This past Tuesday, The World Series of Poker held its annual conference call in regards to their 2012 event, which kicks off at the Rio in Las Vegas on May 27th with the Casino Employees NLHE event. Ty Stewart, the WSOP executive director and Jack Effel, the tournament director have revealed that the 2012 event will feature close to 500 tables, including the tables in the Buzios’ room. Pre-registration for 2012 is up from 2011, according to organizers. Last year, the World Series of Poker’s main event attracted 6,865 players.

Interestingly enough, last year the player turnout was expected to be lower, as Black Friday had struck, and many players seem to express disinterest, as well as distaste for poker. Despite these setbacks, last year’s numbers far exceeded what was expected, and it looks like that trend is continuing in 2012.

The Big One For One Drop $1million buy-in event already has 40 players committed, and with only a 48 player maximum, there’s only 8 spots left for 8 deep pocketed players to snatch up. The Big One will lead ESPN’s WSOP coverage, starting on Tuesday, July 3. The National Championship will be on August 7^th, and the main event coverage will kick off on August 14^th and continue every Tuesday until the final table plays, which should be on October 30^th.

The Pubcon Las Vegas 2012 conference is the ultimate social media and optimization conference, and this year, it’s on October 16^th, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This year’s Pubcon Las Vegas 2012 has announced a great roster of speakers from the Masters Group intensive training program, and topics of discussion will be pay-per-click (PPC) and landing page optimization, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and in-house SEO.

A day before, on October 15^th, is Pubcon’s Masters Group, which is a popular and limited attendance educational training program. This is a separate event from the conference, and is available only to those who purchase a stand alone training day pass and reserve their space. It’s an intense day of learning from top instructors in the fields of social media, PPC, in-house search, and SEO.

In the past, the Pubcon Masters Group training programs have always sold out, so if this is something that you are thinking about attending, don’t think about it too long, otherwise you might end up missing your chance to learn from the best over the course of 4 days. SEO coordinator, Topher Kohan, Atlanta Journal-Constitution SEO manager, Allison Fabella, Digitas senior vice president of search strategy, Melanie Mitchell, and Microsoft senior SEO architect, Derrick Wheeler will lead the Pubcon Masters Group this year.

Auto technology sure has come a long way. There are cars out there now that can parallel park for you, and can direct you to your destination with its built in GPS. There are even cars out there that get satellite radio, have built in screens, heated steering wheels, and loads of other perks.

The latest innovation in automobile technology is the self driving car. SELF DRIVING CAR!

For many drivers out there, this sounds like a dream come true. After all, who really looks forward to driving in rush hour traffic, or in the morning when you’re still half asleep? No one.

Nevada has granted a permit to Google’s self driving car. It is now legal for residents of the state to have a self driven car if they would like, provided that it matches up to the specification achieved by Google’s autonomous models.

The first licensed self driven car won a special permit this week, a Toyota Prius. There are two other applicants waiting to be licensed as well.

Bruce Breslow, the director of Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said in a statement that autonomous vehicles are the car of the future.

I couldn’t agree more! Who knows, maybe we’ll all have self driven cars within the next decade.