Devin Krauter sits on the end of his bed, tapping buttons on his video game controller to shoot down alien beasts while chatting with other players through a headset, texting on his cell phone and talking to a visitor.

The 17-year-old high school junior is ranked by a video game Web site among the best players at “Gears of War 2,” in which soldiers attack the enemy with an assault rifle that has a mounted chain saw bayonet. He says the game teaches him to think on his feet — and that he thinks about succeeding, not slaying.

That intrigues Microsoft Corp.

The software company, which publishes “Gears of War,” is studying the reactions of avid gamers to see whether video gaming can promote learning skills that carry over to the classroom.

“We want to figure out what’s compelling about the games,” said John Nordlinger, head of gaming research for Microsoft. “If we can find out how to make the games fun and not make them so violent, that would be ideal.”

Microsoft has put up $1.5 million to start The Games for Learning Institute, a joint venture with New York University and other colleges. The goal of the research is to see whether video games — and not just software specifically designed to be educational — can draw students into math, science and technology-based programs. The institute has begun lining up middle school students to study.

Microsoft is the not the first to explore whether video games could enhance education. For instance, University of Wisconsin researchers have found that playing “World of Warcraft” can encourage scientific thinking. The researchers noticed that players used mathematics and models to deal with situations in the game’s fantasy world.

Even so, groups that monitor gaming say Microsoft’s entry into the research will bring needed money and credibility. Many studies so far have focused on educational games, not shooter games.

“There isn’t a lot of good research out there,” said Linda Burch, chief program and strategy officer for Common Sense Media.

Parents also want a closer look at potential long-term psychological and sociological effects on frequent game players.

“I would hope that the goal is to have video games that can help develop reaction and problem-solving skills, without blowing everything up in sight,” said Dave Walsh, president of National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis.

Microsoft chief researcher Craig Mundie said during a visit to the company’s Fargo campus that games could stimulate educational abilities by helping people develop “a higher-order cognitive capability.”

Many shooter games force players to track “how many bullets and bombs and missiles do I have, and how do I spend and where do I go get more of them,” Mundie said. In “Gears of War,” players must navigate underground tunnels and buildings, monitor weapons systems, gauge their health and find places to take cover.

The idea that there is broader educational value in such activities is sure to find skeptics.

Vince Repesh, a counselor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, said he fears that gaming is replacing education, not adding to it. He recalled a couple of students coming to him for help after they got hooked on “World of Warcraft.” One student had gone from straight As to flunking out.

“I accused him of coming in loaded from smoking dope, he looked so bad,” Repesh said. “Turns out he had been up for 28 hours straight playing the game.”

Shelby Cossette, 17, a junior, joined a new video gaming club at Fargo South High School. She wanted to meet other gamers and believes it’s a good complement to academics.

“I’ve played a lot of puzzle-solving games and they actually help sharpen my brain,” Cossette said. “My reaction time has actually gone up, thanks to playing video games.”

The club was started by English teacher Chuck Lang. He said he believes Microsoft is doing a good thing in researching the potential of games, even if it might benefit the company through increased sales.

“Why not spread this market out?” Lang said. “Why not promote something where kids are having fun?”

Source: Yahoo

Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network.

The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game.

The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years.

Microsoft is “investigating” the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live.

“There’s been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks,” said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications.

Attack tool

“The smart thing about these Xbox tools is that they do not attack the Xbox Live network itself,” he said.

He said the tools work by exploiting the way that the Xbox Live network is set up. Game consoles connecting to the Xbox network send data via the net, and for that it needs an IP address.

Even better, said Mr Boyd, games played via Xbox Live are not hosted on private servers.

“Instead,” he said, “a lot of games on Xbox Live are hosted by players.”

If hackers can discover the IP address of whoever is hosting a game they can employ many of the attacks that have been used for years against websites, said Mr Boyd.

One of the most popular for the Xbox Live specialists is the Denial of Service attack which floods an IP address with vast amounts of data.

The flood of data is generated by a group of hijacked home computers, a botnet, that have fallen under the control of a malicious hacking group.

When turned against a website this flood of traffic can overwhelm it or make it unresponsive to legitimate visitors.

When turned against an Xbox owner, it can mean they cannot connect to the Live network and effectively throws them out of the game.

“They get your IP address, put it in the booter tool and they attempt to flood the port that uses Xbox traffic,” said Mr Boyd. “Flooding that port prevents any traffic getting out.”

Skill set

The hard part, he said, was discovering a particular gamer’s IP address but many malicious hackers had honed the skills needed to find them.

Some interconnect their PC and Xbox and use packet sniffing software to hunt through the traffic flowing in and out of the console for IP addresses.

Others simply use con tricks to get the target to reveal their net address.

The technical knowledge needed to hunt down IP addresses was quite high, said Mr Boyd, but many of those who had the skills were selling their expertise to those keen to hit back at their rivals on the Xbox Live network.

For $20 (£13) some Xbox Live hackers will remotely access a customer’s PC and set up the whole system so it can be run any time they need it.

Some offer low rates to add compromised machines to a botnet and increase the amount of data flooding a particular IP address.

Defending against the attack could be tricky, said Mr Boyd: “There’s no real easy solution to this one.”

Although IP addresses regularly change, people could find it takes hours or days for their ISP to move them on to a new one.

In response to the rise in attacks, Microsoft said: “We are investigating reports involving the use of malicious software tools that an attacker could use to try and disrupt an Xbox LIVE player’s internet connection.”

It added: “This problem is not related to the Xbox Live service, but to the player’s internet connection. The attacker could also attempt [to] disrupt other internet activities, such as streaming video or web browsing, using the same tools.

In its statement Microsoft warned: “This malicious activity violates the Xbox Live Terms of Use, and will result in a ban from Xbox Live and other appropriate action.

It urged anyone falling victim to such an attack to contact their ISP to report it and get help fixing it.

In January 2009 Microsoft announced that Xbox Live had more than 17m members.

Source: BBC News

Yahoo is introducing a new type of search advertising that integrates images and video in paid listings, the company plans to announce Thursday.

Search advertising typically shows only text advertisements and links. Marketers usually devote part of their online budget to search — which shows text-only advertisements and links — and part to display, the banner and box advertisements that show images or video.

By introducing video and images, the new offering from Yahoo, called Rich Ads in Search, gives search some of the advantages of banner advertisements. “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, the vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo.

Yahoo has been trying to win back paid search advertising from the market leader, Google. Yahoo’s market share in paid search has fallen from 13.8 percent in 2004, to 10.5 percent this year, according to the research firm eMarketer. In the same time period, Google’s market share has more than doubled, from 32.8 percent in 2004, to 67.7 percent this year.

Yahoo’s strength has been its display advertising, where it sells boxes and banners on its highly trafficked pages. However, as the recession has deepened, many advertisers have shifted money to search, which gives them direct, measurable results.

Yahoo’s fourth-quarter results, reported in January, reflected that change. Search revenue was up 11 percent, and display revenue was down 2 percent.

Yahoo has been testing its offering with advertisers like the dog-food company Pedigree. A search for “Pedigree” on Yahoo turns up a light-blue box at the top of the search-results page holding an image from a Pedigree commercial, which plays when clicked.

“Video is always more powerful than just words on the page,” said John Anton, the marketing director at Pedigree. “It’s definitely compelling to us to have options like this, where, when you type in ‘Pedigree,’ you get more than just the words, you get the video itself.”

Yahoo can also include images — a search for Staples results in a similar light-blue box with the company’s logo on the side. Or, it can include a search box within the light-blue space, asking the visitor to enter his ZIP code, then taking him to the section of the advertiser’s Web site that lists bank branches or car dealerships near him, for example.

“What the search results look like is a very different experience with rich ads in search versus the text link,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s senior vice president for revenue and market development in the United States. “There is consistency to the experience, which all advertisers want, and were unable to get until this point.”

Yahoo is charging a monthly fee for the service, versus the auction-based pricing of search advertising, which Mr. Mayer said Yahoo might use in the future. For now, it is allowing only certain large, brand-focused advertisers — which have existing commercials or logos — to participate in the program. SoBe, Pepsi and Home Depot were all part of the pilot program.

According to Yahoo, some advertisers in the pilot program saw an improvement by as much as 25 percent in click-through rates. Karin Blake, the senior search manager at the ad agency Razorfish, who tested the offering for some of her clients, saw slightly less significant results: she said her clients had a 5 to 10 percent increase in click-through rates compared with a regular text ad.

Still, the new type of search will probably be attractive to advertisers, who pay high prices to develop their commercials and logos, and want to be able to show those wherever they can.

“In a typical search landscape, you can’t utilize things like video and images, just because the nature of search listings is really text,” Ms. Blake said. “It does allow Yahoo to sort of put together a more robust offering.”

Ms. Blake said that “right now, there isn’t anything in the paid search landscape that either Google or Microsoft is offering” along these lines.

Even as Yahoo updates its search capabilities, it has been under pressure from Wall Street analysts to consider selling its search business to Microsoft. Recently, Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, has repeatedly expressed interest in such a deal.

Carol A. Bartz, the new chief executive of Yahoo, has not specified her plans for Yahoo’s search business.

“Maybe we should divest of some things, maybe we ought to focus a little more on the company,” she said in a conference call last month with investors. “So, yes, everything’s on the table,”

But, she added, “this is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

Source: New York Times – By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Nintendo posted a 21 percent rise in operating profit for the October-December quarter, benefiting from strong holiday sales of its Wii game console and DS handheld game player and proving its resilience in the face of an economic slump.

But the video game maker cut its profit forecast for the year to March by a much larger-than-expected 16 percent while lowering its sales target for the Wii slightly, a move that could raise worries over its growth potential.

“It will be a major shock for Nintendo bulls out there if they are reducing Wii unit guidance because people expect this to go up,” said Hiroshi Kamide of KBC Securities.

Nintendo’s new operating profit forecast of 530 billion yen ($5.9 billion) for the year to March would still be a record figure, a sharp contrast to Sony, which is heading for its biggest operating loss on record and its first in 14 years.

Nintendo’s strategy to broaden the gaming population by offering innovative but easy-to-play games has been a roaring success, with the Wii far outselling Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360 since its debut in 2006.

Sony has been battered by falling prices and slumping demand for flat TVs and digital cameras, while also having to shoulder massive costs to close factories and cut jobs.

The maker of Bravia TVs and Cyber-shot cameras reiterated a forecast it unveiled last week for a record 260 billion yen ($2.9 billion) operating loss for the year to March, a big swing from the 475 billion yen profit logged a year earlier.

PILING INVENTORIES

As inventories pile up and prices tumble, Sony is feeling the pinch of the downturn in every corner of its operations, which range from semiconductors to movies and insurance.

“Demand does not seem to be getting any better from the fourth quarter (through March 31) on. We will press ahead with production and inventory adjustments,” Sony Senior Vice President Naofumi Hara told a news conference.

Sony reported an operating loss of 18 billion yen for the three months to December, down from a 236.2 billion yen profit a year earlier and joining other technology heavyweights such as Samsung in posting a quarterly loss.

Its TV business alone logged a quarterly operating loss of 43 billion yen, down from a 7 billion yen profit a year earlier.

Sony, which is planning to set up an LCD production joint venture with Sharp Corp, said they have postponed setting up the venture until March 2010, about a year later than originally scheduled, due to the global downturn.

October-December group operating profit at Nintendo rose to 249.2 billion from 205.3 billion yen a year earlier. The result was roughly in line with the average of 247.9 billion yen from four analysts surveyed by Reuters.

But Nintendo cut its full-year outlook by 100 billion yen to 530 billion yen, far below the market consensus of 604 billion yen in a poll of 18 analysts by Reuters Estimates.

Nintendo’s outlook has been tempered by a rising yen, which makes its consoles less competitive and cuts into the value of overseas earnings. It booked a foreign exchange-related loss of 174.2 billion yen in the nine months to December as a firmer yen decreased the value of Nintendo’s foreign currency-denominated assets in yen terms.

Nintendo cut its annual sales target for the Wii by 1 million units to 26.5 million units, while raising its forecast for the DS by 1 million to 31.5 million.

“The Wii is selling extremely well in Europe and the United States. But its Japan sales are falling short of our expectations,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters.

Prior to the announcements, shares in Sony closed up 4 percent at 1,909 yen while Nintendo rose 1.6 percent to 32,300 yen. The benchmark Nikkei average rose 1.8 percent.

Source: Yahoo! & Reuters

The number of visitors to online computer game websites grew 27 percent in the United States in 2008, reaching 86 million by the end of December, according to comScore figures released Wednesday.

The total amount of time people spent playing games online leapt 42 percent, with 4.9 percent of Internet activities devoted to play.

“It appears that online, ad-supported gaming is one of the activities that has benefited during this economic downturn,” said comScore director of gaming solutions Edward Hunter.

“Not only have consumers turned to outlets such as gaming to take their minds off the economy, but as they curtail their discretionary gaming-related purchases they are turning to free alternatives.”

Yahoo! Games was the most popular website in the category with visits climbing 20 percent to 19.5 million year-over-year. Videogame giant Electronic Arts ranked second with visits rising 21 percent to 15.4 million.

Disney Games was in third place with visits growing 13 percent to 13.4 million.

“Casual games are providing a really good alternative source of entertainment that is fun and free for people in a tough economic environment,” said Michelle Weaver, chief operating officer of EA’s POGO game website.

“We are seeing really strong growth. This was a pretty significant jump for the business.”

Approximately 37 percent of the time spent on US online play was spent at POGO, which offers more than 100 puzzle, word, board and other games in a social-networking community setting.

The display advertising market at game websites is a bright spot in a dark economy, with a 29 percent surge in the number of times ads are viewed, according to comScore.

“The growth in display ads in the online gaming category not only underscores the assertion that gamers are increasingly accepting of ad-supported games, but also that the advertising community is recognizing the value of this highly engaged audience,” said Hunter.

Free computer game play that is all the rage in South Korea has been taking hold in a US market dominated by videogames sold on packaged disks or by online subscriptions.

Seoul-based “free-to-play” computer game titan Nexon last year blasted into the US videogame arena with a “Combat Arms” online first-person shooter title. More than a million people registered to play in the first five months.

The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters, and Nexon plans to begin exploring incorporating advertising.

“Free-to-play is starting to catch on fast,” said Nexon America spokesman Min Kim. “As more people get into it, word of mouth is spreading. We are carving a space out for ourselves.”

California-based Electronic Arts has been investing in free play and is putting finishing touches on a “Battlefield Heroes” war game supported by in-game transactions instead of up-front purchase prices.

Personal computers have become a natural gaming forum as people spend massive amounts of time online at social websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Analysts say that startups and established game makers, including Japanese goliath Sony, are increasingly venturing into the free computer game market.

The free play model is tempting in a US market where packaged video games typically sell for 60 dollars each but has to compete with gamers devoted to consoles.

Source: Yahoo! & AFP

YouTube has started to dabble in downloadable videos, offering an new download option for President-elect Barack Obama’s ChangeDotGov channel on YouTube.

Some of the videos, particularly the “Weekly Address” series, now sport a “Click to download” link below the play button. Previously, all videos were offered as streaming videos that required an Internet connection while viewing.

Now, a simple click initiates the download, which results in an H.264 encoded .mp4 file that’s playable on computers as well as many portable media players like iPods, as well as video-capable mobile phones. It’s possible that the downloadable files are the same files that are used for media devices — like in the iPhone’s built-in YouTube app.

Although there have been third-party tools made by companies like RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK) More about RealNetworks for ripping YouTube video streams to files, the ChangeDotGov downloadable files appear to be the first downloads officially offered by YouTube.

Anywhere You Want It

Portability is the keyword here, and the new option lets viewers watch at times when they have no Internet connections.

“If you’ve got an iPhone, you’re online, but you don’t always have a good connection,” Phil Leigh, senior analyst for Inside Digital Media, told TechNewsWorld.

“It’s clearly a step towards portability, and I think they’ve made it clear they want to be available on all screens — they want to be on the computer, portable devices and the TV,” he added.

YouTube did not respond to TechNewsWorld inquiries about the new feature and future scope of downloadable videos on YouTube.

The big question is, will YouTube offer more downloadable user-generated videos in the future?

“It’s as certain as there are fleas on a yard dog,” Leigh said.

More Than Portability

In addition to portability, downloadable videos may make YouTube easier to use and share — for instance, if a user finds a great video and doesn’t bookmark it or save the URL, it can be hard to find again. Similarly, a great video could get downloaded to an iPod and shared at a moment’s notice. Heck, it could even be taken camping.

Portability does bring up other pesky questions, however. How will copyright and usage issues be handled? Will any sort of advertising ever be attached to the videos? Will YouTube lose control of a video that could be posted and shared on a non-YouTube site? What will the number of views mean if a certain number has been downloaded instead of streamed?

How’s the Quality?

A quick test of a downloadable file’s playback quality showed a smaller viewable window than the default YouTube video size shown in Safari on Mac OS X — but it was much sharper with a richer image. Plus, the video was easier to manipulate — viewed with QuickTime More about QuickTime, it was easy to move the video around the desktop without moving a full browser page.

Compared to the streaming HD version, the downloadable version was obviously smaller and produced a lousy image when taken to full-screen mode on a MacBook — as expected, with similar results likely for PCs. The file was 4 minutes long and came in at 13.6 MB.

Source: TechNewsWorld – By Chris Maxcer

It says the Vatican TV Center and Vatican Radio are collaborating with Google on the project.

The Vatican’s press office said Saturday that texts and video of the pope’s speeches as well as news about the pontiff would be posted directly onto the channel.

It says more information will be given next week.

The Vatican began using its Web site widely to publish teachings and pronouncements under the late Pope John Paul II.

Source: Yahoo! & (AP)

The movie rental company has partnered with Sonic Solutions to offer more than 10,000 movies for rent and sale to a variety of PCs, cell phones, portable media players, Internet-connected televisions, and Blu-ray disc players. The collection of offerings will be a combination of titles from Blockbuster and CinemaNow, a movie downloading service Sonic recently purchased.“Blockbuster is a ubiquitous entertainment presence in the physical world. Through this alliance with Sonic, we plan to become a ubiquitous presence in the digital world as well,” Jim Keyes, Blockbuster’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “Our goal is to offer consumers the most digital content, the most accessibility, via the most devices, both in and out of home.”

The partnership is Blockbuster’s latest attempt to match Netflix, which has expanded past its DVD-by-mail service to offer movie streaming on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console, Blu-ray players, and TiVo digital video recorders. In November, Blockbuster introduced the MediaPoint player, a set-top box that–like Netflix’s Roku–offers on-demand content to a user’s TV.

Blockbuster plans initially to sell or rent videos on a pay-per-view service, but the movie rental chain said it was considering offering a subscription plan for unlimited access to Blockbuster’s digital library.

Netflix already provides a free Web streaming service to customers who are signed up for a monthly subscription that costs at least $8.99.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Steven Musil

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – An Internet fantasy universe teeming with faux worlds devoted to socializing and video games is expanding to include virtual classrooms and universities.

A new trend in online education involves students acting through animated characters called “avatars” mingling in simulated school settings and even rocketing off, via the Internet, on quests for knowledge.

San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley has built a campus at Second Life, the popular virtual world created by Linden Lab in San Francisco.

The virtual university spans 16 digital acres dotted with school buildings that Library Sciences Department students use for classes and experiments.

“When I teach with Second Life, I think of it as an experience generator,” university professor Jeremy Kemp told AFP.

“I can send a student in to have an experience in an unstructured environment, and then come out and have a conversation about it.”

Thirty students signed-up for Kemp’s 15-week virtual-world class, which includes learning about the application driving the Second Life program.

“I ask them to volunteer on (an in-world) reference desk, or take a tour of Second Life with snapshots,” he said. “Students can even design a library program with a speaker and invite the public.”

Kemp is trying to simulate real world experiences by building virtual buildings and audiences so students can learn in realistic, but safe and controlled, settings.

“We’re experimenting with using Second Life to prep students to face the terror of public speaking,” Kemp said. “That’s very difficult to do in any other way.”

While Kemp’s class simulations are unconventional, industry analysts say his methods are not unique.

“Second Life is just one of those technologies that allow you to have a more robust classroom experience,” said Sloan Consortium survey director Jeff Seaman, who researches education trends.

The catch, according to Seaman, is that while teachers are interested in this technology, it is a challenge finding constructive ways to use it.

“I know schools that bought their own land in Second Life to figure out what it was, but never used it,” Seaman told AFP.

The University of Phoenix specializes in long-distance learning in the United States and is among schools that invested in virtual property without developing it, according to Provost Adam Honea.

“It’s not that we don’t think Second Life is good, it’s that we can’t fit what we’ve already done into it,” Honea said.

Instead, the University of Pheonix has created its own immersive environments, such as a fictitious company websites that contain realistic documents for business students to analyze.

“Most of our systems are proprietary, so it’s easier for us to create our own immersive environments than to use commercial products,” Honea said.

Only a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million people in the United States that took online classes last year did so in virtual worlds, according to the Sloan Consortium.

“I think that it is going to take plenty of time for groups and communities to realize the affordances and limitations of Second Life,” said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley school of information.

The University of California at Berkeley doesn’t have a Second Life campus, but it makes some courses available via webcasts and podcasts, enabling students to stream lectures to their computers or listen on iPods or other MP3 players.

The pace of academic institutions moving into virtual worlds such as Second Life promises to build as students growing up with the technology become educators themselves, according to Kemp.

“This is an adolescent technology that’s lurching and pushing in different directions and getting a sense of itself,” he said.

“The things we’re learning from Second Life will eventually help distance educators do their work. It’s very promising.”

Yahoo!