Last I saw in 2007 he jumped to Nival. Wonder if he got any back pay from Infinium. More scammy/scummy fake news about the ugly lapboard (first previewed in 2004/2006) had me think about the Phantom console.
The lapboard got a great hands-on preview on Maximum PC.
I think he goes by the name “Dirt” or “NoWayJose” now days.
:-)
He’s left Nival quite a while ago… he’s around though. I think he may lurk here so I could let him fill you in on what he’s up to now.
If it was upto me, his kind would be hunted down, executed and hanged in sillicon valley square, for all to see.
Nah. Like the Nigerians his was never a clever scam and only exist so we can point and laugh at those stupid enough to believe it.
Wait, the Phantom was a scam?
points and laughs
My brother is a “Restaurant Executive.” He was recently involved as Operations Director for a company out of Montreal that had a concept for a chain of upscale steakhouses using a licensed property. They had a number of investors, and, AFAIK, a number of franchisees signed up.
After 18 months of operations, they had yet to open a single location. They had, however, enjoyed several trips to cities across the US where they had sampled menus, and the executives all received 18 months of salary and other perks (home offices set up, Blackberrys, etc.). He is no longer with them, but I believe they are still out there humping the concept to investors, and still have nothing more than concept drawings and a sample menu.
I related the Phantom story to him. I think it’s the same type of deal. Tell a big enough lie, and people will buy into it. You can hook a couple investors, pay yourself – and your friends – handsomely for a year or two, then bail.
From wikipedia:
“On January 3, 2006, Infinium Labs announced that the Phantom Lapboard is due to be released onto online retailers by the second quarter of 2006”
And here’s Gamespot reporting on the Lapboard’s delay-- pushed all the way back to later in 2006: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6147978.html
Heck, RTFA: “When we first gave it a test spin at E3 2004…”
So now they’re giving it a test spin again, 4 years later, and that means it’s shipping this year?
“Excuse me if I’m mildly skeptical.” Previewed in Maximum PC my ass.
Hell quite a few people on here wanted to pick it up the lapboard just as soon as it came out.
— Alan
Maybe for being gullible and buying into a company that was fairly obviously (to some outsiders) something between a questionable time investment and an outright scam, but I don’t think he went there with any intentions other than building a real business.
Blame Kevin for not reading HardOCP before making the leap, but blame the scam-artist founder Tim Roberts for the Phantom debacle.
Your ass was previewed in Maximum PC? What kind of buzz did it get and how many investors do you have signed up?
i’m selling timeshares in my ass.
the lapboard is still quite obviously a scam. smaller small-cap companies have come out with entire product lines, brought them to market without half the deceit and bullcrap that infinium has.
They’re just kidding. Otherwise we would have gotten our deposits back, right?
Let’s start off with a quick overview of where Infinium Labs is at with bringing the Phantom to market.
[Kevin Bachus] Sure. At this point I’d say we’re kind of at the goal line. I joined the company about a year and a half ago and at that time the company was started by a couple folks down in Florida who had experience with the networking side of the tech industry and kind of said, “Well gee with all this capacity that’s out there, people being on broadband all the time, datacenters sitting idle, why is it that I have to go out to BestBuy every time I want to buy a video game? Why isn’t there a service that let’s me get games over an Internet connection?” And of course it’s a question that we in the game industry have been asking for a long time as well.
But of course, it turns out to be more complicated than streaming videos or music for the obvious reasons: It’s an application. It has to run somewhere. The business is so retail-oriented that if you don’t involve the retailers in some way then they look at it as a way to bypass retail and that’s bad. Typically in the past people who have tried to do games on demand on the PC have been caught up in the same kind of complexity that PC gaming in general implies. What I saw was an opportunity to try to go and address all of those challenges and create something that not only satisfies the demand for consumers but also creates a real opportunity for the game industry to see, basically for the first time, an ancillary model for distribution which is something the film industry has. Most of the revenue from the film industry at this point comes from ancillary revenue, post-theatrical. But it’s something that we’ve never really seen in the games business, so it’s something that I’ve been pretty excited about so far.
Infinium may have been a joke but I think the idea behind the Phantom is actually timely right now. MS is in a great position to merge the console and PC platforms for gaming using DD which is where the industry seems to be headed now anyway come next generation.
Totally. Sheesh, you people had me worried there for a minute.
If he has a Q23 posting history he’s probably disgraced by affiliation. Potentially unethical business conduct is not required when your google searches turn up next to wittalinks.
too late to monetize on it. steam, direct2drive, many many other services beat them for critical mass. gametap beat them to the punch by having a product and not being a scam, + xbla which is where MS wants to push it. see what little they care about the PC as a platform with their lame duck GFW initiative.
http://www.phantom.net/content/products/gamingService.html
“The Phantom Game Service is anticipated to be the first end-to-end, on-demand game service delivering online games directly to your living room or any comfortable setting in your home or workplace.”
infinium from the beginning was nothing but smoke and mirrors. i remember the brave claims at the beginning of any/all games with lists of everything they never had any license/rights to. it was a scam to scare up investor money.
gametap/turner went out and hired emu authors. besides, ‘free’ unlimited bandwidth is gone now, carriers are wising up to metering it due to abuse from p2p.