Activision Blizzard sells 6.5 million copies of Call of Duty: MW3 on first day
It was a big week for video game releases in the United States and United Kingdom, with two eagerly anticipated sequels hitting the shelves within days of one another: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from Activision Blizzard, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Bethesda Softworks were both released this week.
Today, based on video game retail tracking data provided by Charttrack, Activision said the first day sales total for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in North America and the UK was $400 million dollars, or 6.5 million units.
WeVideo delivers free collaborative, browser-based video editing
Despite the relentless coverage we give to the hardware end of the tech world, BetaNews is a software site at its heart, and we are always trying out new software.
Granted, in the last few years this has come to mean something different than it used to.
Estonian company Rove Digital taken down in massive clickjacking fraud sting
Six Estonian nationals were arrested this week, charged with running a massive $14 million clickjacking fraud ring that infected 4 million computers across 100 countries.
Discovered in a two-year FBI sting operation called "Operation Ghost Click," the six men have each been charged with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, computer intrusion conspiracy, computer intrusion (furthering fraud,) and computer intrusion (transmitting information). The head of the group, Vladimir Tsastsin, 31, was additionally charged with 22 counts of money laundering.
Google packages its targeting tools in free Real-Time Insights Finder
Think Insights with Google, an experimental marketing research library that Google has been developing for the last three months is now out of beta and available for anyone to check out.
The idea behind Think Insights is that it gives marketers access to Google-sponsored research, search stats, and emerging trends as well as a multimedia library with various case studies, infographics and video content that help advertisers know who they should target, and how they should advertise (with Google, of course.)
Adobe puts full support behind HTML5, leaves Flash to standalone mobile apps
Adobe Flash, as a mobile browser plug-in, is finished.
Today, Adobe Vice President and General Manager of interactive development Danny Winokur announced that Adobe is ceasing work on Flash Player for mobile devices after the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.
Microsoft offers simple patch Tuesday for election day
Microsoft's patch Tuesday has fallen on state- and local election day this month, and as such, is relatively lightweight, with just one "critical" bulletin, two "important," and one "moderate."
The critical bulletin (MS11-083) is for a TCP/IP vulnerability that could allow remote code execution if an attacker sends a continuous flow of specially crafted UDP packets to a closed port on a Vista SP2 (32- and 64-bit,) Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit, x64, Itanium,) Windows 7 for x64-based systems, or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (x64, Itanium) system.
IEEE launches study to make 100 Gigabit optical ethernet cheaper, higher density
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on Tuesday launched an exploratory committee that will look at functional upgrades to the 100 Gigabit profile in the optical ethernet standard 802.3ba-2010.
The group will look at 100Gb/s operation over a narrower and faster interface to enable the development and delivery of lower-cost, higher-density 100Gb/s solutions.
Kodak sells off its CCD image sensor business to private equity firm
The Eastman Kodak Company on Monday announced that it has sold its Image Sensor Solutions (ISS) business to Beverly Hills private equity firm Platinum Equity for an undisclosed sum. The transaction includes the sale of Kodak's New York research and manufacturing facility where solutions for commercial, industrial and professional imaging are developed.
Kodak's ISS business manufactures mostly CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) sensors; a type of digital image sensor that has gradually been losing market share to CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensors, the smaller, more energy-efficient image sensors commonly used in mobile phones and consumer digital cameras.
Palo Alto gives firewalls a cloud-based anti-malware sandbox with WildFire
Network security company Palo Alto Networks on Monday introduced a new anti-malware product for on-premises firewalls known as WildFire, which vets new and unknown files in a virtual sandbox to see if they're a new piece of malware, and then creates a distributable signature if they're determined to actually be bad files.
With the WildFire engine in place, a firewall will submit (either manually, or automatically based on policy) new and unknown .EXEs and .DLLs to a virtual cloud-based environment, where they are modeled against 70 different behavioral profiles to determine if they're malware.
Barnes & Noble debuts new Nook Tablet, longshot competitor to Kindle Fire
Book retailer Barnes and Noble on Monday unveiled the third generation of its Android-powered Nook e-reader, the Nook Tablet. Nearly identical in appearance to its predecessor the Nook Color, the Nook Tablet is designed for improved multimedia consumption to better compete with Amazon's new Android tablet, the Kindle Fire.
The Nook Tablet has a 7-inch IPS touchscreen display, a 1GHz dual-core processor (currently of undetermined brand,) 1GB of RAM, and runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread.)
Open-sourcing the news: Knight-Mozilla embeds tech gurus in news agencies
On the opening day of the Mozilla Festival in London on Friday, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership announced five technology fellows who will spend the next year embedded in leading news agencies, studying the needs of the modern newsroom.
The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Al Jazeera English, Zeit Online, and the BBC have opened their newsrooms so these innovators can find new ways that open source Web technology can advance the values of journalism.
Microsoft's Kinect SDK team becomes @KinectWindows, promises 'big day' today
Microsoft's innovative natural user interface Kinect turns one year old today, and it looks like there's a celebration of some sort brewing.
Kinect began as an Xbox 360 peripheral, but it grew into an official Windows peripheral six months ago with the first Kinect for Windows beta.
In continuing executive shuffle, HP names its own IT leaders
Since Hewlett-Packard lost its Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd last year, the corporation's executive staff has been transient. This week, among the continuing shuffle, a new executive position has been named, and a position that had been open for the last five months has been filled.
Both of these positions, ironically, fall under the category of Information Technology...something HP is supposed to...well...do.
Regulators may approve AT&T merger with T-Mobile after all
On Wednesday, the District Court of Washington DC issued its ruling on antitrust complaints from Sprint and Cellular South about the proposed merger of wireless carriers AT&T and T-Mobile. Most of the complaints were thrown out.
AT&T and T-Mobile moved to dismiss the complaints, arguing that Sprint and Cellular South failed to adequately show the merger would cause them antitrust injury. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said the majority of the claims would actually be dismissed, but let a few of Sprint and Cellular South's complaints stand.
House passes five-year ban on new wireless taxes, now it's up to the Senate
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution called the Wireless Tax Fairness Act of 2011 late Tuesday, which seeks to put a five-year moratorium on new wireless taxes; including those placed on consumer services and property, and also those placed on providers.
The resolution, unsurprisingly, sprung from the heart of the U.S. high tech world, Silicon Valley. The bill's co-sponsor is Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic representative for the 16th district of California, an area which includes the City of San Jose, and Santa Clara County. The bill's Republican sponsor is Trent Franks, of the sixth district of Arizona.
Tim's Bio
Tim Conneally was born into dumpster tech. His father was an ARPANET research pioneer and equipped his kids with discarded tech gear, second-hand musical instruments, and government issue foreign language instruction tapes. After years of building Frankenstein computers from rubbish and playing raucous music in clubs across the country (and briefly on MTV) Tim grew into an adult with deep, twisted roots and an eye on the future. He most passionately covers mobile technology, user interfaces and applications, the science and policy of the wireless world, and watching different technologies shrink and converge.
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