As energy drink-addled Master Chief wannabes emerge from their caffeine haze having conquered Halo 3, they are sure to begin exploring the game’s interesting user-generated features.

The most interesting of these is Forge, a map editor that lets Halo players roam around the game’s multi-player battlefields dropping weapons, vehicles and other materiel around the map. Players can then save their custom-built maps, invite friends and even upload them to the web site of Bungie, Halo 3’s developer, where they can be shared and commented on by the entire Halo 3 community.

But Forge is not the only interactive, user-generated feature in Halo 3. The game’s multiplayer mode features a ‘flim’ option that allows players to record their most impressive kills and other highlights. Videos of a gamer’s last 25 sessions can be edited down to just the highlights, then tweaked to show the action from different camera angles. Saved films can be uploaded to share with other players.

Overall, it’s an impressive suite of interactive features, one that Halo 3 players are likely to enjoy long after they crack the game’s main single-player campaign. Such interactive features are bound to become more common in video games for the Xbox 360, as Microsoft attempts to drive more users to its Xbox Live online service.

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One of the consequences of the evolution of the web from a text-heavy to an increasingly video centric medium is that search tools also need to evolve.

UK-based Blinkx and AOL’s Truveo unit led the way with video search tools that enable users to track down and watch video clips by entering search key words in a browser window.

Clipblast takes video search one step further by making it possible to search and watch video through a widget without having to launch a browser or visit a particular web site. As Demo presenter Chris Shipley noted, delivering online content directly to users bypassing the standard browser is an emerging trend worth watching.

Clipblast’s founders claim the service has the largest web video index and that its web video crawler identifies and indexes most new video uploads within minutes. The privately funded company hopes to tap into the growing demand for video search advertising revenues - a market expected to reach $3bn by 2010.

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The “wisdom of crowds” motif has become a tired cliche in online circles in recent years. With the latest in low-cost interactive Web technologies, though, there finally seems to be a real wave of experimentation underway in how to harness the knowledge of the masses.

The range of that experimentation is intriguing. Two of the companies presenting at the Demo conference - a showcase that tries to filter out the best tech start-ups, though the “winners” of this contest still have to pay $18,000 to show up - represent the extremes.

Paul Pluschkell, founder of Spigit, spent much of his career on Wall Street, and it shows. He has devised a full-fledged stock market-like game for exposing and rating new ideas. The notional currency of this system is the spigit - players start out with 25,000 each and “invest” their money in what they think are the best ideas in the market.

It looks dauntingly complex. Ideas have to clear a number of hurdles - among other things, they have to generate buzz, attract a certain number of pageviews, and find approval with people designated in the system as experts - before they even make it as fully-fledged “companies” to be traded on Spigit’s secondary market of ideas.

Yet Pluschkell has some impressive early users. SAP is trialling the system as a way to surface good ideas among its workers. It already has an internal social network, but clearly this doesn’t have the built-in incentives needed to get people to play. Another new “prediction market” on display at Demo is Fluid Innovation, which asks users to guess at the value of new software products (it’s aimed at companies looking to license out software they developed for internal use.) This may sound like a job for experts, but thanks to the wisdom of crowds it should only take a couple of hundred semi-informed guesses to yield a useful answer, claims Andrew Allemann, the company’s president.

At the other extreme is Ami Kassar, chief innovation officer of credit card company Advanta. He was looking bleary-eyed this morning after spending much of the night watching how his new baby, Ideablob, fared on its first day in the wild. A system for people who have a vague idea for starting a new business but don’t know what to do next, Ideablob is as amorphous as the name suggets. Users enter a one-paragraph description of their idea, then let it loose for others to comment and vote on.

So what’s changed since the days when chat rooms ruled the Web? According to Kassar, it doesn’t take much to turn the random postings of the many into a more useful and directed conversation. Just apply the better user interfaces of Web 2.0 and a simple rating system, he says, and users respond.

Another new start-up applying that approach is Attendi. This is dressed up as a search engine: enter a term and it returns a list of people who have had conversations on the system about that subject (Attendi is built on Jabber, the open-source messaging technology.) Users get to vote on each other, creating “experts” who rise to the top of the search results on each subject. Attendi also shows presence: if you have a question, it aims to link you in a live chat with someone else on the system. That conversation is indexed for future use, and can be viewed by anyone on the system.

Complex or simple, these new experiments all rely on one thing: a willingness on the part of the masses to tell the world at large what they think on a whole range of subjects. How powerful is this urge? Who knows. But at least better tools are starting to appear to find out.

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There have now been reports that almost all the new iPod models unveiled a few weeks ago are experiencing sporadic problems with their screens or software.

From crooked screens on the new fatty nano, to faulty black levels on the iPod Touch, to a range of technical issues with the Classic, it seems like the current batch of ‘pods was really only half-baked before being pulled from the oven and sent to stores.

I know that most users probably aren’t having any problems with their new Apple toys, but it does seem like you might want to hold off a bit on buying one of these new players until all the kinks have been worked out.

A more cynical theory, though, is that these kinks are unlikely to ever be worked out, and are an unavoidable result of Apple’s explosive growth and resultant need to outsource its manufacturing to outside vendors who may be more concerned with keeping costs low than delivering flawless products.

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Just six months after a Virginia jury ruled that the Internet telephony company Vonage infringed on a Verizon patent and ordered that the company pay Verizon $58 million in damages plus 5.5 percent royalties on all future revenues, the AP reports the company has suffered another major blow.

Internet telephone company Vonage Holdings Corp. was ordered in federal court Tuesday to pay Sprint Nextel $69.5 million in damages for infringing on six telecommunications patents owned by Sprint Nextel Corp.

Vonage said in a written statement that it would appeal the decision but also would begin developing workarounds so it won’t need to use the disputed technology….

Greg Gorbatenko, a telecommunications and media analyst for Jackson Securities, said the decision ”feels like a death knell” for Vonage because future revenue will likely dry up, preventing the company from investing in better technology or improving customer service.

Vonage may survive this, but if I was a customer who did not want to lose phone service I might consider another Internet telephony company. Telephone and cable companies both provide VOIP service for similar prices.

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Trying hard to get to their promise of 100 HD channels by the end of the year, DirecTV lit up 21 new HD offerings today.
Diehard customers have been filling up internet chat boards with rumors and news for the last few weeks leading up to today’s launch.

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Due to to the interest that our previous post about Microsoft quietly allowing Vista users to revert back to Windows XP gained, Here’s another look a why Windows XP is still a strong and viable platform for users:

According to PC World: “The six-year-old operating system is showing surprising strength more than half a year after the full launch of its successor. In April, Dell acknowledged continued XP demand and resumed offering XP as an option on new systems. In July, Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell ratcheted up the percentage of OS sales the company expects XP to account for in fiscal year 2008 from 15 percent to 22 percent. Finally, in August, Microsoft announced an XP Service Pack 2c release that does nothing more than add new Windows XP product keys so the company can keep selling the OS to businesses through January 31, 2009.”

In addition, customers who purchase a Vista machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo (among other vendors) can use a vendor-supplied XP Pro recovery disc to replace the Vista operating system on their system with XP Pro.

Certainly sales of Vista aren’t blowing away XP in stores. Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP’s launch in October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of retail sales. (Windows Me launched after Windows 98, but it didn’t supplant the older OS.)

Of course, retail sales are only part of the story. With PC prices dropping over the past few years, and with Vista’s higher hardware requirements, it’s a “no-brainer,” according to Swenson, for many people to buy a new PC rather than upgrade an old one. And the large majority of Vista users get the OS on their new systems.

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Tired of seeing the same ole boot screen every time you start up Windows Vista? Become ennui-free with this nifty free program from PC World. It lets you replace your Vista boot screen with one that you create yourself from scratch, or with a graphic that you find online. You’ll have to create or find the image in two sizes: 1024 by 768 pixels, and 800 by 600 pixels. Both must be in .bmp format, at 24-bit color depth. Once you have them, simply od an image search using google, this program very deftly replaces you boot screen with them.

Download Vista Boot Logo Generator.

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Every day I get to surf the Internet means one more day where I get to say, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Today while surfing Engadget I found the Mpion MP3 player with built-in pimple zapper.
Besides the awesome ionic blemish fighting ability the Mpion has 128 megabytes of storage for your favorite tunes.

Here’s a link to the translated web page.

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Q: Where can you find 1m screens, at the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry, that are just waiting to be connected to the internet?

A: Las Vegas, Atlantic City and anywhere else that players of the slots congregate.

WMS (a public company founded more than half a century ago by Harry Williams, whose main claim to fame was inventing the “tilt” mechanism in pinball machines) showed off an intriguing hybrid slot machine today that could bring social networking to the one-armed bandit.

The trick will lie in marrying two completely different experiences. Devotees of the slots have an innate suspicion of digital technology: they prefer to trust a purely mechanical system that pits man against machine. WMS’s idea is to overlay another, transparent screen on top of the slots window that adds a layer of 3D graphics and interactivity to the experience, without actually replacing it.

Using this, WMS is working on ideas for creating multiplayer games, or identifying individual players so that casinos can pitch offers directly to them. Can a Facebook for like-minded arm-crankers be far behind?

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