80-gig Playstation 3 in US

Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console will come with a beefed up 80-gigabyte hard-disk drive in South Korea, and that model is being considered for the U.S. and other markets, a company official said Wednesday.

The PlayStation 3, which competes against Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, now comes with a 60-gigabyte hard drive. A 20-gigabyte version, which has been discontinued in the United States, still sells in Japan and some other regions.

The 80-gigabyte version will start selling June 16 in South Korea, where online games are enormously popular and broadband connections are more widespread, he said. Broadband can enhance some games, and players can also download features for games from the Internet.
[Source]

Wi-Fi Group To Certify Gear In June

The next generation of wireless Internet products certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to hit shelves this summer, even though a final standard for the technology isn't due for another year, the industry group says.

The Wi-Fi Alliance was announcing Wednesday that it will begin certifying wireless routers, networking cards, microchips and other so-called "Draft N" products in June. The products, which take their name from the upcoming 802.11n technical standard, are expected to reach retail stores shortly thereafter.

Wi-Fi comes in several flavors — "b," "a," "g," and soon "n" — referring to the subsection of the technical guidelines issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical professional organization.

The "n" version is expected to be about five times faster than the widely used "g" variety, though in practice, speeds rarely reach what's listed on the box. Draft N products are said to offer better reach through walls and into dead spots and will use multiple radios to send and receive data, making them better at handling big video files.

Gear rated to handle n-level wireless already is being sold. But the Wi-Fi Alliance said certified Draft N items from different vendors are guaranteed to work together and to work with older certified Wi-Fi products.

Karen Hanley, senior director of marketing for the Austin, Texas-based industry group, said the wireless industry shipped 200 million Wi-Fi products last year worldwide. Over the next few years, the category will expand from mostly laptops and access points to Wi-Fi enabled cell phones, televisions and video games.

Hanley said the final 802.11n standard isn't expected until 2009.
[Yahoo News]

Natalie Portman as Web portal?

Can Justin.TV compete with Queen Amidala?

ValleyWag is reporting that actress Natalie Portman is shopping a project to broadcast a continuous video feed of her work and personal life. The actress reportedly met with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to seek funding for the project.

Portman isn't alone in looking for new online outlets. Dave Networks, for instance, is building Web sites for stars--said to include Will Smith and Jessica Alba--that that would let them own, distribute and "monetize" their own content.

Many celebrities have documented their lives on television and in movies; and unofficial tapes of starlets and other Hollywood types frequently pop up on the Web (though not always with the approval of the actors in question). It's not that surprising, then, that someone would just start doing the broadcasts themselves.
[Source]

Microsoft oPhone

Microsoft's crazy design for a new mobile phone, one that is sure to knock Apple's iPhone out of the water.

MySpace To Acquire Photobucket For $250 Million

MySpace, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NYSE:NWSA - news), has reached a preliminary deal to acquire Photobucket, the world's top photo-sharing site, for around $250 million in cash, a source familiar with the deal said on Monday.

Photobucket functions like a kind of Swiss bank for depositing and transmitting photos, helping Web users post their photos on other social networking sites, instead of trying to keep the users locked up on its own site.

Besides MySpace, Photobucket is popular on sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga.

While hardly known outside the youthful world of social network sites, Photobucket has become wildly popular with users for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows. Site builders turn to it for images to decorate their sites.

The four-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, California, has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year and 2 million in 2004. It now hosts nearly 2.8 billion images on the site.

Spokesmen for Photobucket and MySpace were not available to comment on the deal.
[Source]