Gamerscore blog wrote up a new article that lists ten new live arcade titles for the next bit. The titles will be released on the regular Arcade Wednesdays. For me the list has its highs and lows. I am a big fan of the Castlevania and Worms titles but the titles from Midway are a little bit of a disapointment. Sure, I can get the Xbox Live Arcade versions.. but I already have the Midway Arcade Treasures games and don’t feel like buying the same thing more than once. So that means no Root Beer Tapper or Paperboy for me.  That just leaves the original titles which I have no clue what to expect. Regardless, it’s good to see some new content up on the Live Arcade.
My wish list when it comes to the Arcade would be for some of Sega’s arcade titles. There were quite a few classic games from Sega that I’m sure people would love. I remember all the good times playing Shenmue and just going to the Arcade. As well, an arcade controller would be sweet for some of the classic arcade titles.
On January 17, 2007, FCC Chairman Chris Martin mentioned that “there’s a prohibition on one entity owning both of those licenses.” This was in the reference to the SIRIUS Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: XMSR) merger discussion. This kind of statement seems like a common response by a person high up at the FCC. If he had said anything else, it would suggest the FCC was in favour of antitrust action before a study was conducted on whether the merger would in fact be considered an monopoly. Now that all depends on how you look at it: if you only looked at satellite radio then yes the new company would be a monopoly; although, if you considered all forms of mobile entertainment as competition, then it would most definitely not be a monopoly.
Investors however don’t respond well to news like this.  After Chris Martin’s comments, shares of XM dropped about 10 percent to close at $15.45 while Sirius shares fell by about 7 percent to $3.86. Not surprising at all since these were probably the same investors raising the stock last week when the merger talks were really starting to heat up. I have a sneaky feeling that this won’t be the last we hear about a possible merger though. Both the satellite radio companies are facing a lot of competition from the mobile music market and need to do something to stay ahead.
I don’t know whats going on. For the first three quarters of 2006 I hardly I bought any Xbox 360 games. Then in the last couple months now, I have bought way too many games. I am going to blame this one on peer pressure. I have bought: Ridge Race 6, Gears of War, The Outfit, Lego Star Wars, Viva Pinata, and Rainbow Six Vegas. So, I have all these new games and I still have older games which I have barely played.. or not at all as is the case with Oblivion. I suppose it only makes sense that I should start to play more games just when school gets back into my schedule. The one motivational factor that makes me keep playing.. GAMERSCORE.. but thats another story for another post!
Starting next week, I will be back in school. It has been a while since I’ve been fully in school. I was last in class at the beginning of April. This semester I will be in 5 classes; CS201, CS310, Econ331, Stats254, Classics100. All of these classes should be interesting. I imagine that CS310 will be the most difficult class as I didn’t like Math 221, which is basically the same material. The other classes should range from fun to boring but I am looking forward to my return.
While reading some info about wind power, I noticed someones post and they linked to a very unique site. The site is called One Billion Bulbs, and it lets people sign up and post about changing their light bulbs from standard incandescent light bulbs to more energy efficient CFL bulbs. The site seems like a good cause and hopefully will motivate more people to consider the switch.  The overall goal for the site is to switch over 1 billion bulbs. The site seems rather new as the number isn’t very high yet, only 8,456 as I write this.
In my house, we have been slowly changing over all our light bulbs to the compact fluorescents. The whole movement towards the CFL bulbs is that they reduce energy usage, so its win-win. You have a reduced energy bill and the environment is cleaner. Be sure to check out the site and read up on light bulb technology!
Noah Kalina of viral internet fame has a new project where he took pictures with celebs at VH1’s latest award show. Stars included: Paris Hilton, joey lawrence, xzibit, david hasselhoff, flavor flav and more. The only celebs that were actually familiar with the phenomenon that is Noah K were Weird Al Yankovic and Paris Hilton. How perfect is that. This guy is kind of popular online for taking a picture of himself everyday and putting them together into a video. You can check that out on Youtube. The video is kind of creepy because his facial expression never seems to change. The same thing with the pictures with the celebs, he looks like he is always the same throughout. I suppose that is what makes his picture with Paris Hilton so funny since she always looks the same.
Gmarket Inc. ADR (Nasdaq: GMKT), for the second day, continued its upward explosion on the markets. After opening the day at 23.95 the stock soared upward to reach to a new 52 week high of 27.75 which is up 18.24% on the day. This is great news for Yahoo who has a large stake in Gmarket. Some have been speculating that if Yahoo is going to make an online auction/retail push in North America it will be through the Gmarket name. As well, Gmarket looks like it will be able to take a large portion of the Chinese and Japanese markets if/when they expand their operations.
As I was saying yesterday, the increase in Gmarket is being based on news that eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is not doing particularly well in the Asian markets. There has been news about a joint venture with Tom Online (Nasdaq: TOMO) to be 51% controlled by Tom and 49% controlled by eBay. The name for this new joint venture is going to be TOM Eachnet. Tom was up big-time yesterday but is falling back down today 3.94% today. I am wondering how this joint venture will affect Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) as it was reported before that Baidu would provide text-based search advertising on Eachnet. That deal was previously struck by eBay and I wonder if it will carry forward to the new joint venture. Baidu is up 1.6% today to 118.98. I am expecting that Gmarket will drop before the day is done!
This is a great generalization of current religions. Although it seems to skip over a lot, what do expect for a 90 second video. It covers Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It seems surprising how Christianity just explodes near the end and takes over the majority of the empty space. How has the geography of Religion evolved over the centuries? See 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds…
The practice of placing images above or next to AdSense banners has been around for a while — the idea is to trick visitors into thinking that the Google Ads are click-able image captions. Now, Google has officially announced that the practice is NO LONGER allowed. This is a good move on Google’s part as it shows to their advertisers that they care about them even if it might cost them in the short run. I have run across quite a few sites that were intermixing images and ads to try to get people to accidentally click on the ads. There is nothing worse than being tricked into clicking on an advertisement when you were expecting something completely different. With the new rule changes it should, hopefully, decrease the number of illegitimate clicks while increasing the revenue on legitimate clicks. Thank you Google!
Here is a video of the newly released Wii Forecast Channel.
The Wii Forecast Channel has been released (well, the official release is December 20 and today is the 19th but you can still access it)!
You will need to perform a system update on your Wii before you can use the Forecast Channel. Now all I need is a Wii and I can get my weather. I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t do something like this on Xbox Live? I know if they did it now everyone would say they are copying but I think this could be an interesting feature.