LOS ANGELES — May 17, 2005 — Today at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2005, Microsoft Corp. and Pepsi-Cola North America announced a U.S. promotion to put the Xbox 360 (TM) next-generation video game and entertainment system from Microsoft into the hands of thousands of lucky people before the console hits store shelves. Beginning Aug. 28, Mountain Dew, Pepsi’s intense citrus soft drink, and Xbox® will select a winner of an Xbox 360 console every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nine weeks straight in the “Every 10 Minutes” promotion.

To play, consumers will collect codes found under the caps of Mountain Dew and other participating Pepsi products, and enter codes in a personal online account at http://www.every10minutes.com. Participants will be able to choose which 10-minute drawing to enter, and can spread codes across different drawings or stockpile codes and put them all toward one drawing. In addition, codes entered will automatically earn the participants points toward obtaining collectible merchandise and gear.

Gaming industry executives attending this year’s E3 in Los Angeles will get an exclusive opportunity to be among the first 10 people with a chance to win an Xbox 360 console through a special Peel-to-Play contest. Free 20-oz. bottles of Mountain Dew containing game pieces produced exclusively for the event will be distributed to expo attendees on Wednesday, May 18 and Thursday, May 19. In addition to the 10 Xbox 360 consoles, winning game pieces will be good for a chance to win Xbox games, Mountain Dew T-shirts, hats and other prizes.

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Source: Microsoft

The original Game Boy(R) Advance fits comfortably into the pocket of a backpack. The retooled Game Boy(R) Advance SP fits into a coat pocket. Now Nintendo takes aim at the pocket of your tightest jeans with the tiny Game Boy(R) Micro system, quite simply the smallest and sleekest Game Boy(R) product that Nintendo has ever created.
It’s thinner than a cell phone, as chic as an MP3 player and as fun as a Game Boy. In an instant it attracts attention and positions the image-conscious player as someone on the cutting edge of cool.

The sporty, silver metal Game Boy Micro measures a mere 4 inches wide, 2 inches tall and 0.7 inches deep, allowing it to sit comfortably alongside today’s hippest technological gadgets. It weighs an astonishing 2.8 ounces, or about the weight of 80 paper clips. Yet Game Boy Micro has the same processing power and plays the same games as Game Boy Advance SP models, complete with standard face controls and gleaming shoulder and Start/Select buttons that literally shine.

An Israeli-company is first to market with a new system that allows for the introduction of rich media advertising into on-line video games - a prospective $750 million market by 2006 according to Jupiter Research.

Double Fusion, based in Jerusalem, has unveiled here at the E3 conference, a groundbreaking ad-serving system that will allow marketers to incorporate rich media formats of 2-D, 3-D, music, animation and video seamlessly into the video game environment.

Double Fusion’s initial roll-out of its ad-serving technology will be in two games initially distributed in the U.K. - London Taxi Rush Hour (Data Design Interactive) and Taxi3: eXtreme Rush (Team6-Games). Both games feature the first ever ad-buy of rich media in a video game. The ads feature a product by Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and are incorporated into the storylines of both games.

“The in-game advertising and marketing opportunity represents a sizable and attractive new channel for advertisers to connect with an increasingly difficult to reach demographic,” said Mark Argento, senior analyst, ThinkEquity Partners, a boutique growth-focused investment bank. “While the in-game advertising market is still relatively nascent, we expect the next 12 months to witness significant market acceptance and adoption of this new medium.”

Double Fusion’s technology works with PCs, game consoles and mobile games. It uses secure communication with two-way security for placing or ‘mediating’ the ad media into games. The technology is adaptive and is ‘platform aware,’ allowing it to make use of the host PC or game hardware’s most appropriate hardware resources including cache and extended memory to effectively use each platform’s capabilities for better game play and integration.

In response to feedback from corporate customers looking for desktop searching capabilities designed for their needs, Microsoft is developing a desktop search offering, built on Windows Desktop Search, for the corporate environment. Scheduled to be available in beta form by the end of the calendar year, the offering will enable corporations to empower employees with fast, powerful searching capabilities across their PC, with plentiful customization options.

Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its new Xbox 360 will run video games developed for the earlier generation of its gaming machine, an enticement for owners of older Xbox versions to purchase new hardware.

Microsoft, which unveiled the Xbox 360 last week, will have between 25 and 40 game titles for the machine by the end of this year, with more than 160 games under development.

Source: Reuters

Square Enix Co., Ltd. a leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software including two of the world’s most popular franchises FINAL FANTASY(R) and DRAGON QUEST(TM), today announced that FINAL FANTASY(R) XI will be released on Xbox 360(TM), Microsoft’s next-generation gaming console, and Xbox Live, the company’s premier online gaming service. The partnership was announced at Microsoft’s Media Briefing held in Los Angeles on May 16th. Xbox 360 will be available this holiday season.

FINAL FANTASY XI is a massively multi-player online role-playing game. The original version of the game was released in May 2002 in Japan, October 2003 in North America and September 2004 in Europe, with a subscriber base now in excess of 500,000 active accounts.

With the release of the Xbox 360 version, Square Enix will be expanding its cross-platform strategy, making FINAL FANTASY XI available to a much wider audience. Players will be able to choose their hardware and play on the same servers as existing gamers. The powerful next-generation capabilities of the Xbox 360 will provide a much more dynamic and visually impressive gateway to Vana’diel — the world of FINAL FANTASY XI.

Apple Computer on Monday released Mac OS X 10.4.1, the first minor update to Tiger, the latest version of the Mac operating system. According to Apple, the new version offers a variety of fixes, including improvements to AFP and SMB file sharing. It also promises to make it easier to use dynamic protocols known as DHCP in wireless networks and to burn disk images.

You can download the update here

Source: News.com