Blog Post: ESPN and Bing Team Up to Highlight Decisive Moments in the Lives and Careers of World Champion Quarterbacks

We have joined forces with ESPN to bring you a unique feature series highlighting champion quarterbacks and their decisive moments in life and football, as well as a series of activities at ESPN The Magazine’s annual NEXT event during Super Bowl weekend.

Beginning today, ESPN is launching a new feature series called “I am a World Champion,” presented by Bing, offering a first-person narrative from the signal callers who helped define the biggest game in American sports.

Only 28 men have ever led their team to a Super Bowl victory and walked off the field a world champion quarterback. We’re excited to team up with ESPN to showcase the decisive moments in the lives and careers of these legendary quarterbacks.

The original content will showcase the travails and triumphs told in the quarterback’s own voice – from Terry Bradshaw’s relationship with Chuck Knoll and the many daunting life obstacles Doug Williams overcame to reach glory. 

The first, featuring Bradshaw, is now available online at http://espn.go.com/nfl/superbowl/quarterbacks and airs today at 4 p.m. ET during NFL Live, with the following segments running throughout the week on both NFL Live and afternoon editions of SportsCenter.

As the official Decision Engine of ESPN The Magazine’s 2011 NEXT event, Bing will be presenting an open-to-the-public panel of Super Bowl winning quarterbacks including Joe Montana, Doug Williams and Kurt Warner on Saturday, February 5, at 2 p.m. CT. ESPN The Magazine’s seventh annual NEXT event takes place on Super Bowl weekend over two days at River Ranch in Fort Worth, Texas. A private Friday night gala kicks off the festivities, which will be followed by a public event on Saturday.

Bing will be hosting two key events:

• VIP Interview Tent, hosted by Snoop Dogg and Nelly. On Friday, Feb. 4, starting at 10 p.m. CT, special guests Snoop Dogg and Nelly will conduct interviews with athletes and celebrities attending the VIP party. Video from the event will be available at www.espn.com.
• Bing World Champion Quarterback Panel. On Saturday, Feb. 5, starting at 2 p.m. CT, ESPN Monday Night Football Broadcaster Mike Tirico will interview a panel of world champions to uncover their most decisive moments in a special panel open to the public. Panelists include Joe Montana, Doug Williams and Kurt Warner. Video from the event will be available at www.espn.com and www.bingvideo.com.

To see the full range of features that Bing offers football fans – including player comparisons and stats, sports trivia, taxi fare calculator, weather, recipes, local restaurants and bars, parking lot finders and more – visit http://www.bingfootball.com.

- Danielle Tiedt, General Manager of Bing

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The First Goal

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Punchbowl Takes Party Planning Platform Mobile With New iPhone App

Start to finish party planning site Punchbowl is taking its platform mobile today with the launch of an iPhone app and a new mobile site for smartphones. Punchbowl's platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The startup also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps? to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos.

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Chiefs vs. Ravens: Live

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Mass Effect 2 ? review

PS3/Xbox 360/PC; �49.99; cert 18+; Bioware/EA

PlayStation space marines, you can cancel your defection to a rival console planet: Mass Effect has come to PS3. This re-release of the previously Xbox and PC-only RPG comes ahead of the multi-platform arrival of Mass Effect 3 this winter, which means that Sony types have got most of the year to get the hang of being Commander Shepard on a universe-saving mission.

Reckon that's enough time? Wait until you've tried the game: deep like a black hole and with a similarly powerful gravitational hold on you, Mass Effect 2 is the kind of life-devouring entity that Shepard would usually be trying to dispatch from the nearest airlock.

Mass Effect 2 launches mid-action, with a breath-catchingly dramatic disaster on the SSV Normandy. It looks terrific ? there's a noticeble step up in the quality of the graphics from Xbox to PS3 ? and the game almost immediately gives you a perfect sci-fi moment. As Shepard heads to the bridge to rescue the pilot, Joker, you enter an area where the hull has been breached and the Normandy is open to space. Stars shine hard through the vacuum, the sound drops back to Shepard's ragged breathing, and there's no doubt at all that this is about you facing off against the vastness and emptiness of space.

Actually, it's not quite true that ME2 starts mid-action: to help out newcomers to the series, there's a DLC section that lets you make some of the choices that would have formed your character in the first Mass Effect. PC and Xbox players had the option to import the Shepard they made and nurtured in the first game (ME is big on customisation and permanence), so the DLC is some compensation for that.

But even if you choose to skip it and head straight to the main story, you'll still get to fiddle around with your Shepard's abilities and appearance until you make something you're happy with (or, possibly, something that looks so unsettlingly like yourself that you have to go back and start all over again). Shep can be male or female, a crack soldier or a biotics (that's psychic powers) expert, a war hero or a fractured sole survivor of a previous campaign ? it's all up to you, and as you proceed through the story, you'll make more choices that contribute to your "Paragon" or "Renegade" status and influence the way other characters react to you.

The DLC also gives you the chance to bone up on the story, so newcomers don't need to spend all their in-game conversations for the first two hours flicking the dialogue options to "investigate" and getting the other characters to give you some exposition. (Short story: all organic life in the universe is under threat from something called the Reapers, and Shepard has been resurrected by human supremacist group Cerberus to lead the world-saving effort. How much faith you put in a group that's official considered a terrorist outfit, and its sinister leader the Illusive Man, is entirely your decision.)

Not that you'll ever regret stopping to chat. Mass Effect 2 is populated with some of the most engaging, well-acted space people you could hope to meet, and the script has been carefully designed to make clunking non-sequiturs a vanishingly rare occurrence. As you tour planets and space stations, assembling a crack team of galaxy saviours and meeting all manner of strange and sometimes sexy aliens, you'll also find endless sidequests and subplots to get drawn into. Even if you don't choose to take most of them on, their very existence helps to bolster the idea of the Mass Effect world as a functioning universe.

Because that's what makes Mass Effect 2 great. Not the outstanding action, the compelling story, the huge depth of interaction, or any of the other ways in which the game demonstrates its outrageous surfeit of quality. It's because this is a game so coherent, you start to believe that you could actually live in it. Which is a good thing, because you'll almost certainly end up doing so.

? Game reviewed on PS3

Rating: 5/5

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Xsan sites gain options as Active Storage steps in with new metadata controller

So long, Xserve. At the end of the day (January 31), you will be leaving the product sales list after serving the Mac community faithfully for nearly nine years. But today Active Storage introduced ActiveSAN, a high-performance metadata controller for Xsan and StorNext networks, intending to pick up where Xserve leaves off -- at least for this specialized function.

Xsan is Apple's version of a storage area network/cluster file system, using high-speed Fibre Channel connections to allow bunches of workstations access to the same pool of data without clogging traditional Ethernet networks. They're widely deployed in video production environments, scientific computing and other spots where enterprises find the need to get lots of bits moved around in a big hurry. A typical Xsan deployment might include terabytes of storage (on Xserve RAID or Promise RAID redundant storage) available to users.

In order to make sure that individual client machines only get access to the stuff they're supposed to (and to guard against two machines writing to the same block at the same time), Xsan requires metadata controllers -- traditionally Xserves or Mac Pros running Mac OS X Server and connected via PCI-based Fibre Channel cards to the SAN. While the Mac Pro is still an option for use as an MDC, the Mac mini server is not (no PCI slot to stash the FC card). Since Xsan is built on the same technology as Quantum's cross-platform StorNext, the Active Storage team was able to create a Linux-based 1U metadata controller with Xsan-friendly setup and a native Mac administration tool.

There's no price or configurations for the system yet, but Active Storage intends to show off ActiveSAN at the NAB 2011 convention in April and start delivery during the second quarter. We can assume thatActiveSAN will take advantage of Active Storage's iPhone app, which monitors RAID systems remotely.

You can see a video demonstrating ActiveSan following the jump.

[hat tip 9to5Mac]

Continue reading Xsan sites gain options as Active Storage steps in with new metadata controller

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Two worlds ready or not

Simon Johnson at Baseline Scenario notes that (bolding mine)

On the fringes of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week, there was plenty of substantive discussion ? including about the dangers posed by our ?too big to fail?/?too big to save? banks, the consequences of widening inequality (reinforced by persistent unemployment in some countries), and why the jobs picture in the U.S. looks so bad.

But in the core keynote events and more generally around any kind of CEO-related interaction, such themes completely failed to resonate. There is, of course, variation in views across CEOs and the people work intellectual agendas on their behalf, but still the mood among this group was uniformly positive ? it was hard to detect any note of serious concern.

Many of the people who control the world?s largest corporations are quite comfortable with the status quo post-financial crisis. This makes sense for them ? and poses a major problem for the rest of us.The thinking here is fairly obvious. The CEOs who provide the bedrock of financial support for Davos have mostly done well in the past few years. For the nonfinancial sector, there was a major scare in 2008-09; the disruption of credit was a big shock and dire consequences were feared. And for leaders of the financial sector this was more than an awkward moment ? they stood accused, including by fellow CEOs at Davos in previous years, of incompetence, greed, and excessively capturing the state.

But all of this, from a CEO perspective, is now behind them. Profits are good ? this is the best bounce back on average in the post-war period; given that so many small companies are struggling, it is reasonable to infer that the big companies have done disproportionately well (perhaps because their smaller would-be competitors are still having more trouble accessing credit). Executive compensation at the largest firms will no doubt reflect this in the months and years ahead.

In terms of public policy, the big players in the financial sector have prevailed ? no responsible European, for example, can imagine a major bank being allowed to fail (in the sense of defaulting on any debt). And this government support for banks has translated into easier credit conditions for the major global corporations represented at Davos.

The public policy issue of the day, from the point of view of such CEOs, is simple. There needs to be sufficient fiscal austerity to strengthen public balance sheets ? so that states can more effectively stand behind their banks in the future, and to keep currencies from moving too much. Leading bankers, in particular, insisted on the paramount importance of providing unlimited government support to their sector during 2008-09; now they insist with equal or greater vigor that support to all other parts of society be curtailed.

This is where cognitive dissonance creeps in. Most CEOs feel that the provision of general public goods is not their responsibility, although they are very happy to help guide (or capture) the provision of public goods specific to their firm.

For the big multinational companies current US trade policy also works quite well. What is not talked about are conditions for US companies that are mainly domestic.

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