TOKYO Nintendo, the largest maker of hand-held game players, said Thursday that it would start selling its smallest player next month, as Sony prepares for European sales of its PlayStation Portable after releases in Japan and the United States. The Game Boy Micro will go on sale in Japan on Sept. 13 for ¥12,000, or $109, Nintendo said in release on its Web site.
Sales of the device, about the size of a cellphone, will start in the United States later in the month and in Europe in November.
Nintendo's dominant share in the hand-held game device market is threatened by Sony, which will introduce its PlayStation Portable, or PSP, in Europe next month and expects to sell 13 million units worldwide in the year ending next March 31.
Nintendo is third in the $6.2 billion game console market behind Sony and Microsoft.
Game Boy Micro has the same processing power as the bigger Game Boy Advance and plays the same 700 or more game titles.
The player, small enough to fit in trouser pockets, measures 4 inches wide, or 10.2 centimeters, 2 inches tall and 0.7 inches deep. Micro's 2-inch screen is less than half of the PSP's display.
The device will sell for $99.99 in the United States starting Sept. 19, Nintendo said in a release Wednesday. Sales of the player in Europe will begin Nov. 4 at €99.99, or $123, said a spokesman, Ken Toyoda.
Identifying the market for the Micro is "a little challenging" because the game player's price is between the more expensive Nintendo DS and the older Game Boy Advance, said Defibaugh at Credit Suisse.
The Game Boy Micro will go on sale in Japan on Sept. 13 for ¥12,000, or $109, Nintendo said in release on its Web site. Sales of the device, about the size of a cellphone, will start in the United States later in the month and in Europe in November.
Game Boy Micro
has the same processing power as the bigger Game Boy Advance and plays the same 700 or more game titles, the company said.
Resource:
Herald Tribune
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Apple Computer may be forced to pay royalties to Microsoft for every iPod it sells after it emerged that Bill Gates's software giant beat Steve Jobs' firm in the race to file a crucial patent on technology used in the popular portable music players. The total bill could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although Apple introduced the iPod in November 2001, it did not file a provisional patent application until July 2002, and a full application was filed only in October that year.
In the meantime, Microsoft submitted an application in May 2002 to patent some key elements of music players, including song menu software.Apple and Microsoft were two of several companies that developed portable players, but the iPod, with its sleek design and user-friendly controls, has dominated the market.
In July, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected Apple's application, saying some ideas were similar to an earlier application filed by a Microsoft employee, John Platt.
Apple has signalled it will resist the move. A spokeswoman said Apple would continue to try to get its patent recognised.
By Katherine Griffiths in New York
Published: 14 August 2005
Resouce:
The Independent Online
Web search giant Yahoo has paid $1bn (£556m) for a stake in China's biggest e-commerce firm, Alibaba.com. The US company will now hold a 40% stake - and 35% of the votes - in the Chinese firm, which runs the country's biggest auction and trading sites.
The investment positions Yahoo to compete with world auction leader eBay in a key market. Yahoo is to merge its Chinese search engine operations with Alibaba.
The Chinese firm, in which Yahoo is now the biggest single investor - as well as the biggest investor in the sector in China to date - employs some 2,000 people in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
Yahoo already leads eBay in Japan via its relationship with SoftbankThe Chinese government last month reported that the number of people in the country using the internet had reached 103 million, putting it second only to the US.
Leading overseas companies have recently been investing heavily in China's booming online market.
EBay paid $180m for Shanghai-based Eachnet and US web firm Interactivecorp - which owns Expedia - paid $168m for a majority stake in Chinese online retailer Elong.
And online book retailer Amazon bought Chinese rival Joyo for $75m.
Resource:
BBCNews
Microsoft Beats Rival to Punch in Filing Similar Application on MP3 Software.
Apple Computer Inc., whose iPods are the top-selling music player in the United States, lost an attempt to patent some of the device's technology because rival Microsoft Corp. had already filed a similar application.Microsoft beat Apple to the patent application by five months, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office documents show. Apple's request, filed by chief executive Steve Jobs and other officials in October 2002, was rejected by patent officials last month.
The iPod accounts for 75 percent of all MP3 players sold in the United States, according to NPD Group Inc. in Port Washington, N.Y. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has shipped 21.8 million iPods since Jobs introduced the player in October 2001, with 18.1 million units sold in the past four quarters alone.
Apple's application, filed a year after the iPod was introduced, was rejected July 13. The documents do not identify the iPod by name, a common omission in such petitions.Microsoft's application was rejected in December 2004, patent office records show.
If the patent is rejected again, Apple can take its case to the federal courts, which have the power to overturn the patent office's rejection.
The iPod already faces competition from Microsoft-powered music players. Microsoft said this week it is working with electronics makers to design new devices for release in the end-of-year shopping season.
Resource:
WashingtonPost Buy a iPod
Here
Google Inc. is refusing to speak with reporters at CNET's online news site after it ran a story that used Google's chief executive to illustrate how easily the company's search engine finds personal information.Google told News.com, the online tech news service of CNET Networks Inc., last week that it would not speak to any of its reporters for a year, according to News.com's editor.
Google was angered by a story last month that focused on potential threats the search engine leader's product poses to personal privacy, said Jai Singh, the News.com editor-in-chief.
"We didn't go out and break into any databases to get this information," Singh said. "This is all publicly available information."A Google spokesman declined to speak with The Associated Press about the story.
The crux of Mills' story was about the vast amounts of information Google collects that is unavailable to the public. For example, Google software scans user e-mails to learn what kind of advertising might appeal to the user.
Mills wrote in her story that "hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics standards could abuse that information."
Resource:
BusinessWeek
Google has reversed its initial snub of the RSS format, enabling users for the first time to add Really Simple Syndication feeds from Google News. RSS and Atom provide a similar format for syndicating Web content in XML feeds to other sites and aggregation software called readers. The formats grew in popularity with the rise of blogging in recent years, but their rise has been marked by warring among the formats' relevant loyalists.
Both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division have recently made moves toward RSS. MSN has started testing a Web-based RSS aggregator, while Yahoo has expanded into mobile access to the news feeds gathered on its My Yahoo personalized home page service.
Other major players such as Ask Jeeves have feeds from news as well. With all this competition jumping onto RSS, it was high time for Google to do the same.
Resource:
eweek more information
Google News Feeds
America Online Inc. has acquired Kirkland mobile software company Wildseed and set up a wireless division in Seattle as part of a larger effort to enhance the way people access music, games, calendars and other content on their cell phones.
"Wireless is a big bet for us," said Eisler, who joined AOL last summer and was recently appointed general manager of the new division. The purchase price of Wildseed -- a 5-year-old privately held company backed by Ignition Partners and Azure Capital -- was not disclosed. This was literally a business deal that when both companies sat down and looked at what was evolving between them, it made a lot of sense to put the two organizations together.
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all have placed large bets on the mobile marketplace in recent months. Google started a local search feature for mobile phones in April. Yahoo! last month introduced a service that lets mobile phone users get information such as restaurant listings on their handsets using text messages. In May, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Windows Mobile software that allows users to download music, video and pictures.
"There are about 195 million cell phones in the U.S. today and that is going to be one of the ways that people log on and get content," she said. "We are not there yet.... The question is going to be, when there is money to be made several years from now, who has jumped in and learned and positioned themselves best to capitalize when it does happen."
Resource:
SeattlePI
Jupitermedia Corporation has sold its ClickZ.com network, SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngine Strategies show to UK based Incisive Media plc for $43 million in cash, the companies announced today. Incisive Media is a London-based business information provider with interests in seven markets, including retail investment, insurance, financial risk management, mortgage, capital markets/financial IT, private equity and photographics. The Company delivers key information to defined target audiences across a variety of platforms in print, through magazines; in person via conferences and exhibitions; and online through its various websites.
Jupitermedia is the parent company of this publication and the internet.com, DevX.com and Earthweb networks. "SES {search engine strategies} has all the hallmarks we look for in our acquisitions: this is a high margin business with robust core earnings, and it is a market leader in a strong and rapidly growing global market niche," Tim Weller, Chief Executive of Incisive Media, said in a statement.
The ClickZ.com network itself was acquired by Jupitermedia (then called internet.com) in September 2000 for $16 million in cash and stock.
$43.0 million (approximately £24.3 million) acquisition of Search Engine Strategies ("SES") (the "Acquisition") and placing of 8,200,000 new ordinary shares (the "Vendor Placing") at 150 pence per new ordinary share.
The deal is expected to close this month.
Resources:
DigitalPoint,
InternetNews and
Incisive Media Plc
Apple Computer Inc. is calling its latest product the Mighty Mouse, but analysts say it's actually a Trojan horse that could further the firm's forays into the world of Windows PCs. The Cupertino company started selling the new, four-button mouse, with a small 360-degree scroll trackball. The mouse is compatible with both Macintosh and Windows computers.
The new mouse looks similar to the white, rounded one-button variety that's standard with most Macintosh computers.
The only difference in the look is a small trackball on top that can be used for things like scrolling through Web pages.
The product is Apple's first mouse with more than one button. It will likely take away the frustration of users who want to right-click for extra functions.Although Apple's latest mouse, which costs $50, probably won't become one of its cash cows, the business will probably have hefty profit margins, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research
Resource:
SFGate
Yahoo has announced the appointment of Dr Prabhakar Raghavan to head up its research department.Raghavan was senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search firm Verity. Prior to Verity, he worked for 14 years in a variety of technical and managerial positions at IBM, including head of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies department at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
Yahoo said that Raghavan will lead research efforts in areas of search and information navigation, social media, community, personalisation and mobility.He also holds over a dozen patents, including several on link analysis for web searching, and is a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University.
Raghavan has taught at Yale, and has been inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Resource:
VNUNet
