IBLOG SPACE

There’s no doubt that Microsoft pushes a lot of its money into the marketing behind one of its largest marketable products. Halo has been a money factory for the Redmond-based company, as well as Bungie Studios (the studio developing the First Person Shooter (FPS), so to see a huge marketing campaign kicked off before the release of the title is no surprise at all. And, with only a handful of hours to go for those in the UK, seeing a man dressed up like a Spartan take flight in a jetpack may just be outrageous enough to get a fence-sitter to spend the cash on the upcoming blockbuster. Whether or not Halo: Reach will out-sell other FPS titles still coming out this year, like Call of Duty: Black Ops is anyone’s guess at this point, but Steven McGill obviously has his own opinion. He’s the head of Xbox over in the UK, and he was on scene to watch as a Spartan flew over Trafalgar Square in London. It may not be the biggest marketing aspect of the whole period leading up to Reach , but it

We’ve already heard that Microsoft’s working on the HD 2. And, there’s probably plenty of people who are eagerly anticipating its announcement, or at least some spy shots. And while we wish we could provide those for you today, that’s just not the case. Instead, we’re hearing murmurs from an insider that the official unveiling of the future of the Zune HD, whatever that may be, is set to go public come this October. Right along side the official debut of Windows Phone 7. After that initial tipster claimed that the Zune HD 2 was coming soon, with a product launch next year, it seems that a job listing popped up for Microsoft’s Portable Entertainment Group, which is the group that brought the current generation Zune HD to market. The job listing says that they group is “currently building the next generation of portable entertainment and communication devices.” The “communication” part could indeed be a key word in the whole thing, and this position could mean that the person hired woul

At this year’s IDF, it looks like one of the main focuses is connectivity. After Intel outlined their own plans to feature “smart devices,” with a focus on their connectivity, it looks like it’s time for DisplayLink to keep their promise made at the end of the year, last year. And sure enough, the company has just made official their newest USB 3.0 chip platform. Right now in San Francisco, DisplayLink is taking the curtain off their DL-1000 and DL-3000 single chip series. Both of these brand new chips feature things like integrated display and network connectivity, DisplayLink’s adaptive real-time compression technology (which should help with overall bandwidth, by taking full advantage of USB 3.0), and HD video support. We can thank the newest version of USB for giving us simultaneous support for HD video, networking data, and HD grahics. But, as press releases tend to go sometimes, there’s no details about actual market release, let alone a price at this point. But, considering the

Let’s face it: as awesome as WiFi is, it isn’t perfect. Get enough people on one hot spot, and it can become downright unusable. And, let’s not talk about signal strength: who hasn’t had their signal drop when they absolutely need it the most? Just the way things work, right? Well, if the FCC has their way, we can get one step closer to making sure all of that doesn’t happen, as getting “ Super WiFi ” out and into the real world is something they’ve been hard at work on for two years now. It was two years ago that the FCC took it upon themselves to vote to open up the airwaves between broadcast TV channels. The whole point was to open up the “white space” to make WiFi signals stronger. In essence, make them “super.” But obviously something good like this comes with its own personal struggles. Key of those problems, is the fact that creating “Super WiFi” would probably lead to TV signal interference, and we can’t have that, now can we? So, to try and figure it all out, the FCC has optio

Microsoft is getting ready for the upcoming launch of Halo: Reach , which launches tomorrow. But, further out, they’ve got their motion-controller, Kinect, on the horizon. And with that other significant launch, there’s plenty of changes that Microsoft has in store. We already know that in the upcoming Dashboard update, Microsoft intends to upgrade the overall audio quality of playing on Xbox LIVE . But, what we hadn’t known (in detail), was how much the Dashboard would change for the overall experience. And, it looks like everyone’s going to get the look and feel of the Kinect Dashboard, whether you plan on getting the peripheral or not. While there’s no real confirmation that this is the next Dashboard for the Xbox 360, it does look real enough. And, if you ignore the music long enough (which really isn’t all that bad), you can take note of the few changes that have been made. Primarily, you’ll notice right off the bat that the overall look may feel the same as the current edition o