of the best restaurant software in the biz (way better than that expensive Squirrel or shady Profitek stuff). That’s why his company has been doing extremely well, converting some huge chains over to his system including Blenz Coffee.

Wayne’s a real standup guy and he only hires the best so if you’re looking for a kick ass POS system for your restaurant, cafe or major restaurant chain and you want something that saves you time and money and stays running 24/7, make sure you check out his company. Also, if you’re looking for some exceptional quality RAM, you have to give Kingston Technology a ring or just find it at your favourite store because it’s everywhere. It’s definitely good stuff and it wouldn’t be in our mission critical servers if it wasn’t. Big thanks to Dave at Kingston for the hook up once again. You guys rock!

This Just In – Research in Motion (BlackBerry) Acquires Palm Inc.

Huge news in the mobile industry today. Corporate smartphone juggernaut, Research in Motion has taken the bow off their plan to acquire Palm Inc, makers of the highly anticipated Palm Pre that is due to launch later this year. This announcement makes Apple’s iPhone announcements sound like lunch room banter. Here’s a clip from this worldwide exclusive announcement posted on Futurelooks:

“It has just been announced that Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry line of devices, is in the process of acquiring Palm, Inc. This news comes mere months before the pending release of the Palm Pre, a smartphone that is supposed infuse new energy and excitement into the Palm brand. Research in Motion wants to capitalize on this excitement and extend it to the BlackBerry line as a whole.”

This is hot on the heels of this morning’s launch of the new Blackberry App World. Looks like Waterloo is full of surprises today. Head on over to Futurelooks for the whole story on how this latest deal came together.

With the power and security of the BlackBerry Platform and the beautiful OS of the new Palm Pre, the new PalmBerry handsets will have people saying “iPhone Who?”