Nathan reports ,according to NPD sales data, Wii topped with sales of $436,000 units in January. XBOX 360 followed in at 294,000 and PS3 recorded 244,000 units sold.

Here are the figures today from Nexgenwars showing the total consoles sold for each brand since their respective launch.

Growth Rate:
Wii - 4 months since launch - 4.7m units - 1.17m units/month
Xbox 360 - 16 months since launch - 10.6m units - 662K units/month
PS3 - 4 months since launch - 1.5m units - 375k/month

Clearly Wii is growing presently at double the rate of Xbox 360 and more than triple the rate of PS3. But the real question is will it sustain the same growth rate ? Xbox 360 prices will eventually be slashed. And new Xbox 360 games have been doing pretty well. Crackdown for example has had a great start already.

via blognewschannel
via nexgenwars

WiseGeek has a page which visually explains what 200 calories look like.

via anandjain

Long has a funny Mac Vs PC cartoon made with South Park characters. He also has a bare Linux guy who shouts "I run Linux". :)

For a quiet a few days I have been meaning to write about the brand name changes between Live and MSN. So here is a quick summary

1) Windows Live Mail changes to Windows Live Hotmail
2) Windows Live Shopping to die. MSN Shopping to stay.
3) Windows Live Wi-fi to go under MSN's hat.

2) and 3) are not much of a problem. Wi-fi is not even a public beta. And I do not think Windows Live Shopping was getting as much attention either. But the change from Windows Live Mail to Windows Live Hotmail was a major one that came a little late.

It can be argued that all of these changes are good strategic decisions. But late-good decisions are usually bad. Lets hope this one is not.

There is a already a lot of confusion. Does this fall under MSN? Does this fall under Live?  And right when people were starting to digest MSN as content driven and Live as user driven (service), soapbox landed in the lap of MSN.

There are a lot of questions that Microsoft will have answer going forward:

1) What is the difference between MSN and Windows Live ?
2) What more existing services to rebrand ? Expo ?
3) What about OneCare ?

Sidebar Geek has done a what next analysis. Its an hypothesis which I agree with; According to SidebarGeek Live should constitute the following and the rest goes to MSN.

• Windows Live Portal (Live.com, Live Search, Live QnA, Live Search Maps, Macros, etc)
• Windows Live Hotmail
• Windows Live Spaces
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Gallery (for Live.com Gadgets and Sidebar Gadgets and Add-ons for Windows Live products)
• Windows Live for Mobile (and Live Search for Mobile)

Also, the following should fall under Windows Live

• Windows Live Writer
• Windows Live Favorites
• Windows Live Mail Desktop

And Microsoft should not make the mistake of re-branding Windows Live Mail Desktop to Windows Live Hotmail Desktop

Because Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Mail desktop are different products. The former is an email service provided by Microsoft. And the latter (Mail Desktop) lets you have any of your mail (whether Gmail or AOL or Hotmail) on your desktop in one place.

Nathan has a couple of cool Crackdown videos. As he says

this cool video that explains in one way just the kind of ridiculously stupid fun you can have in Crackdown (and why I’m buying the game) 

 
Video: Crackdown footage

LiveSide reports that Live Search Maps have released a very useful Sidebar gadget which shows realtime traffic information. If you are running Vista this is a must download.

This sidebar get currently supports the following 24 cities.

Nathan has a detailed post on this.

via LiveSide
via blognewschannel

This is awesome. I can share my personalized Live.com homepage template(any page) with anyone. I can even make it public by uploading to Windows Live Gallery.

The "Share" icon is what can be used to share your homepage.

Just a few days back my fiancee asked me to create personalized page for her similar to my "News" page. And I had been procrastinating(for good :-)). Now I can just share mine.

Windows Live Gallery has more templates and collections.

via LiveSide

The first week of Office 2007 saw strong sales thanks to lesser priced Student edition, CNET reports. 

CNET reports:

Office 2007 unit sales exceeded first-week sales of Office 2003 by 108.3 percent, according to a preliminary report released Monday by the NPD Group, a consumer and retail trade researcher.

Bloomberg news reports that  Windows Vista  spurred a 67 percent increase in personal- computer sales at U.S. retail stores in its first week on the market.

HP was the top seller with its share rising by 17% followed by Gateway. Dell does not sell through stores so it was not included.

via bloomberg

Alright. Alright. I gave that title because it just seemed more interesting and engaging (at least to the geeks). These are not our QWERTY (desktop computer) keyboards. But the musical ones. And yes, Microsoft makes software for them too.

Nathan says:

Open Labs makes keyboards (that’s musical keyboards, not QWERTY keyboards, ya dope) that run Windows XP under the NeKo and MiKo brand. These monster “keyboard workstations” use some pretty powerful Intel processors (often 2.4GHz Core 2 Duos or 3 GHz Pentiums) and can cost between $2,500-$4,000.

The Neko and Miko Windows-based keyboards were used during Prince’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl XLI.

More @ MicroMiel

via blognewschannel

Amnesty Generator for Vista is a sweet program which converts web widgets into Windows Sidebar gadgets according to Sidebar Geek.

I tried it out and converted an Xbox Gamertag widget into a Sidebar widget. 

Blognewschannel has the complete coverage

via sidebargeek
via blognewschannel

  via ben61a

Microsoft is using all avenues possible to market Vista. And some of them are indeed unique. The MSN Weather now has a flip 3D version of for Weather maps. It is pretty cool and also very fast.

You can hover the mouse over different items under Current Maps and Forecast Maps for the items to flip 3D windows to cycle.

via Liveside

---

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

---

Very impressed by this concept. I had heard about network KVMs (or KVM's over IP) but this piece of software I found on source forge lets me share my keyboard and mouse across my two computers without any hardware via the network. Here is how the project site describes it:

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

That is what I thought when I first saw this beautifully taken picture browsing through the MSNBC photo blog.

A city municipal worker stands on a man-hole cover he removed to allow flood water in Riga's Krasta Street to drain away like bath water running down a plughole Monday 15th January 2007. Flooding in the Latvian city was caused by overnight stormy weather that brought torrential rail. (Andrejs Strokins/EPA)

via msnbcphotoblog