Latest news

The popular PlayStation Home virtual world has reached 12 million users, says PS Home director jack Buser.

Noting the figures at the Game Developers Conference, Buser says Home users have doubled since June 2009, and jumped 20 percent since December.

85 percent of users that created an avatar on their first visit returned for a second visit and Buser says average users spend "hours" at a time in the virtual world.

"You're going to see us really embrace this idea of total game integration," adds Buser of future plans for Home. "It's an incredibly important part of [Sony's] strategy."

Titles will be given dedicated Home space, as well as bonus mini-games.

As of today, the first ever "dotcom" has celebrated its 25th birthday, an Internet landmark.

On March 15th, 1985 Symbolics computers purchased the first domain with a dotcom ending, becoming one of just 6 companies/individuals to do so in 1985. In 1997, the one millionth dotcom was registered, a number that has since exploded.

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," adds Mark Mclaughlin, Verisign CEO. Verisign is in charge of the entire dotcom domain. "Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event."

In 2010, 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month, and 57 million domain names were registered between the year 2000 and 2010. For the 15 years preceding it, only 21 million domain names were registered.

McLaughlin of Verisign also adds that it currently logs 53 billion requests for websites every day, and "we expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillion."

A new proposal in Britain, taken up by the House of Commons today, wants to make it law that ISPs are forced to block access to all sites that offer unauthorized movies, music and other pirated content like games and books.

Content holders say the amendment will finally give them "the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels," says the NYTimes, but critics see censorship of the Internet and general undermining of the development of England's digital economy.

The Open Rights Group, which has been fighting against Internet censorship, says the new law will certainly be abused, allowing individuals or companies to "suppress any Web content they find objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyright."

The British government says curbing piracy will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue to the entertainment industry, which accounts for 6 percent of economic output, but critics say the policies will be expensive for the ISPs, and taxpayers will be forced to help pay for the enforcement of policies they couldn't care less about.

BrokeMyController has reported this week on a newly discovered Microsoft patent, one that will bring about automated DLC purchasing system to the Xbox 360.

The patent would work as follows: You and friends are on Xbox Live and one of your buddies asks you to join a game for multiplayer. Unfortunately you don't have the latest map pack DLC. The new system would send up a prompt screen, asking that you purchase the DLC to accept your friend's invite. Hit "yes" and the DLC will download and install, without the need to head over to the Marketplace, and you can get back to playing the game with your buddies.

Currently, if you are invited to a game for which you are missing DLC, you are "required to back out of the commenced multiplayer session, manually locate the desired content, purchase the content, install the content, relocate the inviting players, prepare his own request to join their game," says the source, which is clearly a hassle.

MOG, the subscription-based music service that offers 7 million tracks for just $5 USD a month has announced today the release of a mobile app of their service.

The company has deals with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI as well as independent labels and the service offers on-demand music, allowing for users to pick and choose what songs they want to hear, either in their browser, or now on their mobile devices.

"You can see the queue, you can jump to anywhere in the queue, when a song comes on the library, you can save it," adds David Hyman, CEO of MOG. "When you listen to Bob Marley radio, it's not Bob Marley inspired radio. You get Bob Marley 24/7."

The mobile app will be available on the iPhone and Android devices in the Q2 2010, and users will get MOG radio, 64 AAC+ quality, and ability to download in higher quality, for just $10 a month, by far the best subscription package available to date.

According to Deagol's AAPL Model, Apple saw 152,000 iPad pre-orders in its first weekend of availability, however, sales dropped off significantly from Friday until Sunday (view pics at the end).

In the first day, an expected 120,000 tablets were ordered, with orders slowing down as the days went on, for a total of about 152,000 now.

Adds the post: "A nice, round rump evolves after 12 hours into a relatively straight line slightly sloping up. I'll just add that this slope will increase in the next few hours and days, that is, the line will curve in the opposite direction right about now (72 hours) and get steeper, and then it'll become straight once again for some time. Once we get past 100-150 hours, I expect a new, more subtle rump to form in which the slope will very slowly get shallower as the days and weeks pass."

The original Palm Pre (minus the 'Plus') has a 500MHz processor and 256MB of RAM, and the mid-range processor has been criticized by critics of the smartphone for some time.

This week, modders have overclocked the Pre (running 1.3.5.1 firmware or 1.4) to 800MHz, and saw obviously faster performance.

The phone drains battery very quickly, and the phone runs hot as well, but for those with some extra time on their hands and extra money (in case the phone explodes) it might be worth trying out.

Read the full post, and links here: http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre-tips-information-resources/236315-prototype-video-wosqi-720-800-mhz-os1-3-5-1-a.html

Nokia Corp. said that the market for mobile phones totaled 1.26 billion handsets last year, beating the Finnish giant's forecast of 1.14 billion. The company reduced its share of sales to 34 percent from an earlier forcast of 38 percent, recalculating the size of the market and the scale of the growing grey market for counterfeit and unlicensed mobile phones.

According to Gartner research group, the grey market totaled around 145 million handsets in 2009, with the majority of them being sold in China, India and Latin America. "These include vendors of legitimate, as well as unlicensed and counterfeit, products with manufacturing facilities primarily centered around certain locations in Asia and other emerging markets," Nokia said.

"This is a good thing for Nokia because it is really showing that they want to measure the real market and grey market has been a big driver in 2009," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. "It is an opportunity for them to go after and try and actually win over users in that segment as well."

Sky and Virgin Media have confirmed that they will be offering ITV1 HD through both company's entertainment services starting in April. This brings more World Cup football games to UK subscribers in High-definition.

"The addition of ITV1 HD from 2nd April means Sky+HD homes across all ITV regions will be able to watch World Cup matches live in HD, as well as other major ITV shows such as Law and Order: UK, The Prisoner, Foyles War, Lewis, Survival with Ray Mears, and Britain's Got Talent," Sky said in a statement.

Virgin Media also announced separately that it will be offering ITV1 HD from April 2, and that some of ITV1 HD's content will be available on demand on ITV Net Player on Virgin Media's TV Platform.

Sky also said it will be launching Hallmark Chanel HD and Sky Sports 4 HD to bring its total line-up of HD channels to 40.

NVIDIA is hosting a website that covers legal cases against Intel Corporation for anti-competitive practices. The site is clearly part of NVIDIA's PR campaign against Intel as the spat between both companies over rivaling technology continues to grow.

The site has extensive details from legal cases brought against Intel, including cases brought by the European Union, the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., New York State etc. and also aims to educate consumers about the base of the conflict; at least from the perspective of NVIDIA.

The site is an interesting browse and to its credit, is very informative and does its intended job quite well. Nevertheless, some of its content is amusing and reminds you that it is presented from a single side in this argument. Take, for example, the difference in how NVIDIA describes what a GPU is, and what a CPU is.

Q. What is a GPU?
"A. GPUs, or graphics processing units, are specialized processors first developed by NVIDIA in 1999. They were initially used to render three-dimensional graphics. In more recent years, GPUs have also been used for “general purpose” computing, which harnesses the computing power of the chip to perform certain functions traditionally handled by the CPU, often more efficiently than can be done by the CPU alone. General purpose GPUs are being used by scientists and engineers around the world to perform ground-breaking research in fields like medicine, biology and chemistry as well as for mainstream applications like streaming HD video and transcoding media files."

PRS for Music has compiled figures showing that growth in digital music downloads lead to a increase in royalties paid to British songwriters, composers and publishers. About £623 million was paid out in 2009 in royalties, up 2.6 percent from the total in 2008. It represents the first time that growth in digital revenues was larger than the drop in CD and DVD earnings for the industry.

"2009 was the first year in which the growth in revenues from the legal digital market compensated for the decline in revenues from traditional CDs and DVDs, though we remain cautious as to whether this represents a true turning point," said PRS for Music chief executive Robert Ashcroft.

"The next decade does, however, promise further growth in earnings from the legal digital market as well as the use of British music overseas." The global music business witnessed continuing declines throughout the last decade. It blames growth of Internet piracy and the decline of physical format sales for the reduction in revenues.

There is something that doesn't seem right about charging games consumers extra fees to unlock content that is already present on a disc they bought, or at least that is what gamers feel. Fans have pointed out that new Downloadable Content (DLC) for BioShock 2 is actually already present on the game disc itself, despite being labeled and sold as "DLC".

The Sinclair Solutions pack was "released" on Thursday and includes two new playable characters, 20 new trials, weapons upgrades and increases the level cap to 50. The add-on is priced at 400 Microsoft Points, the equivalent of about $5. However, fans of the game posted on the 2K Forum that the download size for the PC add-on was just 24K in size.

Similarly, the download size for the Xbox 360 add-on was just 108K in size. Clearly the content is already on the disc itself, fans believed. According to forum community manager Elizabeth, they are right. She posted that the download was already on the disc to ensure there was no split in the userbase for the games' multiplayer mode.

According to details in a court filing, Nokia Corp. and Apple Inc. will seek a U.S. court hearing in a patent infringement case in mid-2012. The detail shows that both sides expect the mobile patent feud between them to continue for quite some time. Nokia has already moved to have a case brought against it by Apple dismissed in the meantime.

Nokia sued Apple in October 2009, alleging that the company's iPhone uses patent technologies owned by Nokia Corp. without paying royalties for their use. Nokia is seeking up to €1 billion ($1.36 billion) from Apple in the case.

On December 11, Apple filed a countersuit against Nokia accusing the Finnish mobile giant of infringing 13 Apple patents. The company later removed four of the 4 patents from the list.

Patent disputes like these are becoming all too common in the ever-growing market for mobile gadgets. Last week, Apple sued HTC Corp accusing it of infringing 20 hardware and software patents held by Apple. HTC makes touchscreen smartphones that run Google software.

According to AppleInsider, multi-tasking may be the headlining feature of the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, giving millions of users their biggest demand.

Multi-tasking will allow for apps to run concurrently in the background, although it is unclear how many apps will be able to run at once.

The news comes from sources with "proven track records" in predicting upcoming Apple updates, says AI, and the sources say that Apple has "developed a full-on solution" to multi-tasking, although it is unclear how battery life will be affected.

The iPhone 4.0 OS is expected to be released in June at the earliest.

Greek authorities have taken down the large torrent tracker Gamato.info, accusing the site of facilitating copyright infringement of music, games, movies, and books.

Six admins of the site were also arrested in raids of their homes in Athens, Salonika, Larissa and Aridaia.

The police officials were working on tips from IFPI Greece, the local branch of the industry group.

Gamato.info was a top 20 most visited site in Greece, with an estimated 155,000 daily visitors. The site had around 13,000 movies, 6500 games and over 35,000 music albums available.

Says Jeremy Banks, director of anti-piracy at IFPI: "Gamato.info was facilitating the illegal distribution of music, film, games and books. It is the perfect illustration of how such illegal operations are damaging a wide range of creative industries in Europe. The Hellenic Police swiftly recognized this was not a victimless crime and took action against those who sought to shamelessly profit off the back of others' creative work. This skilfully executed action by a highly knowledgeable police force should act as a real deterrent to others in Greece considering engaging in online piracy."