giants

Did you know that Pandas International estimates there are fewer than 2,000 giant pandas living today? This week CNET Exclusives is pairing up with Accessory Power and asking our audience to shop to help the endangered Giant Panda. Accessory Power is hooking up the CNET audience with its GOgroove Panda Pal High-Powered Portable Mini Speaker System. The company has not only passed on a terrific deal ($16.99 with free shipping), it's also generously donating 5 percent of Panda Pal's net profits to Pandas International's Bamboo Project. Pandas International, a nonprofit organization, is working to help … Read more

Twitter reports that football fans sent roughly 10,000 tweets in the final 3 minutes of last night's game, but that wasn't enough to overthrow the all-time record for tweets per second.

Guess which film roped in 25,088 tweets per second last December? Hint: it wasn't made in America.… Read more

Super Bowl Sunday offers no respite from partisan bickering in this presidential election year.

A Silicon Valley startup found a strong overlap between how people feel about who will win today's big game and who they'd like to see win the presidential election in the fall.

Mountain View-based Saygent conducted a survey asking 205 people for their Super Bowl predictions and then did a bit of data crunching using its voice response and analysis platform. Saygent's algorithm looked at the way people talked about the teams and the game ("by analyzing the way people talk about the game we can infer who is actually knowledgeable and who is taking a stab in the dark," the company says).

Saygent then filtered out "people with very low trust or a strong bias" to come up with a prediction from its "trusted crowd" of 90. The result? the New England Patriots by three points.

That's almost identical to the official line, which had the Pats by 2.5 points at last check, and is--frankly--not that interesting.

But Saygent, in what it admits is not an exact science, also asked people in the same survey who they planned to vote for for president. When it took a look at those political preferences, it revealed quite a rift:… Read more

New Yorkers bathe in their cockiness. Which is odd for a city that enjoys the Knicks and the Mets.

What, though, can one make of the fact that yesterday, the New York Giants Web site offered that the team was already Super Bowl champions? Yes, a full 24 hours before the game.

It also encouraged the team's faithful to snap up wonderful Super Bowl winning apparel and even a special custom Championship Badge with which to adorn their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Pro Football Talk noticed this remarkably incomplete pass.

ESPN offered this statement from the NFL: "It … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Super Bowl takes place in just over 72 hours, and Brian Grey and his lieutenants are trying to plan what is by far their most important day of the year.

Grey is the CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the largest sports Web sites in the U.S., and a place nearly 26 million people visited in January for the latest insights into their favorite teams.

Unlike many sports publications, Bleacher Report doesn't concentrate on breaking news with a team of paid writers. Instead, it relies on sports enthusiasts around the country and the world who are … Read more

There are no chat room viewers to keep us on topic now that we've stopped live streaming.

So fair warning: we spend most of the first half explaining the concept of Goodwill stores to Jeff, whose ignorance I still suspect is a veiled attempt at live trolling.… Read more

Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, we're cutting the live stream to free up bandwidth. Our tenderest apologies to the daily live listeners, but be sure to follow @the404 on Twitter for an extremely truncated, livebloggish version of the episode.

If you're now wondering what to do from 12-1 p.m. every day, we recommend rewatching old episodes and pretending they're live. On today's show: sunbathing groundhogs, instant Facebook millionaire David Choe, a CBS pilot show about Groupon, and "Reading Rainbow" host LeVar Burton strikes back.… Read more

The world's largest video controller has been unveiled at London's Liverpool Street Station. The controller is an exact replica of an old NES joypad, scaled up 30 times in each dimension. Hit play on our video (above) to see the massive pad in gigantic action.

The working humungopad, which is 4 meters long and weighs 120 kilograms, was created by British engineering student Ben Allen and collaborators from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It takes two people to play and has to be transported in a lorry.

StubHub is launching a mobile ticket option today for San Francisco Giants fans that allows them to get tickets sent directly to their phones, eliminating the need for printouts.

Because the feature, which is being added to the current StubHub app for the iPhone or Android phones, eliminates the need for a paper ticket, buyers will literally be able to find and buy tickets as they stand outside the gate. Ushers using special scanners, not the bar code scanners currently in use at most sporting and concert venues, simply scan the image of the ticket displayed on the screen.

The app does not completely eliminate the need for paper: ushers will hand customers a printed receipt that they need for reentry to their section after leaving for the bathroom or food.

Mats Nilsson, director of product at StubHub, said that for now there are six of the new scanners at the Giants ballpark. The company plans to expand the mobile ticketing service to other venues over the next few months. … Read more