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(Credit:
Sony Computer Entertainment of America)

Now, however, that lead looks imperiled, and according to a report in Information Week, the Wii could soon become the overall sales leader among the three consoles.

But because the Xbox had a full year’s head start on both the Wii or the PS3, it still had the overall sales lead.

Of course, three-year forecasts have about as much chance of being right in electronics as predictions of who will win the World Series in three years.

Still, for anyone to put their name to a forecast that the PS3 could emerge from its doldrums is actually quite noteworthy. And for me, it’s a hint of future validation since in the fall of 2006, I wrote a story suggesting that the PS3 would be the eventual winner of the next-gen console wars.

But the really interesting news in the iSuppli report is a forecast that by 2011, the PS3 could be the top console. The research firm predicted that by the end of 2011, the PS3 could have sold 38.4 million units, while the Wii might be in second place at 37.7 million.

For more than a year, the whole world has seen Sony’s
PlayStation 3 get its rear handed to it by Nintendo’s
Wii and Microsoft’s
Xbox 360.

And of course, iSuppli’s forecast could be just as far off base as mine was. But the fact that it is willing to make such a prognostication here, in 2008, is gratifying. Even if it’s a bit mystifying.

But if a three-year forecast from market research firm iSuppli is to be believed, the PS3 could out pace both the Wii and the Xbox by 2011.

Since its release in November 2006, the Wii has been the most successful of the next-gen consoles, far eclipsing Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and leaving the PS3 in the dust.

The article cited market research firm iSuppli as determining that by the end of 2008, the Wii will have sold a total of 30.2 million units, 17.5 percent higher than the projected 25.7 million Xboxes Microsoft will have sold.

Shortly thereafter, of course, that suggestion made me look rather foolish when Sony’s much-publicized problems with production and overpricing got the PS3 off to an extremely poor start. And with the surprise success of the Wii, my prediction looked even more foolish, even though Sony said from day one that it views its consoles as 10-year plays.

While it will be in third place among next-gen consoles during 2008, the Play Station 3 could emerge as the top-selling console by 2011.

Under SPA, an attacker can determine the passwords from simple patterns in the power consumption.

(Credit:
CRI)

(Credit:
CRI)

Counter measures, said Jun, include increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. For example, if you want to have a private conversation, you could go to a large football stadium during a game, making it hard for someone trying to listen to separate our conversation from the surrounding noise. That’s amplitudinal noise.

“Almost every smart card you buy today is going to have countermeasures to Simple Power Analysis and Differential Power Analysis,” said Jun, however some newer implementations of ECC “do in fact leak information.” In particular he cited devices such as MP3 players and cell phones. These are devices that have not had 10 years of development, said Jun, and so some exhibit weaknesses found in early smart cards. The purpose of the workshop was to help developers avoid some common flaws.

On Monday, Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI) opened a three-day workshop in San Francisco on the security of embedded system cryptography. The workshop is intended for developers and architects of secure embedded systems. Participants will be given smart cards and challenged to crack passwords using various demonstrated techniques.

Under DPA, the attacker first guesses and then compares the guess against the actual result.

The workshop’s primary focus will be on attacks to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a cryptographic algorithm that is now used to protect electronic passports, mobile communications, and even MP3 players. Jun said there are many ways for an attacker to monitor leakage. In the workshop, he said they will look specifically at Simple Power Analysis (SPA) and Differential Power Analysis (DPA).

The other kind of noise, said Jun, is temporal, which, to a computer, means stuttering the information over longer spaces. For example, if the data value was 8, the code might be expressed as 2 plus 6. More defense can be achieved by randomness, changing the way you express the data value of 8; maybe the next reference you say 12 minus 4, then 5 plus 3, and so on.

The workshop concludes Wednesday. For an overview of the concepts involved in a monitored attack, CRI provides a Flash tutorial on its Web site.

“These are not theoretical attacks,” Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at CRI, noting that his company published the first white paper on monitoring attacks during the 1990s.

To an observer, a power analysis looks something like an EKG. As the device processes the encryption algorithm, peaks and valleys display on the monitor; these ultimately correspond to 1s and 0s in a password. Thus, an attacker could look at the power consumption fluctuations emitted from a device and, based on the specific pattern of peaks and valleys, figure out whether the device used RSA, DES, or ECC for encryption. Knowing what algorithm was used, the attacker could then begin to figure out the password.

The new TV channel will be majority-owned by Japan Broadcasting or NHK, which will issue new shares through private placements with the 13 investors to launch the new TV service. NHK will own a 60 percent in the new TV service and the 13 investors will have stakes of less than 5 percent each. News of the new channel, which is the first of its kind in Japan, was first reported by the Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei and was picked up by Thomson Financial.

The new channel is expected to reach some 10 million households in North America, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world, according to the news reports. In addition to providing 24-hour TV broadcasts, NHK is working with Microsoft and NTT, to distribute video content via the Internet.

Microsoft and Japanese phone company NTT are joining 11 other companies in taking a stake in Japan’s first 24-hour-English language broadcasting service.

Not everyone’s “got the ‘open’ memo” just yet, but Reuters apparently has.

My big question is what Reuters will do with the service. It’s open to commercial and noncommercial use with light-handed licensing terms. Would The New York Times use something like this? I doubt it, but who knows? Open source and open APIs make collaboration possible just about everywhere.

Huh? And? Well…

Maybe this means that it starts connecting the dots (Matt is talking about Reuters, which is a $5 billion information management company; the blog is hosted by CNET Networks, which, according to X source, Reuters once considered buying; Matt was just named the best pie maker on the planet; etc.) and sends it back in this enriched format so that I could then use the metadata to improve site navigation, better organize my content, or whatever.

The Calais Web service returns content in an open, interoperable and entirely portable format, with a unique identifier that can be easily integrated into social networks, widgets and semantic applications like Powerset, Freebase, Twine, Hakia, Wikia, Blue Organizer and more.

As with Google Maps, I suspect that this will lead to people much smarter than me creating cool mash-ups and applications. Here’s what Reuters has to say:

commentary

I’ll stick with: in goes basic text, out comes super-text. My wee brain can handle that.

The Calais Web service enables publishers, bloggers and sites of all kinds to automatically metatag the people, places, facts and events in their content to increase its search relevance and accessibility on the Web. It also lets content consumers, such as search engines, news portals, bookmarking services and RSS readers, submit content for automatic semantic metatagging that is performed in well under a second.

In goes basic text, out comes super-text. Or semantic web text. Or Web 12.0. Or whatever.

That’s hard to say, because after reading through the FAQ and the project site, I’m still awash in a muddle of buzzwords and Silicon Valley speak. But what it appears to mean is that it’s a Web service that allows someone (even me) to send content (this specific blog, your recipe, a weather report, whatever) to the service to have it (in under a second) attach metadata.

The global news and information company this week has opened up the API to its OpenCalais project, which enables content creators/aggregators to enrich their content services. What does this mean in English?

Joining one of the existing teams is as simple as following a team leader. Each team has its own templates for changing your background and profile picture to match the horde. To create your own team all you have to do is provide the site with your special team Twitter account log-in (note–there are already plenty of teams so just join one instead). Ze Frank is using the log-ins to send out system-wide messages to participants, effectively acting as a Twitter administrator using the API.

(Credit: CNET Networks / TwitterColorWar.com)

While March Madness continues to unfold, there’s a way geekier sporting event of sorts taking place on the Web. There’s no money involved or athletic talent required. All that’s needed is a Twitter account and an interest in taking part in some pure and unadulterated tomfoolery.

So, what’s the point? Already there’s been a simultaneous text-based Ro-Sham-Bo (Rock-Paper-Scissors) game played earlier today. A video version of the contest is being unveiled on Monday. There was also a fanmade Guitar Hero top score competition, and a Color Wars theme song challenge. I have no idea what’s coming next, but that’s part of the fun.

Here at Webware we’re not giving out an official endorsement mostly because our allegiances are skewed. I’m a member of the plaid team, while Caroline–being the front runner she is–is a member of FF1CAE team (also known as magenta). You can find the entire listing of teams here.

As a word of advice, if you intend on interacting with some of the challenges, it might be a good idea to install a desktop client like Twhirl (review) or Snitter (review) if you want to stay on top of your game. The notification features on both make it easy to see if you’re getting a message from your team leader. In the case of yesterday’s rock paper scissors game, there was only a minute to send out your tweet, so timing is important.

One site that’s tracking the entire endeavor is TwitterColorWar.com. You can see which teams have the most members (updated by the hour). There’s also a channel that tracks smack talk amongst the various teams as noted by the “#smacktalk” hash in people’s tweets. Since Twitter is an open platform, enterprising developers could create their own little games and apps if people manage to care care long enough.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Twitter Color Wars, an online event/club/social network/mind control experiment created by Welebrity Ze Frank. It’s a wonderfully overcomplicated way to take advantage of the hordes of people using Twitter to recreate a virtual color war using the service’s following and direct messaging features.

See which teams have the most members and track some of the goings-on at TwitterColorWar.com.

Today, on “This Week in iPhone,” we’ll address two significant developments. Apple stores around the country are starting to recover from an iPhone shortage, while T-Mobile has cut the price of the iPhone in Germany by 300 euros.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile is running a special on iPhones until the end of June. You can now get an 8GB iPhone in Germany for 99 euros ($154.78), if you choose a hefty service plan. Several analysts think this means the 3G iPhone launch is therefore timed for the end of June, which would make some sense given the identical target date for the iPhone 2.0 software.

First up, the supply concerns. Apple acknowledged the shortage and told The New York Times that it was working to get iPhones into its retail stores as fast as possible. The cause of the shortage still hasn’t emerged, but speculation that a 3G iPhone would be arriving sooner than expected has cooled.

One reason, advanced by Sanford Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi, is that all the newly arriving iPhones are the regular models, not 3G versions. If Apple really was gearing up to launch a 3G model in the near future, it probably wouldn’t build inventories of the older models. Sacconaghi thinks that Apple ran into a production issue, and made the decision to allocate the iPhones it had on hand to AT&T’s stores, because it can count iPhones shipped to channel partners as sales. Remember, the first quarter just ended last week.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

But, Sacconaghi doesn’t think the shortage really cost Apple all that much business. “We believe the impact to Apple’s overall iPhone sales has been minimal so far, and is likely to be modest unless the shortage persists or worsens,” he wrote in a report.

After a brief shortage, it's getting easier to find iPhones at Apple's stores.

Despite sitting out the
CTIA 2008 conference, Apple’s
iPhone business had an eventful week.

Google’s own engineers were able to push the boundaries of Ajax. Its first release of Google Maps, where users can drag a map around a browser, inspired many developers to push the limits of Webware.

Stocky said that Google’s focus with tools and APIs is JavaScript and good Ajax development practices.

What will be different this year is an increased focus on developing social applications, reflecting Web development in general. Google will have sessions on social applications, including ways to use OpenSocial, which is designed to let people share information on social networks among different applications.

In addition, Google wants to promote technologies that work in all browsers, not things like Flash or Silverlight that require a special plug-in and are proprietary.

Other Web giants–Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon–all have their own developer programs as well.

This year’s two-day event in San Francisco is larger than last year’s Google Developer Day, its first organized conference aimed specifically at Web developers.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has laid out a vision of a providing unifying development model for a wide range of applications, from classic client-server Windows applications to Web services mashups using Silverlight.

On a technical level, Google’s push to attract developers to the Web has a slightly different flavor than others.

“If anyone’s going to push the Web forward, we want them to do it in way that benefits everyone,” Stocky said. “We don’t have an underlying platform we’re selling. We’re trying to improve the Web as a platform…and increase usage of the Internet as a whole.”

It already has many application programming interfaces (APIs) to its Web services, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Messenger, and continues to release more.

There is also a track on mobile development, including ways to use Google Gears for Mobile and Android, the mobile phone platform Google and its partners introduced last November.

“We don’t have an underlying platform we’re selling. We’re trying to improve the Web as a platform…and increase usage of the Internet as a whole.” –Tom Stocky, senior product manager, Google

Stocky said that one of the goals of Google I/O is to garner some feedback from developers on where they are hitting the limits of Web development. But it’s clear that Google wants to ride–and push–the momentum toward more capable Web applications.

More significantly, Microsoft understands platforms, how to build a thriving “ecosystem” of third-party applications and partners, and how to make money for everyone involved.

Salesforce.com sells subscriptions to a customer relationship management application, but when you talk to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, you quickly understand that he is betting that its development platform, called Force.com, will fuel growth in the future.

“In general, every developer I know is trying to learn more and more JavaScript and Ajax best practices,” he said. “It’s where programming is going.”

All the same Web platform?

Google, of course, is hardly the only tech company that is attracting Web developers to their “platform.”

“We’re trying to get more users, in general. We want to increase the number of users and the amount they use the Web. And improving the platform is the best way to do that, we’ve found,” Stocky said.

But the company set to shake things up the most in Web service development is Microsoft, which just hosted its own Mix Web development conference.

Google will hold a developer confab in May, called Google I/O, to discuss the challenges of writing applications for the Web.

While the format is different–there will be more in-depth technical sessions and tutorials for newbies who want to write mash-ups–Google’s developer strategy remains the same.

Why do they court developers? To encourage creation of more and better Web applications, said Tom Stocky, a
senior product manager at Google, on Tuesday.

Of course, Google doesn’t have a legacy development tools business–like Microsoft or Adobe both do–that needs refreshed tooling to write applications for the Internet “cloud.”

“We’re very confident that we hit the satellite. We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank,” Cartwright said.

The Pentagon has made several videos available so far, including the silent short “Missile Intercept.” Another short (1 minute) version includes voice-over by Cartwright, and a much longer one (28 minutes) carries his full press conference.

A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) streaked skyward from the USS Lake Erie late Wednesday and whacked the satellite while it was still 130 or so miles up in space–and whizzing along at 17,000 miles per hour.

Defense Department officials quickly pronounced the mission a success, not just in hitting the satellite at all, but also in apparently rupturing its fuel tank. The rationale for the target shoot was the possibility that the satellite’s 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, a hazardous substance, might be dispersed by a crash-landing in a populated area.

One shot was all it took for the Pentagon to decommission with extreme prejudice a spy satellite that first failed to operate and then started on a steady descent toward Mother Earth.

In a briefing Thursday morning, Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited three pieces of evidence: a fireball, a vapor cloud, and results from spectral analysis.

ComScore makes its estimates of Web site visitors and page views based on the surfing behavior of about 2 million people at home, work, and college, with statistical extrapolations to gauge total traffic.

Sports fans boosted ESPN’s status in ComScore’s latest measurements of Web site traffic, but the top sites kept their rankings unchanged during March.

The biggest players, however, were unruffled by these blips, with the top 10 unchanged in their relative rankings.

Yahoo kept the top spot with 140 million page views. Next were Google, with 138 million page views; Microsoft, with 121 million; AOL, with 111 million; and Fox Interactive, with 88 million.

ESPN jumped from 46th place with 17.8 million page views from U.S. visitors in February to 34th place with 22.4 million page views in March, the month of the March Madness college basketball tournament and the Major League Baseball season opening, ComScore said.

Sports-related online gambling sites also saw a surge, with Sportingbet’s visitor tally jumping 35 percent to 975,000, ComScore said. Upickem.net and SportsBetting.com, while smaller, also saw major gains.

The methodology, though, hasn’t sat well with Web site operators such as MySpace who say traffic is much higher and with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which last year asked ComScore and its rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, to submit their data to audits. (CNET Networks, which is News.com’s parent company, is among the IAB board members that approved the audit request.)

Watching from the sidelines, you have to believe that Phillips, Katz, and Ellison are cheering for the Yahoo deal to succeed. Like Cusamano, they understand that a Microsoft-SAP hook-up would be bad news in bells. I’m sure they hope Ballmer is too busy for now to read the latest business section of the “Gray Lady.”

Instead, Cusamano makes offers an intriguing alternative: forget about Yahoo and go after SAP.

“A few dozen well-paying Fortune 500 customers may actually be more valuable than tens of millions of Web e-mail “customers” who pay nothing for the service and whose attention is not highly valued by online advertisers.”

Ellison: Please Steve, buy Yahoo

“It’s not an outlandish idea. The two companies held merger talks in late 2003, and perhaps since then, too. Microsoft is in an enviable position: it is a nearly universal presence in corporate data centers, and large enterprise customers are arguably the best customers a software company can have. Clients pay very dear prices for the complex, semicustomized software that runs their business. And once they’ve got their systems running–a process that can take years to complete–they aren’t inclined to change vendors lightly.

Steve Ballmer’s getting a lot of (unsolicited) advice these days about what Microsoft ought to do. You can find one of the more thoughtful contributions in this morning’s New York Times. Check out Randall Stross’s piece in the Times, where he quotes MIT professor Michael Cusumano, warning against acquiring an “old-style Internet asset, in decline, and at a premium.”

No doubt Larry Ellison would speed-dial government regulators the moment any such announcement hit the wires. Since the busting of the Internet bubble, Oracle has reconfigured itself through a relentless acquisition strategy of its own. Most of the credit should go to Ellison lieutenants Charles Phillips and Safra Katz. They’ve spent billions, but the deals all have made sense.