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Trion World Network just announced it has raised $70 million for its server-based online games. TWN creates massively multiplayer online games that run almost entirely on the Internet with little/no PC component download. This is different from games like World of Warcraft–or pretty much every other MMO that require you to download some component.

Trion doesn’t yet have any products out the door yet so investors are clearly betting on the technology and the business relationships the company has already established with the Sci Fi Channel and others.

Via VentureBeat

I’m a huge believer in the idea that you can have high-quality gaming experiences in the browser. Casual gaming has proven that people are willing to play browser-based games and the value chain just needs to catch up with more hard-core experiences. Add in subscription fees and other monetization efforts and all of the sudden you have real business.

In conjunction with the iTunes update, Apple also released an update to Front Row, its media application for that allows users to access music, movies, and TV shows in one place, although the company did not detail the update.

The update comes on the heels of Apple’s unveiling earlier Wednesday of a new iPod Shuffle. The new device, which is smaller than a AA battery, adds a new VoiceOver feature that can recite song titles, artists, and playlist names, as well as provide status information, such as battery life. Apple claims the gadget’s battery life clocks in at 10 hours.

Apple released an update to its iTunes music management software on Wednesday, adding a host of enhancements as well as support for a new line of
iPod Shuffles it released earlier in the day.

•  Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.


•  Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.


•  Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs.


•  Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods.


•  Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls.

In addition to some security fixes, iTunes 8.1 adds new features to Genius–a feature that lets you put songs together in your library that somehow “go great together”–and support for CD imports to iTunes Plus.

Among the other enhancements Apple made:

“We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last,” the report read, “since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the new source of news and events.”

The other categories were “news” (3.6 percent), “spam” (also lower than I’d expect, at 3.75 percent), and “pass-along value” (8.7 percent). Granted, sometimes there’s plenty of gray area (is linking to a blog post you wrote “pass-along value” or “self-promotion”? shouldn’t tweeting about breakfast too often be considered spam?) but it’s pretty cool regardless.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public timeline, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would be much tougher to analyze.)

Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter–or tweets, as they’re called–can be classified as “pointless babble,” according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was “conversational,” which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

That might be a bit of a buzzkill for Twitter’s team, which is pretty vocal about wanting the service to be a ubiquitous communication standard. Regardless, the news about the relatively low levels of spam is interesting–for some perspective, about 90 percent of e-mail is spam.

There’s some interesting stuff in there. Despite some Twitter critics’ insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 percent of tweets as “self promotion.”

To do so, subscribers will need to use the “Custom RSS Feeds” option in the “Browse Web Videos” menu. That option will allow them to input a show’s RSS feed with their remote. If it’s a valid link, they can decide to watch a single episode or subscribe to the feed through Season Pass. They can also watch past episodes.

TiVo announced Wednesday that it has added hundreds of free Web videos to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL DVRs. Also, subscribers who are interested in watching video podcasts that they can’t find through TiVo’s listing can enter RSS feeds manually to watch the show on their TiVo box.

TiVo’s new Web videos and the option to add custom RSS feeds are available now to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL owners.

Starting Wednesday, subscribers will be able to watch free video podcasts from several providers, including CBS, Fox, Oprah, and more. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) They can watch a single episode or subscribe to all the podcast’s shows by opting for a season pass.

To maximize the amount of content available to its subscribers, TiVo has provided show producers with guidelines for getting their Web videos ready for the DVR. The shows must be made available through RSS (RSS 2.0 is preferred). The video must also be in H.264 format.

TiVo’s inclusion of more video podcasts follows a long line of upgrades the company has made to its platform over the past year. In October, TiVo announced that Netflix streaming was coming to its DVRs. HD content from Amazon’s Video on Demand service was added earlier this year. The company even announced plans to bring Blockbuster Video on Demand to subscribers. Now, TiVo subscribers can supplement all that professional content with thousands of Web shows that they might already be enjoying on competing products, like the Apple TV.

TiVo also announced that it will allow users to input video podcast RSS feeds to watch those shows that they can’t find on their TiVo Web Video listing.

“We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” Microsoft spokesperson Kevin Kutz said in a statement.

Microsoft said it was disappointed in the ruling and that it would appeal the verdict.

Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML,” according to a statement released by attorneys for the plantiff, i4i.

Updated at 9:20 a.m. PDT with comment from Microsoft.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Microsoft was also ordered to pay an additional $40 million for willful infringement, as well as $37 million in prejudgment interest. The order requires Microsoft to comply with the injunction within 60 days and forbids Microsoft from testing, demonstrating, or marketing Word products containing the contested XML feature.

However, it’s unlikely Microsoft will take one of its biggest money-makers off the market. The injunction gives Redmond two months to pursue an appeal, craft a settlement, or implement a technical workaround that removes the technology found to be infringing.

In May, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the custom XML tagging features of Word 2003 and Word 2007 infringed on i4i’s patent and ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million in the case.

A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.

Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the Redmond,Wash.-based software giant violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.

XML–an integral feature in Microsoft Word–is considered a “page description language,” with one of its key qualities being that it is readable by people, not just machines. Unlike HTML, which has predefined tags, XML allows developers and users to define their own tags for data, such as price and product.

Companies have long reserved the right to monitor or restrict Web surfing activities for the sake of protecting the network and sensitive company data. In a recent survey of IT executives by Trend Micro, 75 percent said they were concerned about unauthorized online activities at work and that nearly 70 percent would consider prohibiting access to certain sites, such as shopping or social-networking properties. But the company also highlights another statistic–42 percent say they’re willing to accept the risks of social networking on office computers because they see social networking as something that will benefit the company in the long run.

The company on Monday also announced a virtual appliance, which allows companies to either dedicate their own standardized hardware to the app or install in a VMware environment with other apps.

It used to be that an IT administrator could warn employees about opening attachments from unknown sources or clicking on links from unknown e-mail senders as the first line of defense against spam, malware, and other bad stuff on the Internet.

Sure, there’s potential for companies to take “Big Brother” to a new level. But the executives at Trend Micro pointed instead to the ability to identify a problem at a company-approved site. If a particular user is using an excessive amount of bandwidth, for example, but isn’t visiting any out-of-the-ordinary sites, it may be the result of a problem at one of those sites.

Today, the seedy side of the Internet comes in many different forms and from many different sources. Stop for a moment and think about the new places where malware might be buried, hidden, released, and shared–a legitimate site that’s been hacked, a bit.ly link on Twitter, or even an image on a Facebook friend’s page. Now, think about how many of these links you’ve clicked on from within the corporate network.

Trend Micro, in an effort to fight a modern-day Internet security war, is announcing Monday the launch of its Web Gateway Security, a product that does more than just enhance URL filtering or expand the database of trouble spots, red flags, and other information used to keep its customers safe. The product also comes with tools that provide IT administrators with detailed information about who on the network is doing what, when and from where–even just a few moments ago. The dashboard (pictured below) gives the administrator a nearly real-time look at the users, the traffic, and the sites being downloaded across the entire network with just a glance.

It’s a tool that gives companies the ability to monitor for unusual activity and track it–nearly in real-time–to a particular site or particular user. No more waiting for reports the next morning to make some sort of discovery or identify the root of a problem.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Web Gateway Security’s dashboard offers a nearly real-time look at users’ activity across the entire network at a glance.

(Credit:
Trend Micro )

We were impressed with the Opera Mini 5 beta browser, which came out in mid-September. At CTIA Wireless 2009, a smaller player, Bolt Browser, leaves its beta behind to chase after Opera’s dominance as an alternative browser for Java phones.

First, Bolt renders pages more faithfully than Opera Mini, with sharper text and photos, and with all the photos intact. Opera Mini 4.2 tended to overly compress some, but it bought it speed. On some sites, Opera Mini stripped an image or two out, or the photo footprints drastically condensed. Bolt also has an interesting feature that Opera doesn’t–the capability to split the screen. This is essentially Bolt’s zoom feature. As you pass the cursor over the zoomed-out section up top, the same area is zoomed in below. The 5 key toggles split-screen view on and off.

We liked what we saw the first time we tested out Bolt as a beta (video review) on a Samsung Propel. Bolt’s rendering felt truer than Opera Mini 4.2 on many sites, but it didn’t seem faster. Now that Bolt has shucked off its beta, we find performance essentially unchanged.

But what of those speed claims? Bolt, a proxy browser built on Webkit, now claims that it’s about 15 percent faster than before and compresses data at a 23:1 ratio. In other words, 2.3MB from the Web shrinks down to 100KB. That may be, but we pulled up our online stopwatch to run our own surf tests.

(Credit:
Bitstream)

Bolt took 12-14 seconds to load and navigate on Nordstrom.com versus Opera Mini’s 9-13 seconds. It took 26 seconds to load The New York Times site and two other stories on Bolt. On Opera, the same stories loaded in 19, 11, and 10 seconds. Yelp was about the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2, about 14 seconds, but one Bolt page ran 2 seconds slower. Our tests clearly favor Opera Mini for speed, but there are one or two other caveats and clarifications to consider before declaring an all-around winner.

Split screen is Bolt's take on zooming.

True, Bolt has undergone some cosmetic alterations, such as a Google search box that’s separate from the URL bar, and a welcome download manager that lets you download files as well as upload. It also caches pages now, so you can jump back to the previous page without reloading it. Bolt 1.5’s new video manager selects the best of three delivery mechanisms for streaming video on your device, including triggering your media player if the phone isn’t well equipped for playback.

Bolt browser 1.5 is free to download. BlackBerry owners should download the optimized version for BlackBerry phones, which integrates RIM’s typical operating system shortcuts.

Without ever budging from our roost, we tested navigation three times on each of three sites, keeping the routine the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2. We would have thrown Opera Mini 5 beta into the mix, but it didn’t seem compatible yet with our testing phone, a Samsung Propel on AT&T’s 3G network. We’re telling you this because we know what a difference carrier, data strength, and handset type makes in each user’s result. Were you to run the same test, you might get slightly different numbers.

So which Java browser prevails overall? It’s a tough call: Bolt renders graphics more clearly, but Opera was speedier. We’ll see if these numbers continue to stand up when Opera Mini 5 comes out of beta. In the meantime, try them both out and chime in with your own views. You may find that a few seconds are worth it to you to use Bolt’s interface. Maybe speed is all that matters and you’ll stick with Opera Mini for now. You tell us.

Twitter posted changes to its terms of service Thursday, assuring users that they own their tweets while leaving “the door open for advertising” opportunities.

Advertising–In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Certainly the ownership message is designed to avoid the user backlash created by a revision to Facebook’s terms of use that some interpreted to mean that Facebook claimed ownership of user profile data and photos.

The prominence of the advertising revision seems to suggest that the microblogging start-up is warming up to an advertising-based model, a dramatic change from comments Stone made in May.

APIs–The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.

Spam–Abusive behavior and spam are also outlined in these terms according to the rules we’ve been operating under for some time.

“There are a few reasons why we’re not pursuing advertising–one is it’s just not quite as interesting to us,” Stone said at the Reuters Technology Summit.

“The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a company blog. “For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter.”

Ownership–Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

In announcing the new terms of service, Stone also addressed the topics of abusive behavior and spam. These are four highlights Stone called out:

I’ve never believed in albums as a complete “oeuvre” in the way that some artists insist they must be. Albums have long felt like a way for the music industry and artists to sneak in weak songs and get the consumer to pay for them. When was the last time you felt that every song on an album was equally great?

I’ve suggested that artists may find new ways to more deeply engage their fans by focusing on singles rather than albums, but there’s something to Carr’s logic:

It’s the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of “tracks” at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.

(Credit: iTransistor)

Today, we’re quick to dismiss those ancient days of “scarcity” and to celebrate our current “abundance,” but scarcity had something going for it: it encouraged a deep engagement in listening to a particular piece of music, across the expanse of an album, and it also encouraged, in the artist, an interest in rewarding that engagement. I would like to get back the money I spent on records in my youth, but I would not give up the experience that money bought me.

The singles culture, in other words, is making it easier for me to experiment with a band, to “date it,” if you will, before I “marry it.” It’s also letting me go very broad with bands that I already like: to pay the band to experiment. (I’ve never met a Radiohead /Thom Yorke or Morrissey single that I wouldn’t buy, though the quality of the tracks varies wildly.)

There is some truth to this, but I’m not sure it matters as much as Carr implies. For every Blonde Redhead (”Dr. Strangeluv” is a wonderful track) that I casually buy and then will probably forget, there’s also the Band of Horses or Arcade Fire that I increasingly find myself deeper and deeper into, track by 99-cent track.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Did we like music more back when we had to pay for it in bulk?

That’s essentially the question writer Nick Carr asks in yet another provocative post on his Rough Type blog. “Slanted and Enchanted” revels in the one-hit wonder but also asks if we are losing something by dumping albums for tracks.

I’m simply not ready to invest in an album yet. But I’ve already spent the equivalent of an album, tasting around the edges of both bands, getting myself ready to hit the “Complete my album” button in iTunes.

Yes, some like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or Queensryche’s “Operation: Mindcrime” are definitely meant to be listened to as a complete piece, but most albums don’t fit this “rock opera” genre, and the singles world, while potentially shallow, is also a great way to enrich one’s experience with a band.

(Credit:
Kmart.com)

(Credit:
Kmart.com)

Additional reading: Sony’s first move–cut price of current PS3 to $299?

For all those who’ve been waiting for the
PS3 to drop in price from $399 to $299, that day apparently has finally arrived.

Clicking on a preorder button from the Kmart.com home page leads to this.

Additionally, Kotaku has posted an image of an apparent promotional poster that a reader sent in, announcing price cuts for the 80GB PS3 ($299), as well as for the 160GB bundle ($399).

We’re off to a press event at Sony headquarters in New York, where we expect to hear more about all this and perhaps get word on that “new” PS3. We’ll update this post as soon as we get more info. (Update: The New York event was dedicated to new line of Sony wireless audio products. Now the focus shifts to Sony’s press conference in Cologne, Germany. Check out the live coverage from our sister site, GameSpot..)

While Sony has yet to make an official announcement, Kmart.com features an ad on its home page that reveals a price cut and appears to announce the arrival of the new PS3 Slim.

(Credit:
Kotaku)

(Via Engadget and Kotaku)