Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

“People ask me all the time - ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Source: AP

Retailers sold less than half as many shrink-wrapped packages of Vista than Windows XP, and reaped almost a third less revenue, in comparing the launch weeks of both Microsoft operating systems, a research firm said Thursday.

The drop in revenue came despite a 65.5 % increase in the average selling price of Vista compared with XP, The NPD Group said. The avarage selling price for Vista was $207.13.

During Vista’s launch week at the end of January, retailers sold nearly 59 % fewer units than XP in 2001, and took in 32 % fewer dollars, the research firm said. More than 30 % of the unit sales, however, were for the Ultimate version of Vista.

Source: InformationWeek

Microsoft has launched in public beta MSN Soapbox, an online video service that would compete with Google’s YouTube.

Like YouTube, Soapbox lets people upload video in almost any digital format. Users can then tag and categorize videos, so others can more easily find them. One difference is that Soapbox users can watch and browse from the same screen. But the site apparently supports only Internet Explorer, and doesn’t work with Firefox.

Source: InformationWeek

Wikimedia Foundation Inc.’s popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia cracked the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S. for the first time in January, according to comScore Networks Inc.

Wikipedia sites ranked ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, ahead of the sites from The New York Times (number 10), Apple Inc. (number 11) and Viacom International Inc. (number 12), comScore reported Thursday.

Source: Yahoo

Prices for NAND flash memory chips are projected to crater this year, tumbling by a whopping 65 percent and prompting whispers that this once high-margin technology could soon become a nearly free commodity.

NAND was in a state of severe oversupply throughout 2006, and the problems have apparently spilled over into 2007. Starting late last year, poor seasonal demand prompted Samsung, Hynix and others to dump 8-Gbit NAND parts in the spot market. This sent average selling prices (ASPs) plummeting in January, and caused the apparent collapse of the contract market, analysts said last week.

The bad news for NAND manufacturers, however, opens new doors for system OEMs. With NAND prices having sunk so low, system vendors can either pack more memory into enhanced products at the same price points or slash prices on products with current memory capacity, said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group (San Jose).

Source: EETimes.com

You may be carrying a new type of credit card that can transmit your personal information to anyone who gets close to you with a scanner.

The new cards–millions of which have been issued over the past year–use RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, technology. RFID allows scanners to use radio signals at varying distances to read information stored on a computer chip.

According to a study from academic and business researchers at the University of Massachusetts, RSA, and Innealta, many of the cards will transmit your name, credit card number, and expiration date (but not the three-digit security code) in the clear to anyone nearby with a scanner.

Source: Yahoo

Google Inc. has agreed to acquire in-game advertising company Adscape Media Inc. for $23 million, according to technology site Red Herring, which cited sources familiar with the matter in a report late on Thursday.

A Google spokesman declined comment, saying the company’s policy is not to respond to “rumor or speculation.”

Video game industry analysts said the acquisition, if successful, could give a boost to the nascent in-game advertising market.

Source: Reuters