We have a date for MidWest LAN War 2008 and its August 2nd! This has really been a hard task to find a location that would fit 250 participants, provide enough power and have enough bandwidth. I know there are lots of other sites but most are just built for seminars, conferences and banquets. There was no thought to putting a couple of hundred computers or consoles in the room. This location is in Kansas City Kansas in a dance hall called The Rainbow Center. Its in the industrial part of southern KCKs located at 6220 Kansas Ave Kansas City, KS 66111 if you want to Google it. There is a map on our main page and all the information about the event is now listed.

It meets our power requirements, has Time Warner Cable and will seat more than 250 if needed. I was glad to have found this place as we were running out of time since I wanted this years event to be during the summer. Please tell your friends and post on other forums about our event. We have several banners on our website that you can use to post and link them to our site if thats all you can do. The more teams we get to this event the bigger cash prizes that will be offered. As it is we are going to match the prize pots up to 10 teams so each tournament has the ability to be a $1,000 prize pot! Counter Strike Source, Call of Duty 4 (PC), Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) are the Featured Games for this event.

Please check the website for more info: www.extremelankc.com

Oh sure, GalleryPlayer enables your HDTV to instantly turn into an art display, but it doesn’t even pretend to be anything classier than a multifaceted television. Samsung, however, is looking to change the game by partnering with Thomas Kinkade on a new 46-inch prototype Digital Masterworks Art-TV. The unit was recently showcased to news media, and it’s said to be “housed n a Thomas Kinkade frame designed to accentuate the fine art theme.” From what we can gather, it’s being aimed at folks who’d love a nice piece of art sitting above their mantel, but when the time comes, they can switch off the paintings and throw on a day’s worth of NFL in HD. The wild thing here is how important the actual art aspect is to the display, with hidden touch controls planned to enable viewers to flip through artworks and zoom in / out as they please. Heck, there’s even integrated WiFi, a 40GB hard drive, 3,000:1 contrast ratio, 8ms response time and 500 nits of brightness. The set is due out exclusively through Thomas Kinkade’s Signature Gallery later this year, with iffy plans to release it to other retailers in 2H 2009.

[Via CNET]