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This Friday, Nintendo revolutionised the Gaming Industry by launching an unconventional Game controller aptly named “Revolution” console. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata launched it at the Tokyo Game Show. The controller is similar to a conventional TV Remote Controller, that has a Motion detection Sensors, allowing players to move and swing it around like an actual Sword, Gun, Steering Wheel or a Baseball Bat and more depending upon the game.

The Nintendo launch was the biggest buzz at the Game Show, and is expected to attract 150,000 people. The Revolution is available in bright red, black, silver, white and green colors. It can also be fitted with a joystick add-on. Also, people can use it with much ease, just like a TV Remote, so gamers can adapt to use quickly.

The Virtual Reality that it creates in the minds of players while holding the controller in hands is the biggest advantage. Players can handle it like an actual handheld during their games. It adds a lot more real experience to the game and extends the effect to near reality. Nintendo calls this motion sensor based technology as a “direct pointing device”.

Nintendo is dominating the market for the handheld game machines with its Game Boy, while Sony leads the home game consoles with the PlayStation. Nintendo has sold 66.79 million units worldwide, while Sony has sold 91 million PlayStation2 consoles worldwide over the last five years, 21 million of them in Asia, although more than 100 million of the original PlayStations have been sold worldwide.

Further, Nintendo snatched the limelight from Microsoft XBox 360, scheduled to be launched in November. Microsoft is strongly pushing XBox360, learning from the past failure of the original XBox. Microsoft sold 21.9 million XBox consoles worldwide during 3 years, but it failed miserably in Asia, including Japan, where Sony PlayStation dominates strongly.

Microsoft is trying hard to appeal Japanese consumers by signing on designers popular here to make games exclusive for XBox 360, such as “Final Fantasy XL” and “Ninety-Nine Nights”. Microsoft has partnered up with all the industry’s leading games developers — including Electronic Arts, Activision and Ubisoft — and plans to develop games specifically for Japan.
But Sony is confident that the PlayStation3 will be a hit. The PS3 will be equipped with the world’s most advanced Cell processor, which is 35 times as powerful as the PlayStation2. None of the “Revolution” and “PlayStation 3″ are expected to arrive before XBox 360, so Microsoft needs to play really safe to dominate the market and stand competition when Nintendo and Sony start selling their products.

Yahoo Inc. told to upgrade its Yahoo Mail service, the most popular Web-Based Email Service, making it more efficient and fast like a desktop application. The New Web Interface is a look-alike of Microsoft Outlook program and provides features like drang-n-drop, autocomplete, right-click menus that are generally available on desktop programs.

Yahoo Mail upgrade has quickly followed AOL Mail’s improvements meant to make its e-mail service quicker and easier to use. The new Interface is based on advanced technologies like DHTML, XML and SOAP and AJAX eliminating the need to refresh the browser to load new page/data. It sounds similar to the Interface that is currently provided by Gmail.

The Yahoo Mail upgrade was expected after Yahoo acquired Oddpost Inc. (a company that provides Web-based e-mail applications) in 2004. And after the war of storage capacities, that Google started with Gmail, now, the fight is turing for the best Interface of these Email services.

Further details can be found at http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com

It seems all big companies are on a shopping spree. Continuing the trend, Oracle has bought Siebel to become the number one CRM applications company in the world,” as told by Larry Ellison, the Oracle chief executive. The deal comes after nine months of Oracle’s PeopleSoft acquisition, one that took nearly two years to be completed amid a flurry of lawsuits and anti-trust investigations.

Oracle is offering $10.66 per Siebel share, 16.8% more than Siebel’s closing share price on Friday. While Oracle shares rose 1.6 percent to 13.49 on the news while Siebel shot up 12.7 percent to 10.29.

After the acquisition of Siebel, Oracle has got a leg up with its rival SAP, the German Software Giant in the business management applications field. The purchase of Siebel is likely to help Oracle achieve its stated goal of 20% long-term annual earnings growth. Also, Oracle is now the second largest software group in the world after Microsoft.

eBay Inc. is buying Skype - the Internet Telephony Company in a $2.6 bn deal.
Skype, founded by the creators of Kazaa, the file-sharing program that riled the music business gives away software that allows people talk for free over the Internet using computers and microphones . A paid version, SkypeOut, allows those calls to be connected to regular phones. Similarly, SkypeIn is a real phone number your friends can call and you pick in Skype.

eBay is buying Skype to speed up the communication between the buyers and sellers instead of the current method of exchanging messages.

Skype has 53 million registered users, including more than 2 million who pay for its premium services. In 2004, Skype generated about $7 million in revenue, which it projects will snowball to $60 million this year. eBay said it would pay an additional $1.5bn to Skype over the next three years , bringing the total size of the deal to $4bn.

Apple Computer Inc. today introduces “iPod nano”, the pencil-thin incredibly small music player. Soon after the launch of the iTunes mobile phone Rokr, the company has introduced iPod nano.

Steve Jobs, CEO intoduced the iPod nano at a concert calling nano as “the biggest revolution since the original iPod”. Surely, as nano is extremely thin, less than a pencil, almost one third of iPod size, a completely new design and posesses an elegant look(hmm…Apple is eying ladies to buy nano…lol).

iPod nano is available in 2 models as of now, a 4 GB model that can store around 1000 songs and a 2GB model with a half-capacity of storing 500 songs are available at $249 and $199 respectively. The player is based on flash memory instead of hard drive and has a color screen that shows photos. Usage of flash memory also made the player lighweight at 1.5 ounces approximately.

It holds up to three days’ worth of music. It plays for up to 14 hours between battery charges.
It displays the color album art for the song you’re listening to right now. It carries your photos(25000), podcasts and audiobooks(11000).

There are host of other features: Click Wheel, Calendar and Contacts, World Clock, Customizable menus, PC Sync with iTunes - Automatic Transmission, addons with iPod accessories (Armband, Lanyard Headphones, Tubes, In-Ear Headphones, Dock).

Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs today introduced Apple iTunes phone, based on Motorola “Rokr” phone model. The cellphone runs the popular “iTunes” Software from Apple Computer Inc. and can play music songs similar to the iPod shuffle player, the best-seller item from the Apple’s stable.

The cellphone can store around 100 songs and users can transfer songs from/to PC’s through USB-Data Cable. The music stops when a call is received, so you don’t miss your calls.

A product like this was in demand for quite sometime, and Apple only recently gave hints about the release of such a gadget only lately. After riding on the huge success of the iPod, the company can expect to unwind another craze amongst the consumers to buy a musical phone similar to iPod music player.

The phone is currently available via Cingular phone service only and company expects to boost sales and legal music downloads as well through iTunes.

More details are yet to come

Sony PSP is breaking sales records with it PlayStation Portable (PSP) to become the fastest-selling games console of all time in the UK, according to figures. It sold more than 185,000 units since its launch in September 1. That is more than double than Nintendo’s DS (87,000 at launch), and it became the most successful hardware launch in UK history ever.

24 games were available at launch, the largest for any console, with 20 entering the All Formats Top 40 and 9 games breaking into the Top 10. Games were priced at £34.99 with the console itself retailing at £179.

The software for the PSP is also selling well, though no singular title stood out particularly in terms of sales. Ridge Racer recorded the most sales, at 37,000 units sold. Other hit titles include Wipeout Pure, Virtua Tennis and Metal Gear Ac!d, for a total of 20 PSP titles entering in the U.K. top 40.

The Sony PSP and Nintendo DS have fought for supremacy in every country they’ve been released and the recent UK launch comes as a defeat for Nintendo. Still, the Nintendo DS has outsold the PSP in Japan. And in the United States, the PSP had a stronger launch but Nintendo still claims better numbers overall for its DS.

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference is expected to be a coming out party of sorts for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas.

Primary among the new features in and new direction for Orcas will be advances in how the toolset handles data, sources said. Sources said “The future ‘Orcas’ release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML.”

As both its PDC and the launch of its Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 products loom in the next few months, Microsoft is working on delivering technology to eager users, prepping to RTM VS 2005, deliver a release candidate of the technology and provide a third beta version of a key component. Microsoft will officially launch both Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 on Nov. 7 in San Francisco.

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A federal judge on Monday ordered distributors of the popular file-swapping program Kazaa to alter the software, which millions have downloaded, so it can no longer be used for music piracy.

Hailed as a victory by the recording industry that brought the suit, the decision has implications well beyond Australia, where Kazaa executives are based, because Kazaa’s users span the globe.

The ruling released late Sunday night held liable Sharman Networks, the Sydney-based company that has owned Kazaa since early 2002, as well as its chief executive, Nikki Hemming. The Sydney federal judge also found that a Sharman partner, Altnet, violated Australian copyright law. The ruling applied to Altnet’s parent company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, and its chief executive, Kevin Bermeister. Legal scholars said the decision may ultimately lead to the demise of Kazaa, just as a similar injunction by a San Francisco federal judge in July 2000 hastened the death of Napster, the pioneering file-swapping service.

It gave Kazaa two months to include filters to prevent the trading of copyrighted music and tossed out record industry claims of contravention of the Trade Practices Act and conspiracy.

Ruling Text

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SAP, Europe’s biggest software maker is focussing on Banking Sector as one of the cores areas for expansion, SAP head Henning Kagermann told Handelsblatt. “We see a lot of opportunity for growth — mostly organic but we will make fill-in acquisitions if we need to buy in certain expertise,” Kagermann told the Financial Times.

The market for SAP has the potential of “around 9 billion euros per annum” for SAP according to Kagermann. SAP currently has a market share of less than ten percent in the banking sector.

The modernization of some 4500 banking systems, the paper writes, will cost some 100 billion euros according to the extrapolations of experts. And the market experts at Forrester Research say that less than half of this has already been done.