Twitch takes over streaming duties for PAX, New York Comic Con

The folks in charge of running America's largest biannual gaming event are teaming up with gaming's most popular streaming solution to offer streams of PAX Prime, PAX East, and New York Comic Con going forward. The company behind all three conventions, ReedPOP, are working in conjunction with Twitch.tv to offer live broadcasts from the aforementioned three shows, as well as Chicago's Comic & Entertainment Expo. ReedPOP also runs PAX Australia, though it looks like Twitch isn't handling that streaming as well.

Twitch's biggest competitor in the streaming space, Ustream, secured a deal with Sony to handle streaming from the company's forthcoming PlayStation 4 game console. Microsoft's Xbox One can also handle streaming -- Xbox One distinguished engineer Nick Baker told Engadget, "We architected in several components to allow that. We have a video hardware encoder, h.264, and the ability to essentially screen scrape. Take your output without having to render two separate images. Take your output, feed that back to memory, compress it, save it, stream it to a companion device. The hardware has the capability." Microsoft has yet to announce a plan for how its streaming will work on Xbox One, but we imagine we'll know much more as of next week.

Maingear's Pulse 14 laptop: Haswell and a GeForce GTX 760M starting at $1,299

Haswell-infused devices have been stepping out from behind curtains for the past few days, and now Maingear's ready to unveil its latest gaming notebook withIntel's fresh silicon: the Pulse 14. Each configuration of the rig comes decked out with a quad-core Core i7 processor clocked at 2.2GHz, a GeForce GTX 760M graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, 2.1-channel speakers and a 14-inch, 1,600x900 resolution display. As for connectivity, an SD card slot, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet and three USB 3.0 ports all come standard with the machine. Extracting $1,299 from your wallet will net you a respectable 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GBhybrid drive. Ponying up $1,399 will nab you a 1TB HDD with a 32GB caching SSD, while shelling out $1,699 brings in 16GB of RAM and two 128GB solid state drives in Raid 0 backed by a 1TB hard drive. Take a gander at the laptop in the bordering gallery or hit the break for more details in the press release.

Microsoft previews Windows 8.1 on camera, forgets the Start button (video)

While it's not exactly our "first look" at Windows 8.1, Microsoft's put together an official preview video showing off several features of the OS update. If you caughtour overview of what's coming in the next version, there isn't anything in the clip you won't know already -- in fact, the (sort of) return of the Start button isn't discussed at all, although it does briefly pop up on the screen of the Surface Proused in the demo. You've been reading about it and inspecting screengrabs, but if an official video talkthrough is what you've been hankering for, there's four and a half minutes of just that waiting for you after the break.

Pandora launches TV / console-friendly HTML5 site HD

With 70 million active monthly users, we suspect the world isn't desperately searching for another way to listen to Pandora. That said, we certainly can't fault the internet radio provider for attempting to optimize the experience for as many platforms as possible. The latest push comes in the form of tv.pandora.com, a service the company claims is optimized for that proverbial "10-foot experience." The HTML5-based site plays nicely with your Xbox 360 at the moment, and Pandora says that it'll be coming to further TVs, set top boxes and consoles in the months to come. tv.pandora.com has a simplified navigation system, play, pause, skip and thumbs up and down functionality and 500 curated stations to get you started. You can check the site out today, or peep a press release on the matter after the break.