DVD Industry Woes: The Other Shoe Drops 14%
According to the Digital Entertainment Group, first quarter movie rental revenue is way down even though digital downloads and Blu-ray sales were up compared to the same time last year. U.S. DVD rental revenue fell 14% from a year ago. DVD sales account for about half the profits for a movie, so any decline portends financial worries. During a very tough 2009 for home entertainment, consumers preferred to rent DVDs than purchase them. DVD rental revenue rose 4% in 2009, while sales dropped 13%. Both figures include high-definition Blu-ray discs. Comments
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ASUS Receives Prestigious 2010 Red Dot Design Awards
ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) Rampage III Extreme motherboard, Commercial Series notebooks, Eee PC™ Seashell 1015 netbook and new ultra-slim series of Eee PC™ netbooks have risen above more than 12,000 submissions to snare prestigious red dot 2010 product design awards. Tony Chen, Corporate Vice President and Vice Chair of ASUS' System Business Group, said: "Innovative product design is in ASUS' DNA, and our 100-strong international team of culturally-diverse designers is absolutely passionate about bringing form and function together in simple yet stylish and powerful ways. Every ASUS product embodies our brand spirit of inspiration, perfectionism and environmental consciousness; the garnering of red dot design awards proves that we are attuned to the aspirations of the design community and the desires of consumers at large." Comments
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Spam Volumes Grew 6 Percent Last Year
The bad news is that, despite our best efforts, the volume of spam grew by 6% last year. The good news is thatÂ…wellÂ…there really isn't any good news. We are all going to die under an avalanche of spam. Despite security researchers' efforts to cut spam down to size, it just keeps growing back. The volume of unsolicited email in the first quarter was around 6 percent higher than a year earlier, according to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini. Comments
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Blizzard Making Millions Selling Mounts
Need a few million dollars? If you are a company like Blizzard, you simply offer gamers a see-thru flying mount for $25 and they will line up to get it. I know what you are thinking "Oh c'mon, how profitable can that be?" Well, read this: At the time of posting I was in Position 80368 and have to wait over 5 hours! So let's look at that for a sec 80,000 x $25 = $2,000,000 in sales in line at this time! For all you non WoW players this is a digital ingame item, it's a flying horse for your Avatar to fly around on. Comments
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National "Secure Your ID" Day
The Better Business Bureau says that tomorrow is National "Secure Your ID" Day. Gather your old documents up and head on down to a participating location and start shredding. Better Business Bureau (BBB) announced today a nationwide "Secure Your ID" Day to be held on Saturday, April 17, 2010. Individuals and small businesses are encouraged to stop at one of 55 locations across North America set up by BBB for free document shredding. BBB staff will also be on site to provide expert advice and tips for identity theft protection. Comments
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Gmail Gets Drag-and-Drop Attachments
Gmail finally has the ability to drag and drop attachments into messages. What's the catch? The feature is only for Google Chrome and Firefox 3.6. I used to have to click "Attach a file," find the photos, click them, etc. Starting today, if I'm using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6, I can just drag and drop the files to attach them — easy as pie. We'll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only. Comments
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How Project Natal Sees the Player
Project Natal was demoed by Microsoft's R&D department at the Think Next convention earlier this week. Apparently this is how the camera sees you while you play games. Comments
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18 U.S. Schools Named Intel Schools of Distinction Finalists
Intel Corporation today named 18 U.S. schools as finalists in the 2010 Intel Schools of Distinction Awards. The finalist schools, to be honored in September at an awards reception in Washington, D.C., serve as outstanding examples of leaders in preparing tomorrow's innovators. Each of the 18 schools will receive a $5,000 award from the Intel Foundation and a trip to Washington, D.C. in September, where 6 schools will be named Intel Schools of Distinction. These 6 schools will each win an additional $5,000 from the Intel Foundation and a package of goods and services valued at approximately $100,000. Comments
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Creative World of Warcraft Wireless Headset Review
While we at HardOCP have been focused on how games look for a decade, we have never talked about how those games can sound. Today we break that trend with a look at Creative's WoW Wireless Headset. While being marketed specifically to World of Warcraft gamers, we find out that they are good for just about everyone.
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Video Games Before Bed Are Okay
A new report in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that playing violent video games before you go to bed won't keep you awake. In addition, none of the participants showed homicidal tendencies after playing violent video games, although the children forced to watch March of the Penguins did experience nausea, vomiting and mild dementia. A new study found that teens who played the popular video game "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" took only slightly longer to fall asleep than teens who watched a documentary. Australian researchers found that it took teens a median of 7.5 minutes to fall asleep after playing the video game, only slightly longer than the three minutes it took them to nod off after watching the Academy Award-winning March of the Penguins on DVD. Comments
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Viacom: Google Used Piracy to Coerce Content Owners
Viacom and Google are still slugging it out in court and the fight is starting to get dirty. The highlight of the day definitely had to be this little exchange: But Viacom said in a statement that the new documents show Google "made a deliberate, calculated business decision not only to profit from copyright infringement, but also to use the threat of copyright infringement to try to coerce rights owners like Viacom into licensing their content on Google's terms." "It's revealing that Viacom is trying to litigate this case in the press," said a YouTube spokesman. "These documents aren't new. They are taken out of context and have nothing to do with this lawsuit." Comments
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AMD Reports Record First Quarter Revenue
AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2010 of $1.57 billion, net income of $257 million, or $0.35 per share, and operating income of $182 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $63 million, or $0.09 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $130 million. "Strong product offerings and solid operating performance resulted in record first quarter revenue," said Dirk Meyer, AMD President and CEO. "We continue to strengthen our product offerings. We launched our latest generation of server platforms, expanded our family of DirectX 11-compatible graphics offerings, and commenced shipments of our next-generation notebook platforms to customers." Comments
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Microsoft Sending Inspectors To China
Microsoft isn't wasting any time sending inspectors to China to investigate the poor working conditions recently reported by the National Labor Committee. As a result of this report, we have a team of independent auditors en route to the facility to conduct a complete and thorough investigation. If we find that the factory is not adhering to our standards, we will take appropriate action. Comments
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