Wii Makes Gift Giving Easy With Virtual Console

Gadgets

Marcus Yam (Blog)

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Virtually send Wii games as holiday gifts

Nintendo will later today launch a new feature on the Wii that will make gift giving this holiday season a little more convenient. A new Gifting function will allow users with Wii to send Virtual Console games to those with whom they have traded Friend Codes.

Virtual Console games are purchased from the Wii Shop Channel at a starting price of 500 Wii Points ($5). Classic NES titles typically start at 500 points, SNES games at 800 and N64 at 1000. Virtual Console games from other classic systems such as the Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, MSX and Neo Geo are also available.

The new Gifting feature will also take out some of the guess work in virtual gifting. Should the recipient already own a particular game gift, the sender will be immediately notified to choose another title.

Launching alongside the Gifting feature is the first Pokémon game to hit the Virtual Console – Pokémon Snap – originally for N64. As an added bonus, pictures taken as part of the gameplay in Pokémon Snap can be posted to the Wii Message Board and shared with friends.

Other new additions to the Wii Shop are Ghosts'n Goblins from the NES and Baseball Stars 2 from the Neo Geo.

Bill Gates Gets Degree After 30 Years

an evergreen moments...

The most successful college dropout finally gets a degree 30 years later. Bill Gates made his papa proud, again, when he himself was a recepient of an honorary doctorate from Harvard before giving a commencement address to students on Thursday. Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start a little company called Microsoft. Thirty two years later, after becoming the richest man in the world, Bill announced he would be quiting his day-to-day role at Microsoft to devote more time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr.Bill Gates' sense of humor shined during his speech:

"I want to thank Harvard for this honor. I'll be changing my job next year, and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson called me 'Harvard's most successful dropout.' I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class. I did the best of everyone who failed."

"But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. [Ballmer, now Microsoft's CEO, was also there, sitting in the crowd behind Gates.] I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today."

Congratulations Dr. Gates! You've done it again, this time one-uping Steve Jobs and Michael Dell with your shiny doctorate from Harvard.

Excerpts: 'Dr.Bill Gates' at Harvard graduation. [Seattle PI]

60 Minutes

Titans of Tech

Meet the titans of tech. Here are some of the extraordinary individuals who have changed the world through the power of the computer. From Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to the Google Guys and the founders of Napster and eBay, "60 Minutes" has covered the high-tech revolution from DOS to the iPhone.

Bill Gates Like You've Never Seen Him Before

Bill Gates: Video Game Warrior?>> Watch Clip

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Goes to Public Beta

By Peter Galli December 10, 2007 However, users who do not have Office installed will not be able to edit documents.
The public beta for Microsoft Office Live Workspace will go live Dec. 10. The service, which lets customers access, share and collaborate on documents online, was announced Oct. 1, at which time Microsoft said the beta would be released before the end of the year and that the company was accepting registrations from customers who wanted to test the software. The beta going live "means that all those customers who signed up and were on the wait list can now start using the product," Eric Gilmore, Microsoft's senior product manager for the Office business group, told eWEEK. The 12 schools that have already set up pilot programs using the alpha code will now also get the new beta service so they can roll out the pilot more broadly to include many more students, Gilmore said. But while he said the number of people who had signed up for the service "met and exceeded Microsoft's expectations," particularly as the software vendor had done little marketing of this, he declined to give a specific number. To read about the integration of Office Live Workspace With Live@edu, click here. "We are building this service to be at Internet scale and at Office scale, meaning hundreds of millions of users potentially. We had an expectation that it would ramp up over time after the initial hit, and we feel good about that," he said. "But if you look at our core audiences, we really think that the value proposition resonates really powerfully with students given the use cases they have and the work they do as well as with those information workers who want access to their data at home and work." Microsoft has also added a forum to the community site that it launched around Office Live Workspace, which allows the company to have a better conversation with customers, he said. Asked about the fact that users will not be able to edit the documents they are viewing through a browser unless they have Office installed on their computer, Gilmore said users without Office can still store documents online, preview and comment on them. However, Microsoft officials believe that doing full-on document editing on the Web is still in its infancy, he said. "You don't need Office to use this service, but it is optimized for Office users. There are over 500 million people using lots of different versions of Office, and we want to give a great experience across all of those. We support versions all the way from Office 97 to Office 2007 from a document format standpoint, meaning they will be able to preview these documents in a browser," he said. Click here to read more about Microsoft Office going online. However, the integration that allows one-click editing in Word or easy storing from the rich client directly to the workspace is only available for Office XP via an add-in known as the Office Live Add-in Toolbar, and Office in 2007, where it is integrated into the Office icon, he said. While Microsoft Office Live Workspace does not currently include advertising, the plan is to do so going forward, along with offering additional premium services for a fee. "We will figure out what the right business model is over time. We plan to pilot some things and see what works best for us and customers," Gilmore said. Check out eWEEK.com's Messaging & Collaboration Center for more on IM and other collaboration technologies.

Toshiba Launches Portege M700 Tablet

by Cisco Cheng

Toshiba's convertible tablet line began with the Portege M205, which generated plenty of hype for the tablet industry. It slowly evolved into the Portege M400, which boasted an optical drive and a standard voltage processor. Today, Toshiba is giving the line another facelift with the launch of the Portege M700.

The new M700 incorporates a widescreen form factor and inherits a similar 12-inch LED screen to that found on the Toshiba Portege R500. With LEDs, the M700 will benefit from a thinner and more energy-efficient screen technology.

In addition to a digitized screen, the M700 will also include touch capabilities, so you can use your fingers or the included digitizer pen to navigate. Some of the design elements are being brought from the Toshiba Portege R400 Series. It's a latch-less design, which means the rotating screen is locked into place by two pegs rather than a locking mechanism in the front bezel. According to Toshiba, the design will beef up the hinge by 35 percent, holding the screen steady at multiple angles.

As with the M400, the M700 comes with an integrated dual-layer DVD burner at 4.4-pounds. The drive is also modular, which means you can substitute the optical drive with a second hard drive. A 1.3MP webcam above the screen will give you face time with family members. The system will come loaded with standard voltage Intel Santa Rosa parts. Processor options will start with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 (1.8Ghz) and go all the way up to the T7700 (2.4Ghz). Memory configurations are expandable to 4GB. As for battery options, the M700 will come with a standard 6-cell battery. Customers can slide an additional 6-cell slice underneath the base for a total of 9 hours of battery life.

Prices will start at $1,699 and $1,799 and systems will begin shipping immediately.

IBM tips 32nm with high-k gate-first design

Business and Law

By Rick C. Hodgin

Armonk (NY) - IBM announced a new follow-on step to their January 29, 2007 announcement, that of a high-k/metal gate semiconductor process technology. Scheduled to be "available to IBM alliance members" in the second half of 2009, the new process has demonstrated working silicon at the 32nm process node, including SOI. IBM's partners in the project include AMD, Chartered, Freescale, Infineon, and Samsung. IBM's laboratory tests in East Fishkill, NY, have confirmed a 45% reduction in total power consumption using their new process, with lower operational voltages. They have indicated this equates to a 30% speedup potential for existing chip applications. IBM has demonstrated the first SRAM chips manufactured using this process on CMOS, containing a 0.15 um2 cell size (picture on left). They have also completed a similar SOI implementation which will be suitable for mass production of future multi-core processors. This newest process technology research is the industry's answer to Intel's hafnium based high-k/metal gate technology, which is currently in use in all 45nm products at Intel. Intel has claimed a 10x reduction in gate leakage and other power and performance improvements with their solution, culminating to approximately the same reduction in overall power--about 30%. IBM's solution announced today will not be available until the 32nm process node. This will come in the second half of 2009, though it is likely any commercial products based on the technology will not be out until 2010. IBM's partner, AMD, had mentioned previously during the Technology Analyst day conference call that they were still examining the possbility of incorporating a high-k/metal gate solution at the 45nm process node. Read more ... IBM's press release.

Katalyst Phone Works With T-Mobile's Home Wi-Fi Service

The Samsung cell phone also works with the carrier's HotSpot @Home Wi-Fi service and at T-Mobile Wi-Fi hotspots at about 8,500 locations nationwide.

By Elena Malykhina
InformationWeek
December 10, 2007 11:00 AM

T-Mobile on Monday began offering the Katalyst by Samsung, a new mobile phone that works with the carrier's HotSpot @Home Wi-Fi service.

The Katalyst -- model number SGH-t739 -- has built-in Wi-Fi technology and is designed specifically for T-Mobile HotSpot @Home service, which the carrier launched earlier this year. HotSpot @Home costs an extra $20 a month, and seamlessly switches subscribers back and forth between cell phone calls and calls made over Wi-Fi.

T-Mobile's Katalyst by Samsung is a new mobile phone that works with the carrier's HotSpot @Home Wi-Fi service.

Besides using home-based networks, subscribers can also make calls using T-Mobile Wi-Fi hotspots at about 8,500 locations nationwide that include popular venues like Starbucks.

The Katalyst is a new addition to T-Mobile's lineup of phones that support HotSpot @Home, such as the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 6086 and the Samsung SGH-t409.

"Since launching T-Mobile HotSpot @Home in June, we've worked closely with companies like Samsung to expand our selection of HotSpot phones. The Samsung Katalyst strikes a great balance of style and features with an affordable price, and gives customers who want the calling benefits of HotSpot @Home a great new handset choice," said Saj Sahay, director of product marketing at T-Mobile, in a statement.

The phone also comes with Bluetooth, a music player, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and instant-messaging capabilities with support for widely-used services like AOL,Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), and Windows Live Messenger. It has expandable memory with a microSD memory card slot.

One thing you won't find on this quad-band phone is built-in 3G cellular technology, since T-Mobile is still in the process of building out its 3G network, known as HSDPA. Instead, the Katalyst supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE, and consequently offers slower cellular data speeds than some competing phones.

The Katalyst costs $80 with a mail-in rebate and a two-year subscription to T-Mobile.

Microsoft bringing ads to mobile devices

Posted by Elinor Mills

Microsoft is set to launch mobile ads through its MSN Mobile portal.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is set to launch on Monday its first mobile advertising.

Going forward, people will be able to see mini banner ads optimized for their browser type and screen size on their mobile devices when they visit the MSN Mobile portal, which works on any mobile phone, said Phil Holden, director for online services for Microsoft.

The MSN Mobile portal offers news, information on weather and stocks, as well as movie reviews and listings. It also offers access to search, Hotmail, Messenger, and Windows Live Spaces.

MSN Mobile will also now enable users to buy movie tickets over the phone with a credit card and download background images and ringtones.

The initial advertisers are Bank of America, Paramount Pictures, and Jaguar.

Microsoft faces competition in the mobile ad space from Yahoo, Google, and smaller firms like Amobee--in which Vodafone and Spain's Telefonica have stakes--among many other companies.

Celebrity Gift Guide: Shopping for the Stars

AP

Angelina Jolie

Celebrity Gift Guide: Shopping for the Stars

It's not easy to shop for someone who has free designer clothing and jewelry thrown their way on a regular basis -- which is why FOXNews.com put together this handy guide for friends and family of the famous.

Angelina Jolie

She certainly doesn't need collagen filler for her famously kissable lips, but Angelina Jolie’s puffy pout could certainly benefit from Benefit Cosmetics' Lipscription, a $32 exfoliator and balm set. After all, kissing four kids good night and smooching Brad Pitt might put some strain on that million-dollar mouth.

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