Nintendo Raises Profit Forecast on Sales of Wii, DS Players

Nintendo Co., maker of the top- selling Wii game console, raised its annual earnings forecast to a record after reporting first-quarter profit surged fivefold as the company widened its lead over Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3.

Net income climbed to 80.3 billion yen ($668 million) in the three months ended June 30, from 15.6 billion yen a year earlier, the Kyoto, Japan-based company said today. Nintendo raised its profit forecast for the year ending March 2008 to a record 245 billion yen, 41 percent more than its April projection.

Nintendo, whose market value doubled last year, plans to build on the success of the Wii's motion-sensor remote controller with new products including a steering wheel and exercise pad. The company today increased its Wii sales target by 18 percent to 16.5 million consoles this fiscal year, compared with Sony's shipment forecast for 11 million PlayStation 3s.

``Nintendo continues to knock the cover off the ball in the video-game market,'' Daniel Ernst, a New York-based analyst at Soleil Securities Corp. with a ``buy'' rating, said prior to the earnings release. ``Nintendo not only creates great hardware that is low-cost to make and easy to play, but also great software.''

Sales, also driven by the DS portable and the ``Mario'' games series, more than doubled to a record 340.4 billion yen. Operating profit, or sales minus the cost of goods sold and administrative expenses, tripled to 90.6 billion yen.

Revenue will reach 1.4 trillion yen this fiscal year, 45 percent more than the April estimate, the company said. Sales of Wii software titles will rise to 72 million units, compared with an April forecast for 55 million. Nintendo plans to sell 140 million games for its DS portable, up from 130 million.

Six of the top 10 selling games in the U.S. in June were made for Nintendo's game systems, with ``Mario Party 8'' leading the pack, according to NPD Group Inc.

Record Share Price

Shares of Nintendo, the world's largest maker of handheld players, rose 3.5 percent to a record 56,800 yen on the Osaka Securities Exchange. The stock has gained 83 percent this year, compared with a 4.3 percent advance in the Topix index.

``The earnings results and upward revision have already been largely factored into the share price,'' said Junichi Misawa, who oversees $655 million including Nintendo stock at STB Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. ``The overall trend for the stock remains positive.''

Nintendo today raised its full-year dividend to 960 yen, up 37 percent from its previous plan.

The company revised its outlook on the yen projecting the Japanese currency to trade at an average 118 yen against the dollar and 155 yen to the euro this fiscal year, compared with 115 yen and 150 forecast in April. The yen traded at 118.05 per dollar and 157.33 against the euro as of March 31.

Demand for the Wii will probably continue to exceed supply this Christmas season, Nintendo said earlier this month. Tokyo- based Sony earlier this month offered a discount on the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp. is considering a price cut for the Xbox 360 to catch up with Nintendo.

Leading the Pack

The PlayStation 3, launched in late November, was outsold by the Wii by two to one in the U.S. as of May, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group. In Japan, the margin is three to one, researcher Enterbrain Inc. in Tokyo said.

Nintendo's two-year-old handheld DS player, its best-selling machine, uses a stylus instead of button controls, making it easier for users to play Frisbee with their virtual pets, practice calligraphy and draw pictures. Nintendo is also capturing an older audience with a ``brain-training'' game and tutorials for cooking and languages.

Hit DS game titles include ``New Super Mario Bros.'' and ``Brain Age,'' a quiz game designed to test mental agility. Titles for the Wii include ``Wii Sports'' and the role-playing ``The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.''
Source :http://www.bloomberg.com

First native third-party applications running on iPhone

Late last week, one "Nightwatch," an anonymous hacker familiar with the ARM processor family, wrote a "Hello, World!" program and ran it. Ordinarily, that wouldn't really be sufficient fodder for an Infinite Loop post, but this particular program is Kind of a Big Deal™. It was run on an iPhone—the first known non-native application to do so.

According to the iPhone Dev Wiki (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), Nightwatch's ARM/mach-o toolchain kit has successfully compiled its first non-AJAX iPhone application, a significant step forward in unlocking the secrets of the device (if not the device itself). Granted, it's rather a messy process at the moment, involving multiple installations of various and sundry open-source bits and the binaries that, once compiled, don't have much access to little things like OS X header files or whatnot. But the major hurdle, knowing it can be done, is now out of the way. Just don't expect to see Pocket Quicken in the next couple of weeks or anything.
Source :http://arstechnica.com

Search engines race to update privacy policies

The major search engines are racing to outdo each other in updating their data retention policies in an attempt to assuage concerns that they keep consumer search data too long.

The latest to go public with their moves are Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft and Ask.com also are proposing an industry effort to create voluntary standards for protecting consumer privacy with search and online ads, a move that is likely spurred by Google's plan to acquire a leader in the online ad market.

Microsoft is set to announce on Monday plans to permanently remove the Internet Protocol address and other identifying data associated with Web searches after 18 months unless the searcher wants the information stored for longer. The company will also store search terms separately from account information that personally identifies a user, such as name, e-mail address and phone number, gathered as part of other Microsoft services.

In addition, Microsoft is promising that it will give people the ability to opt out of behavioral ad targeting it offers on third-party Web sites and it will allow people to search and surf its Web sites without being associated with a personal and unique identifier used for such ad targeting.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is vowing to remove portions of IP addresses and personally identifiable cookie IDs within 13 months except when users want the data retained for longer or when the company is required to retain it for law enforcement or legal processes, said Yahoo spokesman Jim Cullinan.

Cookies are small files stored on a computer so that the computer can be recognized when it revisits Web sites, enabling the site to remember the user's preferences for things like e-commerce and sites that require a log-in.

The news comes days after changes at Ask and Google. On Thursday, Ask said it would allow people to search anonymously and would not retain a user's Web search history at all if the searcher didn't want it to. Searchers will be able to change their preferences using a new AskEraser tool, which will reside on the Ask servers and will work with all the major operating systems. Ask said it will retain the search log data for 18 months for people who don't want to be anonymous and then it will disassociate the search terms from the IP address.

Also last week, Google said it would have cookies expire after two years instead of 2038, although for anyone who visits Google even once in the next two years, the cookie expiration date will be extended another two years.

In March, Google said it would start anonymizing the final eight bits of the IP address and the cookie data after somewhere between 18 months and 24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer. That would make it much harder to identify the specific computers used for searches.

The risks associated with retaining search data were illustrated last year when AOL inadvertently exposed the searches of more than 650,000 users. The New York Times was able to discover the identity of at least one of the users, highlighting the risks associated with retaining search data logs.

Microsoft and Ask also said they would work together and are asking other companies and organizations to join them in creating industry guidelines for protecting consumer privacy in the areas of search and online advertising. They said they would provide an update on the effort in September.

The moves come amid discussion in the industry over privacy concerns related to Google's proposed $3.1 billion of online ad provider DoubleClick. Privacy advocates have questioned the deal; Microsoft opposes it on antitrust grounds; and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into it.

"It's a topical area right now, and (the Google-DoubleClick plan) had some influence on us looking at this" now, said Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at Microsoft. "We believe privacy is a very important aspect for our business going forward."

But where do Yahoo and Google stand on the self-regulation effort? Neither company would give a straight answer to that question.

"We're certainly open to having conversations about technical issues, but we don't think this is the right time to participate in that," said Yahoo's Cullinan, without elaborating.

A Google spokeswoman provided this statement: "Our goal is to improve privacy protection and data security for all Internet users by continuing to innovate in the area of privacy."
Source : http://news.com.com

Voters question candidates at CNN debate

When Democratic presidential candidates square off for a debate in front of CNN's cameras Monday, don't strain your neck looking for Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour or any of the network's reporters. They won't be asking the questions. Those will come from animated computer programmers, off-camera gay soldiers and guys in Viking helmets.

The debate in Charleston, S.C., airing live at 7 p.m., will be the first among presidential candidates in which the questions are posed by actual voters submitting videos through the Internet -- and journalists and politicians agree it won't be the last.

'It's here to stay,'' University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said. ''You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.'' Adds Jon Klein, head of CNN's U.S. operations: ``What candidate could walk away from a chance to hear from actual Americans? What candidate wants to look afraid to do it?''

CNN and video-sharing website YouTube.com began asking voters to post questions on the site earlier this month. As the deadline approached Sunday night, more than 2,700 had been submitted. About 200 of them will go into a pool CNN reporters and editors will use to grill the candidates Monday.

CNN and YouTube will also collaborate on a Republican debate with the same format on Sept. 17 in St. Petersburg. The website will begin collecting questions for that date at 9 p.m. Monday.

CNN came up with the idea earlier this year while pondering ways to inject some creativity into coverage of presidential campaigns, which once lasted less than a year but have turned into grinding, 18-month-long forced marches.

''We're constantly trying to steer away from covering the election as a horse race and get into the issues,'' Klein said. ``What better way than to allow American voters to pose the questions?''

Actually, letting voters pose questions doesn't always work out too well, as anybody who has covered early-season primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire -- where campaigns consist mostly of visits to coffee klatches and small town-hall meetings -- can attest.

Queries can range from the maddeningly broad ('You hear somebody say, `Senator, give us your thoughts on the U.S. economy,' and you just drop your face into your hands,'' Sabato said) to the numbingly narrow. S.I. Hayakawa, running for the U.S. Senate from California, once infamously exploded at a question about a small town's upcoming vote on greyhound tracks: ``I'm running for the U.S. Senate. I don't give a good god---- about dog racing.''

But CNN reporters who've combed through the submissions say that while there's a lot of chaff, they've got more than enough wheat for a debate. ''I had some fears when I first heard about this,'' said Anderson Cooper, the CNN correspondent who will moderate the debate. ``But once I saw the questions, I relaxed . . .

``There are plenty of good ones. The people are actually living the question, in many cases. There's one about medical research from a man with Lou Gehrig's disease. Another woman asking about healthcare takes off her wig at the end of the video and reveals she's in chemotherapy.''

All question videos can be viewed at http://youtube.com/contest/DemocraticDebate. Some, like the one from a man in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who asks how the candidates can keep the Federal Reserve from inflating the U.S. money supply, sound little different than what you might hear on Meet The Press or any other Sunday-morning talk show.

Others, like the man wondering if high-performance sports cars should be banned, are peculiar. And some, like the man demanding Congressional hearings on UFOs as he sings I'm A Believer, sound more like they came from Saturday Night Live.

Some are barely questions at all: A stuffed blue duck asks, ''Do you feel the terrorists will come here?'' before exclaiming, ''Oh my God, there is one here right now!'' as the camera goes jittery.

Others use visual gimmicks to make serious points. A question about the military's don't-ask-don't-tell policy on gay soldiers comes from a disembodied, off-camera voice because the man asking it is a gay soldier. One about whether the war in Iraq is motivated by corporate interests includes a clip of President Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial complex. A cartoon character identifying herself as a computer programmer asks how candidates will stop high-tech jobs from moving off-shore.

If the cleverly staged questions were intended to catch the eye of CNN programmers, at least some of them worked.

'My favorite is the purring cat with the subtitle that asks, `How can you protect my food in the future?' '' said Klein, who adds with a nearly straight face: ``We're really interested in that feline demographic -- our ratings are low there.''

Whether the candidates will be amused at questions from faux Vikings and animated jobless people remains to be seen. Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, said the candidates need to get over themselves.

''The debates so far have just been terribly, utterly boring,'' he said. ``We could use a laugh or two. The funny stuff doesn't bother me at all -- those are legitimate questions that they're asking, regardless of how they do it.''

Sabato is an unabashed fan of the involvement of YouTube videos in the debate. ''Hey, if we're going to get more people -- especially young people -- into politics, we have to use the techniques with which they're familiar, and that means YouTube,'' he said.

``The day doesn't go by that I don't get two or three videos e-mailed to me by students. They watch those things the way us older people look at dead trees, constantly.''

In fact, YouTube is no stranger to politics. Most of the campaign organizations regularly contribute videos to the site: some plugging their own candidate, some apparently showing opponents flip-flopping on the issues. If you've heard reports that Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have changed their stands on abortion, it's largely because of YouTube video clips of their old speeches.

And YouTube may already have had a decisive effect on the presidential race when it became the home of a widely circulated video that showed U.S. Sen. Paul Allen, running for reelection in 2006, referring to an Asian-American man by a word that some of his opponents said was a racial slur. Allen, who if reelected would have been a strong candidate for the Republican nomination this year, was defeated.

Expanding YouTube's role in the campaign into a mainstream media outlet like CNN is part of journalism's fascination with so-called ''user-generated content'' -- that is, using new communications technology like cellphone cameras and Internet social-networking sites to involve the public in news-gathering.

Executives at Fox News, who are keeping a careful eye on the CNN debate experiment, say that even if it's a dud, the citizen-journalist is a big part of television news' future.

''Social networking and user-generated content are important phenomena right now,'' said David Rhodes, vice president for news at Fox News, ``and I think every news organization has to think about ways to incorporate those into what they're doing.''

Video shot with passengers' cellphones played an enormous role in Fox News' coverage of the 2005 terrorist bombings in the London subway, Rhodes noted: ``Those were some of the most dramatic pictures.''

Involving unvetted civilians in news coverage has its risks, especially on live television: Almost every news division has been burned by crank calls from Howard Stern's legion of prankster shock troops that made it onto the air. CNN officials concede ruefully that it's a possibility Monday, too.

''We're checking the videos carefully,'' said Klein, ``but there's always a chance that we've missed a flash-frame somewhere.This could be the first presidential debate where a nipple gets on the air.''
Source :http://www.miamiherald.com