June 2nd, 2009

Microsoft has planned to make the company’s Xbox 360 game console an entrance for movies, television and social networking, and to realize the plan the company has  set up new relationships with social networking firms Facebook, Twitter and Sky, British satellite television provider which is a unit of the News Corporation.

Using the renovated game console, Microsoft said, Facebook users will be able to access their profiles and share photos on their television through the Xbox Live network, and Twitter devotees will also be able to post and read messages through the service.

Even Microsoft’s new deal with Sky will allow Xbox Live users in Britain to watch live television that consists of professional soccer on an Internet version of the Sky service. But not every channel available over satellite will be available over Xbox Live, and the offering will include dozens of stations.

Microsoft has since long strived to play a role in home television by building its own set-top box business. Partnering with Sky represents a back door into the television market. The company has also recognized how Nintendo has expanded the traditional audience for video games with its innovative motion-sensitive controller for the Wii. Microsoft provided the first public demonstration of its futuristic Project Natal, which it hopes will usher in an age of completely controller-free gaming.

Using a sophisticated camera, infrared sensors and voice recognition software, Natal allows users to control a game or other programs, like a virtual painting studio, merely by waving their arms, speaking to the system and moving around.

Apple welcomes companies who intends to have their products placed in its commercials or in the other prime real estate, the “Featured” section of the App Store and does not accept money from those companies.

For this, Apple has gained applause from software developers and backers like  Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “Apple doesn’t want the money. It’s a level playing field. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person or a 10,000-person company, as they’ll put it in New or ‘What’s Hot,” he said.

A developer easily gains entrance to that level playing field, by paying a nominal of US$99-a-year fee for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store.

It is often a slow process and has drawn the ire of many developers. But the worst that Apple has been accused of is maddening opacity, not discrimination.

Apple takes a 30% cut of App Store sales, a paltry slice compared with that exacted by other online stores in the past. Those that distributed software for the Palm Pilot, for example, took 50 to 70 percent of sales as their cut, according to Jeff Scott, founder of 148Apps.com, a Web site offering in-depth reviews of iPhone apps.

Apple also makes buying and downloading a snap, the app is dispatched wirelessly from the store to the iPhone and is ready to run in a few seconds.

For example, Apple’s legal department called Mitchell Waite and left a voice message last February, asking him to call back. Waite thought he was about to be sued, as he has a tiny software company that bears his name and has no full-time employees, and  whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.

IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from US$4.99 to US$29.99.

“I look at it like Apple paid me US$10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show - no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Waite said.

It is, indeed, a delightful story - not only because it does not involve a lawsuit, but also because it does not involve promotion fees.

Microsoft’s E3 keynote Project Natal come to the Xbox 360, you are the controller to play. It’s real, the project using camera tech developed by 3DV. The video sorts keynote of use-your-whole-body gameplay applications.