Jay Z & Beyonce Lose Bid to Minecraft Creator for $70 Million Mansion

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Jay Z and Beyonce’s rumored plans to move to California have been thwarted by a billionaire game designer. The power couple lost a bidding war for a lavish mansion located in Beverly Hills, Calif.

According to Curbed, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson snatched the mega-mansion from the Carters for $70 million. The house has been on the market since August, and Jay and Bey were the highest bidders before Persson closed the deal. The original asking price was $85 million.

This 23,000-square-foot property is epic. The home boasts a candy room, eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, a movie theater, a car showroom and a 54-foot curved glass door that opens onto the pool.

The hefty price tag also covered everything inside the mansion, including artwork and cases of Dom Perignon. It’s currently the highest price ever paid for a house in the Beverly Hills area.

We’re not sure how Jay Z and Beyonce feel about losing their potential love nest. They might not be able to find another bigger and more exquisite mansion in California.

Check out pictures of this lavish home here.

See Bootylicious Beauties

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Bits Blog: GIF Creator, Steve Wilhite, Receives Lifetime Achievement Webby Award

Among the thousands of file formats that exist in modern computing, the GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, has attained celebrity status in a sea of lesser-known BMPs, RIPs, FIGs and MIFFs. It was honored as a “word of the year” in 2012, and Tuesday night, its inventor, Steve Wilhite, will be accepting a lifetime achievement award at The Webby Awards.

Now, almost any fragment of digital culture can be spun up into a grainy, gratifying animation. GIFs provide a platform for nearly everything, it seems — from rapid-fire political commentary to digital art to small moments of celebrity intrigue.

Has any file format received more attention, more accolades (or had more fun) than the GIF?

Invented in 1987, today the GIF has become the aesthetic calling card of modern Internet culture. Even Yahoo released one to announce the company’s acquisition of Tumblr this week, seen below.

“It’s been an incredibly enduring piece of technology,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards. “Even as bandwidth has expanded,” he said, “it has been very exciting to see how much cultural cachet the format has gotten.”

But back in 1987, such things could not be imagined. Dial-up speeds were achingly slow. Image downloads were made even worse by interoperability problems. An article that year in the magazine, “Online Today” described the problem:

“Horror stories about incompatible microcomputers may be humorous when everyone is in a good mood, but they are certainly the nemesis of any serious computer user. The frustration is no laughing matter when a person wants to transfer some data or a graphics image, and the system doesn’t cooperate.”

Mr. Wilhite, then working at CompuServe (the nation’s first major online service) knew the company wanted to display things like color weather maps. Because he had an interest in compression technologies, Mr. Wilhite thought he could help.

Steve Wilhite was featured in an October 1987 issue of the CompuServe magazine, “Online Today” for inventing the GIF.

“I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he said in an e-mail. (He primarily uses e-mail to communicate now, after suffering a stroke in 2000.) The first image he created was a picture of an airplane.

The prototype took about a month and the format was released in June 1987.

“I remember when other people saw the GIF,” he said. Colleagues abandoned work on on other black and white formats, he said, as graphics experts began to spread the GIF online. A triumph of speed and compression, the GIF was able to move as fast as Internet culture itself, and has today become the ultimate meme-maker.

In the last decade, the animated GIF has reigned supreme, and while Mr. Wilhite has never himself made an animated GIF, he said the classic, “dancing baby” from 1996 remains a favorite.

Since retiring in 2001, Mr. Wilhite has led a quieter existence than his creation. He goes on RV trips. He built a house in the country with a lot of lawn to mow. He dabbles in color photography and Java programming. He uses e-mail and Facebook to keep up with family.

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

The webcast of Mr. Wilhite’s Webby Award acceptance speech will be on YouTube on Wednesday.

Bits Blog: Letterpress, Game From the Creator of Tweetie, Lifts Off

These days, iPhone games are a dime a dozen. But every so often, one breaks free from the masses and begins to generate a bit of buzz. That’s the story around Letterpress, a clever new word game for the iPhone and iPad, which is already creeping up the iTunes charts and has been downloaded around 60,000 times during its first day.

Letterpress is the newest creation from Loren Brichter, a 27-year-old app developer living in Philadelphia. Mr. Brichter is well known among mobile circles as the man behind Tweetie, a beautiful and simple Twitter client for the iPhone. Twitter snapped up the company back in 2010, and brought Mr. Brichter into the fold to help develop and release Twitter clients for the iPad and the Mac.

Mr. Brichter left Twitter almost a year ago to start working on personal projects.

Letterpress, he said, started off “as a fun side project to scratch an itch.”

The idea for the game began to gestate a few months ago when he and his wife were waiting for a table for dinner. They simultaneously pulled out their phones and began playing a game called Spelltower.

“The game is single-player, so we were both standing there playing it and I thought, well, maybe I should make something that we can both play,” he said.

He worked through several versions of the game before settling on the current version, which challenges players to create words and claim as much of the board as they can in their color.

“The mechanics evolved like crazy,” he said. “I only knew it would be around color and words.”

Originally, he said, it wasn’t his intention to build a game. “But I thought this would be a way to explore a different side of the App store, one that I don’t have experience with. I’ve never released something for free that has in-app purchases, but that’s the most popular way to release software now.”

The initial version of the game is free, but players can upgrade for 99 cents to a version that will let them choose different color schemes and play more than two games concurrently.

Mr. Brichter has become well known in mobile circles for novel gestures and sleek interfaces that become popular and are echoed across other applications and services. He developed the “pull-to-refresh” action, among others. He said he had embedded Letterpress with a few new motions and design tweaks that could become as popular.

“When you get an alert in the game, you can swipe down to fling it offscreen, instead of pushing cancel,” he said. “Little things like that might catch on.”

Mr. Brichter hopes the game will become a hit. He has a few other ideas in the works, including another game, but he plans to continue to work on Letterpress.

“It all depends on whether this sticks,” he said. “The chances of having a successful game right out of the gate are zero, unless you’re a company like Rovio, but I’m going to focus on this for a while and then see what’s next.”