Piper Jaffray analyst Anthony Gikas and associate Stephanie Wissink have just released their latest overview of the gaming industry for investors, which shows the Xbox 360 leading the next-gen console war through at least 2008.
The report projects that the Xbox 360 will lead console sales with 19.6 million units sold through the end of 2008, [...]

Tim Chen, chief executive for Microsoft in China, told a group at a business forum in Shanghai that Microsoft hope to launch the Xbox 360 in China in 2006.

Microsoft has planned rollout to target the three largest gaming regions at the end of this year, with launches in North America on November 22nd, Europe on December 2nd and Japan on December 10th. This announcement adds mainland China to the list of countries expecting the 360 in 2006, which includes, Australia, Colombia, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

Tiger Telematics recently filed its 10k (annual report) with the SEC and is planning on filing its 10Q (quarterly report) shortly to remain up to date. After the company files its 10Q on time, it will be able its stock to trade on the NASDAQ, if approved. According to Tiger’s press release, the [...]

BitTorrent, one of the better known programs for downloading free files, has raised $8.75 million in venture funding in an attempt to “go legit”.
While BitTorrent is widely popular among swappers of videos, cd-rips, and images of installation disks, it was not designed to specifically download illegal content as organizations like the RIAA and [...]

Tiger Telematics, maker of the Gizmondo, filed its annual report with the SEC showing a loss of $210 million in the first six months of 2005. The company attributes this loss to a large investment into the release of the new versions of the Gizmondo and marketing expenses.
However, with total losses of more than [...]

Google, Yahoo and MSN continue to trade claims about which search engines covers more web pages. Last month, Yahoo claimed it had grown to more than 20 billion pages in its index. To trump that, Google announced on its seventh birthday that it now covers three times as many pages as any search other engine.

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Do users even care how many pages are in a search engine? Not at all! Users care about finding the information they need quickly.

Openwave Systems has acquired Musiwave for euro 99.5 million with an additional euro 15 million payable if the division meets certain targets.

Musicwave, which provides entertainment services to mobile operators, will help to fill out Openwave’s software and service product lines. Link to full press release.

The Korean Association of Game Operators (KAGO) has been created to create standards in the services offered by game operators. KAGO was formed by a group of Korean online game publishers, the Korean Ministry of Information and Communications and the Korea IT Information Promotion Agency.
This new effort formalizes much of the work of the [...]

New research from OneStat.com shows that Google is still the largest internet search engine in terms of usage, but MSN Search begins gain share, even if slightly.
In the past eight months, Google’s market share has slipped slightly from 57.2% to 56.9% of total global usage. During that same time, MSN Search usage increased from [...]

U.S. District Judge John Schabaz threw out a lawsuit brought by Associated Bank-Corp against Earthlink for identifying the bank’s site as a “potentially fraudulent” and advising users to “not continue to use this potentially risky site”.
We raised the possibility of sites and businesses being negatively affected by errors in the new anti-phishing toolbar from Microsoft. [...]

This is high from the rumor stack, but we knew you would want to hear it.

Best Buy began taking pre-orders for Halo 3 today for $59.99 and sets the launch date for May 15th, 2006. Microsoft will not confirm this date, and previous comments from Microsoft on Halo 3’s release placed it on the date of the PS3 launch. In addition, recent rumors on Halo 3 have placed the games release closer to the of the Halo movie.

Did Best Buy jump the gun and release the product page, as we have all seen retailers do in the past? We will have to wait and see. If this May 2006 date holds true for the release, perhaps gamers will see a fourth version released to coincide with the movie.

A press event scheduled in San Francisco for Monday will see Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Palm CEO Ed Colligan Verizon Wireless President and CEO Denny Strigl make an announcement. Representatives for the three companies have declined to comment on the news, but analysts see only one possible possibility – the long-anticipated arrival of the [...]

Alabama’s growing technology base, skilled labor force, low cost of doing business, lucrative state and local incentives and friendly environment has drawn numerous automotive companies into the state. These same traits are now beginning to cause a tremendous expansion in Alabama’s aerospace and defense industries.
Northrop Grumman, known as a world leading defense company, currently [...]

New research from TNS shows that mobile users across the world want one thing from device manufactures – better battery life. Consumers are definitely interested in converging devices and new features, but as we pointed out with phones capable of playing music, consumers will not accept these new features at the expense of battery life.

TNS asked 7,000 mobile users in 15 countries regarding their preferences for device capabilities and features. Over 75% of respondents said better battery life is the main feature they want from phones, PDAs and similar devices.

For converged devices (with a phone), the top required feature in 14 of the 15 was “two days of battery life during active use”. In China, the 15th country, respondents most requested “20 Gigabytes of memory” as the key feature in the future. Along the same lines, battery life was listed as one of the top reasons “consumers do not use games, music, and TV applications on their mobile more frequently”.

Carl Geppert, the Communications & Media National Sector Leader for KPMG, gives a great overview of the growing problem of billing and tracking for carriers as sales of mobile content increase in a new article.
Carriers setup their internal tracking systems to handle consumers’ usage of one type of product – voice minutes. To a [...]