Was Sony's 'God of War' Promo Too Much?
Sony's party last month in Athens promoting its new game God of War II is now getting lots of attention for its featured centerpiece -- a decapitated goat.
The resulting fallout from the company's decision to print photos of the event, complete with unedited pictures of the headless animal, in its magazine will likely mean the recall of the entire run of the official PlayStation magazine.
Google Partners With Four U.S. States on Search
Google said Monday it had partnered with Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia to add its search capabilities to the websites of those governments.
In addition to offering its search technologies to these states, it would also take steps to ensure that public information was also more accessible from the search engine's own site. This would include indexing portions of the site normally missed by most search spiders.
Sony's Kutaragi Steps Down
PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi will leave Sony at the end of June, the company revealed Thursday. This is only the latest in a string of developments which show the company is serious about turning around its business.
After years of being the top video game maker, it now finds itself in third place behind a resurgent Nintendo and surprisingly strong Microsoft. While Sony expected the video game unit to help it recover, it instead is doing exactly the opposite.
Sony Reports Successes with PS3 Folding@home
Sony said Thursday that over 250,000 console owners have registered to participate, and at any given moment provide over 400 teraflops of additional computing power, which is more than half of the total available to the project. With the addition of the PlayStation 3, Sony says the Folding@home project is one of the world's most powerful distributed computing projects.
"Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate," program lead and Stanford University associate professor Vijay Pande said. "We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases." Sony says it has also released an updated version of the application, which is automatically delivered to current participants after the application is restarted.
Longhorn Server Beta Goes Public
For the first time, the general public will be able to get their hands on Longhorn Server, as Microsoft released the first publicly available beta on Thursday. The company says Longhorn is still on track for a late 2007 release.
Beta 3 is now available free of charge from the Microsoft Web site. The Redmond company claims the latest build is ready for general testing publicly, and invited its customers to use the software in live production environments.
Acer Recalls 27,000 Sony Laptop Batteries
Thought Sony's battery recall woes were over? Think again. Acer has announced a voluntary recall of 27,000 batteries made by the company over short-circuiting and fire concerns.
According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Acer, 16 reports of overheating batteries have already been received, though none of them were in Acer laptops themselves. The recall affects batteries within TravelMate PCs produced between May 2004 and September 2006.
HD DVD: 'Still Very Much in the Game'
The public relations melee between HD DVD and Blu-ray continued Wednesday as supporters of HD DVD were quick to point out their own successes.
So far, 998,059 HD DVD discs have been sold, according to the HD DVD Promotional Group. This is about 2,000 shy of the total publicized by Blu-ray on Monday. It also disputed claims that Blu-ray was building an insurmountable lead.
Vonage Asks: 'Can You Patent an Orange?'
Fresh off its victory in gaining a permanent injunction, Vonage is now taking its battle to the people, launching Free to Compete, a Web site aimed at putting pressure on Verizon to lay off the VoIP company.
Vonage says that Verizon is attempting to stamp out competition by suing them out of the marketplace. In addition to the website, it will also place full-page ads in papers around the country as well as through radio and television.
New Internet Data Speeds Set
A group of researchers testing out the so called Internet2 network said it had broken speed records by first sending data at 7.67 gigabits per second, and breaking it the next day with a data transfer rate of 9.08Gbps.
"These records are final for the 10Gbps network era because they represent more than 98% of the upper limit of network capacity," University of Tokyo researcher Dr. Kei Hiraki said. "Through collaboration by a number of institutions, we have demonstrated the ability to overcome the distance and achieve this newest mark."
Live Search Manager Leaving Microsoft
Microsoft's search division has lost another executive as the company announced internally Tuesday that its general manager for Live Search was leaving to "pursue non-profit interests" and spend time with his family.
The departure of Dane Glasgow, initially reported by Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley and since confirmed by the company itself, will take effect on Friday. It is the second departure in the division in as many months.
Verizon, BlackBerry Introduce Dual-Mode Phone
RIM on Wednesday introduced a new phone for the Verizon Wireless network that would allow the carrier's customers to use the phone overseas. Included in the phone is a dual-mode chip compatible with both CDMA and GSM.
Verizon's use of the Qualcomm-backed technology was a bit of a problem for its customers, as they had to request another phone from the company that was compatible with GSM when traveling overseas.
Vonage Wins Permanent Stay of Injunction
Vonage is safe, for now. Following 90 minutes of testimony before an appeals court, the VoIP provider has won a permanent stay of an injunction against it that would have prevented the company from signing up new customers.
Word of the ruling came about two hours after lawyers for Vonage and Verizon presented their case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. Both sides were questioned by the judge for approximately 40 minutes each.
Yahoo China Loses Piracy Case
Yahoo's China arm lost a case in a Beijing court that found it had infringed copyrights by allowing links to pirated music on its search engine.
The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court ordered the search company to pay 210,000 yuan ($27,000 USD) to the record labels that brought the suit, including Warner Music Group, BMG, and Universal.
Nielsen, comScore Stat Accuracy Questioned
An Internet advertising group has taken two Web ratings providers to task over their methodologies in an open letter, saying both companies have refused attempts to audit their data to explain inaccuracies in measurement.
Both the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents over 330 online advertisers (and is the author of the letter) and the Media Rating Council have been asking for these audits of Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix since 1999. However, both have so far refused to comply.
Blu-ray Shows Strong Momentum Against HD DVD
New data suggests that Sony's Blu-ray is beginning to pick up steam in the marketplace, most recently accounting for three out of every four high-definition discs sold in March.
Blu-ray's dramatic turnaround happened in short order; as recently as the holiday season it lagged far behind the Toshiba and Microsoft backed HD DVD. However, the format began making a move in the beginning of the year and sales have continued to accelerate since.
Ed's Bio
Ed Oswald is a freelance journalist from the Reading, PA area. Although he has written across a variety of subjects, Ed’s passion and focus has been on technology and gadgets. His work regularly appears on tech news sites BetaNews, PCWorld, and Technologizer, and has been syndicated to eWeek, Time’s Techland blog, VentureBeat and the New York Times.
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