Gijit on vacation

The Gijit team is taking a break for a week. We'll post sporadically but rest assured, from August 31st forward we'll be back and working harder than ever!


- The Gijit Team

In Battle of Consoles, Nintendo Gains Allies

In the competition among the makers of video game consoles, momentum is building for the Wii from Nintendo among its crucial allies: game developers and publishers.

Inspired by the early success of the Wii, the companies that create and distribute games are beginning to shift resources and personnel toward building more Wii games, in some cases at the expense of the competing systems: the PlayStation 3 from Sony and Xbox 360 from Microsoft.

The shift is closely watched because consumers tend to favor systems that have many compelling games. More resources diverted to the Wii would mean more games, and that would translate into more consumers buying Wii consoles later. | Read full article

Google Offers to Run Site Search Engines

Google expands its enterprise solutions business with search tool for small to medium sized businesses.

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From The New York Times - Google Inc. is offering to run the search engines of small Web sites for as little as $100 per year, marking the company's latest attempt to make more money off technology that already steers much of the Internet's traffic.

The service scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday is aimed at the millions of Web sites that either don't have search engines or are unhappy with the quality of their current search results, said Nitin Mangtani, a Google product manager.

The price for Google's ''Custom Search Business Edition'' will start at $100 annhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifually to sift through up to 5,000 Web pages. Larger Web sites can pay Google $500 annually to search up to 50,000 Web pages.

That's a significant discount from the fees that Google has been charging for scaled-down versions of its Internet-leading search engine. The price for the so-called Google ''Mini'' -- a combination of hardware and software introduced more than two years ago -- starts at $1,995. More sophisticated iterations of Google's search engine cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. |

Sony to launch cheaper PlayStation Portable

From Scientific American - Sony Corp. will launch a cheaper, slimmer version of its PlayStation Portable handheld game player in an effort to better compete with Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s hot-selling DS.

Japanese electronics maker Sony said on Tuesday it will launch the new PSP in Japan on September 20.

Both Sony and Nintendo released their handheld gear, the PSP and DS, respectively, late in 2004. But sales of the PSP, which can play movies, music and games, have recently been outshone by the DS.

The new PSP will sell for 19,800 yen ($162), 5 percent less than the current model, which has been sold for 20,790 yen. It compares with 16,800 yen for Nintendo's DS Lite, the lighter version of the DS. | Read full article

Radio Looks To Politics, Web For Relief

From Scientific American - With 2007 poised to be its seventh straight year of slow to no growth, the $20 billion U.S. radio industry hopes to break the trend with political advertising and revenues from nontraditional sources in 2008.

"I think it would be shortsighted to view the industry as hopeless," said Barrington Research analyst James Goss, noting that, despite slow growth and the "challenged" radio environment, these companies are strong cash generators.

"Chances are 2008 will be better due to Internet dollars or nontraditional revenues and political dollars."

While revenue from Web sites, concert promotions and other nontraditional areas amount to less than 10 percent of the total radio industry revenue base, it has grown steadily over the past few years as the rest of the industry lagged in the face of increased competition from iPods, the Web, music- playing cellphones and other entertainment devices.

Radio industry officials believe these revenue sources will contribute more over time. | Read full article

Broadband and Household Income Go Hand-In-Hand

From The Center For Media Research - New consumer research, Broadband Access and Service in the Home 2007, from Leichtman Research Group, finds that 53% of all US households now subscribe to a broadband high-speed Internet service at home. Broadband services now account for about 72% of all home Internet subscriptions, compared to 60% last year.

While broadband subscriptions continued to increase across the country in the past year, broadband penetration remains strongly correlated with household income. | Read full article

SunRocket Users May Lose Service and Payments

From The New York Times - Telephone service could be lost for more than 200,000 customers of SunRocket, an Internet telephone company that said on Tuesday that it had gone out of business, according to a person involved in its liquidation.

The customers also could lose money paid in advance to SunRocket, which offered unlimited telephone service for a year for an upfront payment of $199, said Martin D. Pichinson, co-founder of Sherwood Partners, which signed a contract on Tuesday to handle the distribution of assets to creditors.

Mr. Pichinson said the first priority would be to make sure customers were made whole, by moving their phone lines to other providers. But he said that negotiations with other providers had not yet borne fruit. | Read full article

Related article: Internet Phone Company Halts Operations

EU Backs Nokia-Led Mobile TV Standard

From The New York Times - The European Commission backed a Nokia-led mobile television broadcasting standard on Wednesday in a move that could spur growth in the fledgling but potentially lucrative sector.

The lack of a single technology has held back wider take-up for television on cell phones and the EU's support for digital video broadcast handheld (DVB-H) could be the decisive factor in the battle to establish a global standard.

The Commission said on its Web site that DVB-H "appears to be the strongest contender for future mobile TV deployment in Europe" and is already the most popular standard in Europe.

"The Commission therefore considers that DVB-H will form the basis for successful introduction and take-up of terrestrial mobile TV services in the EU," it said. | Read full article

Podcasting Real Estate in Europe and Asia

From The New York Times - House and apartment listings that are read aloud so they can be loaded onto an iPod player for the morning commute; video tours of faraway villas, accessible with the click of a mouse. Video and audio file-sharing, technologies already so popular for entertainment and communications, are giving real estate buyers and sellers a variety of new tools for finding and marketing properties.

It is in American real estate that the sharing of audio and video files over the Internet has caught on most quickly — with video tours of homes now widely available — but property markets in the rest of the world also are beginning to embrace the idea. | Read full article

Google to Expand Program, Giving Newspapers a Lift

From The New York Times - NEWSPAPERS reeling from major losses of advertising revenue to the Internet are getting a lift from the company that helped lure advertisers away: Google.

Google plans to announce today a significant expansion of its Print Ads program, in which advertisers purchase ads in newspapers through the Web. The company introduced a limited test program last November in which 50 newspapers sold ads to 100 selected advertisers through Google’s computer system.

But now, more than 225 newspapers are participating, and hundreds of thousands of Google advertisers on the company’s main advertising system, AdWords, are eligible to buy ads from those papers. | Read full article