Discount site Woot.com has somehow managed to acquire enough white Zune players to sell them at a $100 discount from Microsoft's suggested retail price. For as long as supplies last, a new Zune player can be had for $149.99 plus $5 shipping.

Woot typically sells older items or those that have been overstocked and sitting on store shelves. The deal could be an indicator that Microsoft is trying to clear out stock in preparation for new models of the Zune that could arrive before the holidays. Either way, it's a great opportunity for those who have wanted a cheap portable audio player and aren't a fan of Apple products.

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Comcast is denying any filtering of BitTorrent traffic after a blog accused it and other ISPs of attempting to thwart users of the service.

The TorrentFreak blog first made the accusations last week in a post, which said Comcast and other providers had been either limiting BitTorrent bandwidth or preventing users from seeding their downloads.

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TiVo said Wednesday that its new lower-cost high-definition DVR is now available at retailers across the United States after being announced in late July. The $299 TiVo HD sports much of the same feature set found in TiVo's high-end $799 Series3.

The company says TiVo HD is arriving as many consumers are looking to upgrade their television setups to high-definition. TiVo did not say when it plans to activate the TiVoToGo portability features for either HD model, but news on that front is expected sometime in the near future. TiVo service costs $16.95 per month on a 1-year basis, or $12.95 per month with a 3-year contract.

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A day after protesting a decision by Paramount to only support HD DVD and threatening not to make a second "Transformers" movie, Michael Bay has apparently had a change of heart after seeing the format in action. He apologized in a forum post Tuesday evening for drinking the Blu-ray "kool aid."

"I heard where Paramount is coming from and the future of HD and players that will be close to the $200 mark which is the magic number. I like what I heard," Bay wrote. "As a director, I'm all about people seeing films in the best quality possible, and I saw and heard firsthand people upset about a corporate decision. So today I saw 300 on HD, it rocks! So I think I might be back on to do Transformers 2!"

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Apple has secured revenue sharing deals to bring its iPhone to Europe, the Financial Times reported late Tuesday.

Three operators have signed deals with Apple that will be officially announced later this month at an industry trade show, the paper reported. They are T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France, and O2 in the UK.

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Apple on Tuesday released its second software update for the popular iPhone, which has seen sales continue to soar even a month after its debut. Unfortunately, the company is providing few details of what's new in the update, citing only "Bug fixes," but we don't doubt users will rush to upgrade.

Meanwhile, the research arm of UBS said in a note Tuesday that it expects Apple to top its estimated sales of 730,000 iPhones this quarter. UBS says that it expects upwards of 800,000 iPhones to be sold in Apple's fiscal fourth quarter. Still, those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as some analysts predicted 500,000 iPhone sales in the first weekend when the numbers ended up around 270,000.

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Customers of Microsoft's AdCenter are being invited to participate in the company's first foray in the field of context-sensitive, text-only advertising - the product that many say established Google's permanent presence in online services.

Displaying its typical flair for draining all the poetry out of the naming process, Microsoft Content Ads enters the beta process one week from tomorrow, with the promise of opening up formerly premium MSN ad inventory to low-cost clients.

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Microsoft has unveiled an application that combines its Silverlight technology with Windows Live Search, code-named "Tafiti." The name means "to search" in Swahili. It integrates the various types of Live Search, and allows users to store and share search results by placing them on "shelves." From there they can be stored or e-mailed or blogged about. Tafiti runs on any browser and platform that Siverlight is compatible with.

In addition to the virtual shelves, the application also includes a carousel to help the user navigate through returned search results, and a tree view where search results are placed on the limbs of a tree and allows for visualization of search results. While the applicaiton is likely to never become an actual Microsoft product, the team responsible for creating Tafiti has made it publicly available.

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The first commercial release of Office Communications Server 2007 will be unveiled to the public on October 16, Microsoft announced this morning. Along with it will be the Office Communicator (OC) client - the company's professional grade on-screen messaging service - as well as the next edition of Live Meeting, whose conferencing features will be upgraded to support OC.

The move comes a day after Microsoft publicly made nice with Cisco, which is otherwise one of its principal competitors in the communications space.

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Toshiba on Tuesday announced a lineup of nine new 2.5-inch laptop hard drives, including the world's largest to date with a capacity of 320GB. The drives incorporate Serial ATA interfaces and speeds of either 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM. Toshiba expects to begin mass production in November.

The 320GB monster includes 2 disk platters and 4 heads, while offering seek times of 12ms and 8MB of buffer. The faster 7,200 RPM drives reach 200GB in size and offer buffer memory of 16MB. Toshiba says the new 200GB drive increases the maximum transfer rate by approximately 46% and the average random access time by approximately 8%.

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A forthcoming update for Adobe's Flash Player 9, the beta testing for which is set to begin today, will incorporate the ability to decode H.264 videos - the Advanced Video Codec portion of MPEG-4, and the same standard currently used by Apple's QuickTime. Adobe's move comes as users of Macs, iPhone, and AppleTV have been noticing YouTube's gradual shift away from Flash video and toward H.264, which some speculate may become a complete shift within months.

While the new Flash version is not getting a new number, it is getting a new code-name: "Moviestar." A check of Adobe's release notes reveals why: The playback module now enables the hardware acceleration mode of many graphics cards, when going to full-screen mode. Earlier versions relied on software acceleration.

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Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft's security engineers formally ruled out the possibility of its regular monthly "Patch Tuesday" update sequence as having triggered a worldwide outage of Skype VoIP communication service on Thursday, which lasted for about two days.

In a company blog post yesterday morning, Skype engineers disclosed that they suspected a wave of client-side reboots were triggered by Patch Tuesday at roughly the same time. The temporary reduction in P2P traffic capacity that followed, Villu Arak said, triggered a failure of the Skype VoIP network. This was after Arak had blamed an internal server software glitch, during the time of the outage.

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MTV Networks, RealNetworks and Verizon Wireless announced a joint venture Tuesday morning, which will unite the companies' digital music offerings with Real's Rhapsody service. MTV's URGE service will be shut down, but customers can migrate over to Rhapsody.

The expanded Rhapsody music service will fall under a separate corporate branding, called "Rhapsody America," jointly owned by MTV and Real. MTV will provide music programming from its MTV, VH1 and CMT properties, while Real continues to handle the underlying architecture and music sales.

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Atari said Tuesday that it was in the process of developing a package of classic games playable on Sony’s PlayStation Portable game system, as well as taking those games and ‘evolving’ them into more up-to-date versions which would include up-to-date graphics. The games include Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Battlezone, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Millipede, Missile Command, Super Breakout, Tempest, Warlords and Pong.

"We are looking forward to providing gamers with the experience of the iconic Atari catalog on a handheld platform," said Matt Rush, Producer, Atari, Inc. "Offering these Atari classics in both their elemental and contemporary forms should excite both old-school and next-generation gamers alike." The company also says it is planning to make more than 60 games from the 2600 platform available on the PSP as well, which will include online leaderboards and peer-to-peer wireless compatibility.

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Bebo said Tuesday that it had partnered with Microsoft to incorporate Windows Live services into its social networking site, including Windows Live Messenger and Contacts.

The arrangement is the first of its kind between a social networking site and Microsoft. Before, the only integration of this kind with Windows Live was through Spaces, Microsoft’s own service.

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