Computer News

“We like to hear people scream at us. Unfortunately, it has been a long while since anyone’s actually done it. To compensate, the editors of all three IGN Editorial offices (US, UK, and Australia) got together and decided that it was time to revisit one of the most controversial topics in our business…

The Top 100 Games of All Time!”

Click here to see IGN’s Top 100 Games Of All Time.

In the most shocking and important news of the year publishers Activision and Vivendi have merged, dethroning Electronic Arts as the world’s biggest games publisher.

The shock power-shifting deal is worth $18.9 billion and sees the two form into Activision Blizzard, ‘the world’s largest pure-play online and console game publisher’.

This deal comes a few weeks after EA’s boss said there would be no more big mergers in the industry.

You can see straight away from the name then that Activision’s motives are clearly for the World of Warcraft cash bounty, while Vivendi’s other IP’s include Crash, Spyro, F.E.A.R. and Timeshift. Activison of course is the owner of the massive Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises, developer Bizarre Creation and film licenses such as Spider-Man and James Bond.

The goliath company will also have access to Blizzard’s stellar properties Diablo and StarCraft.

Activision Blizzard says it expects to make around 70 percent of its revenues from its library of IP-based franchises, boasting that it has “the most diversified and broadest portfolio of interactive entertainment assets in its industry”.

Jean-Bernard Levy, CEO of Vivendi said: “This alliance is a major strategic step for Vivendi and is another illustration of our drive to extend our presence in the entertainment sector.

By combining Vivendi’s games business with Activision, we are creating a worldwide leader in a high-growth industry. We are excited about the opportunities for Activision Blizzard as a broader entertainment software platform.”

Robert Kotick, Activision’s chairman and CEO added: “This is an outstanding transaction for Activision and our stockholders, as well as a pivotal event in the continuing transformation of the interactive entertainment industry. By combining leaders in mass-market entertainment and subscription-based online games, Activision Blizzard will be the only publisher with leading market positions across all categories of the rapidly growing interactive entertainment software industry and reach the broadest possible audiences.”

Well, bloody hell then. This really has been a shocking year for the games industry, hasn’t it? Peter Moore and Ken Kuturagi jump ship, Bungie leaves MS, GTA slips… we don’t know how much more our heart can take.

We can only see this move as a good thing for gamers though. The increased competition will surely keep EA on its toes and perhaps we’ll see less lazy franchise updates from both companies from now on. We hope so, anyway.

Source: CVG

Yahoo! and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo’s ad serving system and then monitor the performance through Yahoo!’s system. Publishers take a cut of the revenue from each click on the ads and Yahoo will split its share of the revenue per click with Adobe.

The service gives PDF publishers access to Yahoo’s network of advertisers and allows them to make money off the content without having their own sales force or having to do the ad insertion themselves, says Josh Jacobs, vice president of publisher solutions at Yahoo.

Publishers participating in the beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, which moved to a Web-only format earlier this year, as well as Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier.

Source: CNET News

Microsoft Corp. is raising its Silverlight rich-media delivery software to a new level — in name, at least. Instead of calling the next release of the cross-platform browser plug-in Version 1.1, as previously planned, Microsoft will bestow a Version 2.0 name on the upgrade, according to a blog posting today by Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the company’s developer division.

Microsoft had already released an alpha version of Silverlight 1.1. But Guthrie wrote, “After stepping back and looking at all the new features in it, we’ve realized that calling it a point release doesn’t really reflect the true nature of it.”

Guthrie said in the posting that Microsoft plans to release a beta version of Silverlight 2.0 in next year’s first quarter. The beta code will include a go-live license, enabling programmers to immediately create and deploy applications based on Silverlight 2.0.

Since launching Silverlight last spring, Microsoft has focused much of its marketing efforts on potential uses of the software for streaming content on consumer-facing Web sites.

But Silverlight 2.0 could hold far more relevance for corporate users, because it will include a subset of the .Net Framework, Microsoft’s underlying software development platform. That will enable Microsoft’s vast community of third-party developers to use familiar tools like Visual Studio to create so-called rich Internet applications for delivery via Silverlight within multiple browsers, according to Guthrie.

In his blog posting, Guthrie discussed some of the new features planned for Version 2.0, including support for higher-level components of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation user interface framework. He said the upgrade will also add new layout management and data manipulation controls for developers, support for a variety of communication protocols and a base class library of .Net functionality.

In addition, Guthrie said that Microsoft plans to release a free update of Visual Studio 2008 with support for Silverlight 2.0.

A Microsoft spokesman said the company wouldn’t comment on the Silverlight plans beyond Guthrie’s blog posting.

Source: Computerworld

Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system is about to get faster and Windows Vista isn’t, according to a report that caused a stir online this week as industry watchers speculated that a zippier XP could keep customers from upgrading to Vista.

Microsoft, however, said it’s too early to evaluate the two service packs it plans to release next year.

Early versions are already in the hands of testers like Devil Mountain Software Inc., which helps big financial services companies track trading-floor computer performance.

Wellington, Fla.-based Devil Mountain Software ran several versions of XP and Vista through a test simulating common desktop computing tasks. It found the original Vista performed 50 percent to 100 percent slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

Vista SP1, due out in the first quarter of 2008, barely improved the operating system’s performance.

But XP SP3, scheduled for the first half of 2008, did improve on XP’s earlier performance, running 10 percent faster than SP2.

That’s a strike against Vista for IT professionals on the fence about switching, according to Craig Barth, the company’s chief technology officer.

Kevin Kutz, director of Microsoft’s Windows Client group, said the company is working on speeding up tasks like moving files between PCs, but it’s a work in progress.

Michael Cherry, an analyst for research group Directions on Microsoft, said it’s impossible to say if Microsoft has started tuning Vista SP1 for speed. Even if XP gets faster, consumers and businesses may still switch to Vista.

“It might be an acceptable thing to me if it were slightly slower but more stable,” Cherry said.

Benjamin Gray, an analyst for Forrester Research, said businesses will upgrade to Vista regardless, to “stay current with Microsoft’s support life cycle.”

Source: Yahoo! News