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Adobe has announced a new beta of its popular Flash Player that greatly improves hardware acceleration and adds new features.

The beta provides a new method for video playback in Flash Player 10.2 that will allow developers to utilize complete hardware acceleration of the video rendering pipeline, greatly improving video playback performance. Stage Video can dramatically decrease processor usage and enables higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.

The player also takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics capabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 web browser. Additionally, developers will also be able to define custom native mouse cursors to enhance user experience.

One other note-worthy change is improved support for Full Screen playback. Full screen content will remain in full-screen on secondary monitors, allowing users to watch full-screen content while working on another display.

Winamp has introduced a beta version of their Winamp for Android app this week, giving Android 2.1 (and higher) users a powerful music management application for their smartphones.

For users with 2.2 or higher, the app gives access to 40,000 Internet radio stations through SHOUTcast.

Winamp lists what comes with the Android app, version 0.9.2:

Sony has sold 4.1 million Move motion control systems since launch in September.

The company says today that worldwide sales passed 4 million this week thanks to strong holiday demand.

"The milestone was reached in just two months since its release in September for North America, Europe/PAL territories and Asia, and 1 month since the release in October for Japan," added Sony.

"The number not only shows clear success of the launch of the new motion sensing controller but also indicates positive momentum going in to the holiday season and to the year 2011."

Move is supported by 25 games.

Over the holiday, Microsoft announced it had sold 2.5 million Kinect motion control systems since launch this month.

Developer Howard Harte has offered a $1000 reward to the first person who can show him how to root a Google TV device, allowing him to install third-party apps.

The only other catch is that the hack must be available before Google officially adds third-party support.

With the ability to root, Harte will port his Better Terminal Emulator Pro Android app to the Google TV.

According to posts via Twitter, Microsoft is ready to release a giant update for Windows Phone 7, one that will bring many of the features that users hoped for when the smartphones launched earlier this month.

With the software update will come the following updates:

-Bing turn-by-turn directions, improvements
-Custom ringer support
-Copy/Paste
-Multitasking

Microsoft has announced today that strong Thanksgiving week demand has led to strong sales of the Kinect motion control system.

The software giant says sales have now hit 2.5 million worldwide since launch on November 4th.

Adds Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft:

"We are thrilled about the consumer response to Kinect, and are working hard with our retail and manufacturing partners to expedite production and shipments of Kinect to restock shelves as fast as possible to keep up with demand. With sales already exceeding two and a half million units in just 25 days, we are on pace to reach our forecast of 5 million units sold to consumers this holiday."

Mozilla's senior exec Asa Dotzler has gone off on Google, Apple and Microsoft this week, ranting on the "evils" of their plugins which install in Firefox without asking the user permission.

Says Dotzler:

The iPhone Dev Team has said today that Ultrasn0w for Apple iOS 4.2.1 is about ready for distribution, giving users with the latest firmware update a way to unlock their iPhones.

Apple released the update on November 22nd.

The Dev Team already released an updated version of redsn0w, the tool used to easily jailbreak your devices, but many iPhone owners were waiting for a way to unlock their smartphones.

Unfortunately, the software only works with older iPhones, the 3G and 3GS models.

Nintendo has said today that they have already seen strong Holiday demand for their Wii and DS consoles, with 1.5 million being sold last week.

For the individual week of Thanksgiving, the gaming giant sold 900,000 DS handhelds and 600,000 Wii consoles, far out pacing past full months.

Adds NoA president Reggie Fils-Aime: "U.S. shoppers bought about 9,000 Nintendo hardware systems nonstop for every hour of every day during the week of Black Friday."

Year-over-year, DS sales were down from 1 million, but Wii sales rose from 550,000.

Although still unconfirmed, multiple sources are reporting today that search giant Google has acquired daily deal site Groupon after weeks of discussions.

The rumored price is $2.5 billion, in line with past estimates that said Groupon could command up to a $3 billion price tag.

Groupon is a giant in the daily deal world, and was valued at over $1 billion in April. Since then, traffic has continued to explode, with small business owners lining up to get on the site.

Yahoo was also rumored to have been interested in Groupon, offering as much as $4 billion for the site, but that bid was never confirmed, either.

If accurate, the purchase will be Google's largest this year, and their second largest ever, behind the purchase of DoubleClick in 2008 for $3.2 billion.

Microsoft is currently in discussions with media companies in an effort to start a new subscription TV service through the Xbox 360, a service that will directly compete with Hulu Plus and Netflix.

The software giant has even gone as far as to say it could become a "virtual cable operator," delivering the shows over the Internet to subscribers paying a monthly fee.

A second option would be to use the 360 console to give current cable subscribers "enhanced interactivity" of shows they might be currently watching.

It appears that how popular you are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter actually had a real world effect on the November elections in the United States.

Candidates with more "likes" on Facebook won 71 percent of the time in the Senate elections while candidates with more Twitter followers won 74 percent of the time.

Facebook said that in 77 of the 118 races it followed in the Senate and the House, the winner had more "likes" than the opponent did.

If you had double the amount of "likes," the average margin of victory was 3.9 percent.

One gamer, under the alias 'Yankeyan' has posted a video this week showing himself playing the original Super Mario Bros. game using Microsoft's new Kinect motion control system.

Says Yankeyan:

"I programmed it to recognize my motions and passed the virtual button presses to the NES emulator. I could have placed a simulated keypad right in front of me that I can press with my hands, but I thought full body gestures were more in the spirit of Kinect. Of course, Mario isn't designed to be played like this, so this is really really hard."

According to Cambridge computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe, April 11th, 1954 was the most boring day since 1900, with almost nothing of note occurring.

A general election happened in Belgium, a Turkish academic was born and Jack Shufflebotham, a famous soccer player for Oldham Athletic, passed away. Other than that, nothing of note happened on April 11th, 1954.

Tunstall-Pedoe used his computer program True Knowledge to come to that conclusion.

The program was fed 300 million facts about "people, places, business and events" that made news (even small-town local) and uses complex algorithms to link information together.

New sources have reported that the upcoming iPad 2 will include 5 new "key" features, ones that will likely boost the tablet's sales exponentially.

If accurate, the reports say the iPad 2 will add a front-facing camera for video conferencing (and FaceTime), USB ports, Retina Display, 3-axis gyroscope and a carbon fiber (lighter/thinnner) body.

The most notable of the features may be the addition of USB ports, which Apple has never added to any of their iOS devices.