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Newly bought out by Best Buy, Web-based music maven Napster is now looking into delivering location-based services such as notifying Best Buy customers on their cell phones about local concerts, said Napster's CEO, speaking at CES last night.

Addressing an audience at a CES mobile forum, Napster CEO Brad Duea pointed to a study by JupiterMedia analysts showing that, of all location-based services they'd most like to use, music -- at 11 percent -- is topped only by weather, at 14 percent.

One of Intel's software stacks will run the Yahoo-powered Widget Channel, whereas the other will operate tru2way technology for applications that work across environments from different cable providers.

Both software stacks will run on top of a media processor, Intel officials said, speaking with Betanews on Sunday in the Intel booth at CES.

Amidst all the announcements about widgets this week was one ominous note: a survey from Strategy Analytics saying that consumers it surveyed weren't all that hot on widgets.

Well, they're right -- and wrong. As Disraeli (or Mark Twain, depending on your preference) used to say, there's three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. And the way you design a survey can make a big difference in the sorts of answers you get.

Yahoo is trying to bounce back from its financial woes with the announcement at CES of blue-chip partnerships around its TV widgets, a technology pointed to by some pundits as something that will transform television as we know it today.

At CES press conferences packed with reporters from all over the world, top manufacturers like Sony and Samsung unveiled plans to include Yahoo's widget technology in future HDTVs so as to help consumers customize their converged TV/Internet experiences.

At CES, Opera is launching a new edition of its toolkit for building browsers that run on gaming machines, set-top boxes, and other places beyond garden variety PC and cell phone environments.

The "Devices" toolkit -- already used for Nintendo's Wii -- now allows for development of mini-browsers with complete Internet capabilities.