Nintendo confirms, no Blu-ray or DVD compatibility for Wii U games
Nintendo has made it official, Wii U games will be on a proprietary disc that is not Blu-ray or DVD.
The confirmation comes via Nintendo president Satoru Iwata following a week of confusion and speculation as to exactly what Wii U games would be published on.
In explaining the move, Iwata says:
We feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such that it didn’t warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies.
Furthermore, the Wii U will go “social,” says Iwata (via TR):
After examining the penetration and adoption rate of social networking services like Facebook, etc, we’ve come to the conclusion that we are no longer in a period where we cannot have any connection at all with social networking services.
Rather, I think we’ve come to an era where it’s important to consider how the social graph of the social networking services can work in conjunction with something like a video game platform.
Apple will defend developers against ‘patent troll’ Lodsys
Apple has stepped up to the plate and will put some of its $60 billion in cash to work defending app developers being attacked by “patent troll” company Lodsys.
In May, Lodsys began sending letters to app developers demanding a 0.575 percent cut of all revenue, due to the fact that they own a patent relating to in-app purchases.
Apple has now filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the developers, which may have not had the resources for a court battle. Apple has also filed a counterclaim against Lodsys, saying itself and all developers can use the tech.
Cupertino mayor shows love for new Apple ‘Spaceship’ building
The Cupertino mayor has said this week that there is little to no chance that city officials will reject Apple’s plans to build a new 3.1 million square foot “Spaceship” campus.
Says the mayor: “There is no chance that we’re saying no.”
Jobs appeared before the city council earlier in the week to show off plans for the new campus that will hold 12,000 employees.
The plans will first have to pass environmental checks and pass a public hearing (likely in 2012). Jobs wants to complete the Spaceship by 2015.
Adds Mayor Wong:
In my mind, one of the city council’s most important challenges and accomplishments has been to make sure that companies like apple can grow and thrive. While other cities are struggling … we can grow.
The building will be four stories, be circular in shape and have a large 150-acre interior courtyard. Apple’s new architecture will be in addition to the company’s main campus.
Nokia worth 52 percent more if broken up
Bloomberg has reported this weekend that Nokia has lost so much value over the past few years that its stock is now worth 50 percent less than if the company was sold and broken up.
At its peak, Nokia was worth $300 billion before Apple and Google introduced their smartphone operating systems but is now worth just over $25 billion.
If you were to separate its mobile, infrastructure equipment, mapping software and accounting businesses, Bloomberg says the company would be worth $39 billion, based on current comparable valuations of patents.
There has been speculation that Microsoft is willing to buy Nokia’s mobile phone business, but Nokia has denied the rumors.
Nokia’s stock currently trades at $6.65 per share, the lowest it has since 1998.
U.S. will treat cyber-attacks as act of war
The Pentagon is set to publish a report on measures to tackle and respond to cyber warfare.
A cyber-attack last month targeting U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin has hastened the Pentagon’s steps on the cyber-warfare plans. A report, due in a matter of weeks, is expected to deem cyber-attacks as an act of war, and to suggest whatever measures necessary to defend the country’s infrastructure.
“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.
Areas of great concern include the already-strained power grid in the U.S., or systems that emergency response networks rely on. Attacks against systems particularly in urban areas could have devastating consequences for the civilian populations in the worst case.
“We reserve the right to use all necessary means - diplomatic, informational, military, and economic - as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests,” states a White House statement put out on May 16.
The United States is not alone in its feelings toward cyber-warfare either.
In 2007, the nation of Estonia came under a heavy denial of service attack in a dispute over the movement of a Soviet-era war monument. The attacks, believed to have come from Russia (though the Kremlin stresses there was no official involvement), targeted the government and financial services of the state, with harsh consequences for citizens in a country that relies heavily on digital transactions and other electronic services.
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Twitter prepared to introduce photo-sharing service?
Twitter may be ready to introduce its own photo-sharing service as early as this week, say multiple reports.
The service will be announced tomorrow at the D9 Conference in California, with CEO Dick Costolo as keynote speaker.
Currently, there are a number of competing photo services for Twitter, with the most popular being TwitPic, Lockerz and Yfrog.
The new service shouldn’t be anything too mind blowing, but will be likely integrated into Twitter’s official Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Web apps/sites.
Twitter recently acquired popular client TweetDeck for $40 million.
Nvidia 3D Vision videos now on YouTube
NVIDIA announces YouTube is giving users the ability to view thousands of 3D videos on their NVIDIA 3D Vision PCs and notebooks.
The videos will work with the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. “We’re excited to introduce HTML5 and WebM support to the thousands of 3D videos available on YouTube,” said Jonathan Huang, 3D Product Manager at YouTube. “By embracing these open standards, NVIDIA 3D Vision users now have a great way of experiencing YouTube’s library of 3D content.”
With the growth of 3D camcorders for the consumer market, the amount of content that can be created by consumers and uploaded to sites such as YouTube has risen. YouTube’s support of NVIDIA 3D Vision technology extends its existing commitment to 3D, enabling even more consumers and 3D enthusiasts to share their 3D videos online.
“Firefox with 3D Vision creates a stunning and smooth 3D video experience using HTML5 video based on open standards,” said Jay Sullivan, VP of Products at Mozilla. “3D Vision from NVIDIA is a great example of the rich, innovative experiences that are being built on top of the speed and graphics power that Firefox delivers to the Web.”
To further showcase the new YouTube stereoscopic 3D video streaming capabilities and some of the latest professional and user-generated 3D YouTube videos, NVIDIA is now hosting the top YouTube stereoscopic 3D videos on its 3D web community site at www.3DVisionLive.com/YT3D.
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YouTube turns six - three billion video views per day
YouTube has just turned six years old, and has more milestones to report to the world on its relentless growth.
Founded in 2005, YouTube’s ease of use and potential has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the service. The idea that a video in almost any format could be uploaded by the user, and then converted and provided on its own YouTube page (and could be embedded anywhere else) attracted drones of people to the service.
That growth only seems to accelerate for YouTube, which is now reporting that over 48 hours of video is uploaded to the site every single minute. So in just one minute, two whole days of video content has been added to YouTube’s incredibly vast digital vaults.
To compare that to last year, it represents a 100% increase in the amount of content being uploaded at any given time.
All of that content needs viewers to have any purpose on the video sharing giant, and YouTube is now reporting that it delivers 3 billion video views every single day.
Now YouTube is challenging its users to keep up the momentum , so that it can one day in the near future reach 72 hours of video footage per minute, and 4 billion daily views. To help this, the service is constantly making improvements to aid content creators and to provide its service on as many platforms as possible.
Skype founder Zennstrom predicts success for Microsoft
Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
Twitter completes purchase of TweetDeck
Twitter has completed their acquisition of TweetDeck, one of the most popular clients for the microblogging service.
The purchase ended for just over $40 million in cash and stock with the closing papers signed today.
TweetDeck had been previously linked to UberMedia, who was looking to purchase the client for $30 million and had an exclusive negotiating window that ran out. Uber has the top Twitter app for BlackBerry (UberSocial) and the “highest rated” Twitter app for Android, Twidroyd and has been allegedly cooking up a plan for a “Twitter killing” service.
As arguably the best Twitter client around (and accounting for 13 percent of all tweets sent on a daily basis), TweetDeck is a hot commodity for the microblogging platform and remains the top app for “power users,” those who tweet many times per day from many different devices.
TweetDeck also allows users to connect their LinkedIn and Facebook platforms to one app.
