(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider Peak 10 (www.peak10.com) announced on Wednesday it has expanded its management team with several new executive appointments. The company recently hired Karin Davies as vice president of human resource...

One of the many differences between Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft's previous attempts at producing a mobile phone operating system is that the new platform's user interface will be locked down and consistent. Windows Mobile handset manufacturers would often use custom front-ends as a unique selling point, but on Windows Phone 7, that won't be an option. The Metro interface that has been widely demonstrated will be the only UI available. A choice of color scheme is likely to be the only real modification possible.

For the handset vendors, losing the ability to skin the interface, and hence differentiate their products from the competition, may well be an unattractive prospect. In response, it looks like Microsoft is going to help them write appealing custom applications to reinstate that differentiation. A job advertised by the company is looking for a developer to work with a Korean OEM (most likely LG, perhaps Samsung) to help produce unique software to win over consumers.

Whatever these custom applications turn out to be, they're still going to be limited in scope. OEMs will be limited to providing up to six applications taking no more than 60MB, and for the most part will be limited to the same Silverlight API as third-party developers. OEMs will have a handful of—unspecified—extra APIs to work with, but even with these, the days of radically different front-ends on Microsoft-powered phones are coming to an end.

OEMs aren't the only developers that Redmond is trying to entice to its new platform. An iPhone application developer approached PoetGamerck.biz claiming that he'd been offered up-front cash to port his successful iPhone games to Microsoft's new platform.

The amount of money was claimed to be substantial, but not enough to justify the porting effort. iPhone software is written in Objective-C and/or C++, using OpenGL ES for graphics. Migrating to C# and XNA (the managed DirectX-like API used for Windows Phone 7 games) is likely to be a sizable undertaking. Perhaps surprisingly, the source also suggested that Microsoft wouldn't have to change too much to make such ports economically viable. Even if true, the fundamentals of the platform—the use of managed code and C#—are unlikely to change in the near future.

Read the comments on this post

At this year's Game Developer's Choice Awards, Vavle's Gabe Newell won the Pioneer Award, and he used the opportunity to share a slide show with the crowd of developers, press, and business people. His message? DRM is not good for business.

He spoke about DRM adding negative worth to products, and his remarks were greeted by loud and enthusiastic applause. 

"One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it's an attitude that says 'what have I done for my customers today?'" he said. "It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get into that mindset it helps you avoid things like some of the Digital Rights Management problems that actually make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them."

Of course, Steam is itself DRM pretending to be a service, but as long as gamers are willing to trade the ability to sell their games or have a physical copy for the added features and convenience offered, Newell will continue to have a good thing going. DRM isn't going away, but at the very least its harmful effects can be minimized.

Read the comments on this post

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- HP (www.hp.com) announced on Wednesday that it has launched its HP Cloud Services private beta program. HP says it has made early access available for users to test and provide input on its two initial cloud services: HP C...

Following the WWDC keynote, reader reaction to the just-announced iPhone 4 was mostly positive. The new and improved screen, front-facing camera, and iMovie for iPhone are all attractive features that have plenty of users deciding to upgrade or make the switch. However, there are still reasons for some users to avoid buying the iPhone: it's still tied to AT&T here in the US, and the App Store is still a walled garden.

Apple announced that iPhone 4 would be available in stores on June 24, but with preorders starting tomorrow morning, we want to know if you are planning to buy an iPhone 4. If not, what are your reasons? Vote in the poll and let the rest of the world know in the comments.

Final Fantasy games often seem like a mixed bag. One one hand, they tend to take too long to get into; the first ten hours or so always feel like something you have to slog through before things really become exciting. After a while, the battles can start to feel repetitive. They eat up more of our time than we really should allow. But they're also beautiful. And epic. Once the stories get going, they're fascinating. More importantly, they become addictive. Such games are definitely an acquired taste, but they're a delicacy for those of us who have come to enjoy JRPGs.

Final Fantasy XIII is particularly noteworthy in an already extraordinary series, though, because it brings about a number of design changes. While the game retains the amazing production values that the franchise is famous for, its gameplay has been modified to deliver something that feels faster paced than its predecessors and often seems more like an action title than a proper RPG. This might sound worrying to dedicated fans, but rest assured: based on our first twenty hours with the game, the outcome is excellent.

I don't have a problem admitting that I'm tired. Like Uncle Carl used to say, "Saturday I woke up (I usually get out of bed between 5am and 6am) and it was still quite warm outside - 80F. I got up yesterday and it was rather cool - 44F. It's like going from the peak of summer to the middle of fall in a heartbeat. The weather decides to remind us who's in charge every once in a while.

The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group has developed a new lens that lets you watch three-dimensional content without 3D glasses. The new lens is thinner at the bottom (about 6mm) than at the top (11mm) and steers light to a viewer's eyes via LEDs along its bottom edge. The 3D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer the light; the idea isn't new, but the required CPU power is now affordable and small enough to pull it off on a large scale.

Various companies have shown off 3D displays that don't require glasses, but those sets often use lenticular lenses, which are integrated into the display and project different images in two fixed directions. As a result, the viewer needs to be in a designated zone to experience 3D. Microsoft's prototype display, however, can deliver 3D video to two viewers at the same time by presenting different images to their left and right eyes (one video for each), regardless of where they are. It can also show ordinary 2D video for up to four people simultaneously (one video for each person).

Traditional lenses found in projectors sit between a point of light and its focal point, which is why viewer-tracking 3D systems are often bulky. The design of Microsoft's wedge lens bypasses this problem, as the light is traveling within the lens and not in the air (the focal point is thus the flat surface of the wedge), minimizing the distance between the projector and the screen. The LEDs control the position and angle of the light as it enters the bottom edge of the lens and, as a result, the direction the light comes out. The viewer-tracking cameras, meanwhile, collect light traveling the other way through the lens. The system's viewing angle is about 20°, but Microsoft hopes to tweak the lens design and increase it to 40°. That would be an improvement, but 40° still isn't that hot.

Since the lens is thin, it can be incorporated into a standard liquid crystal display (LCD), replacing the traditional backlight; light from the lens shines through the liquid crystals to project the images to viewers. Picture quality is limited by the screen's refresh rate, and so Microsoft is pushing display manufacturers to make faster LCDs. Separately, the company is looking into how the lens can be used as the backlight of a laptop that can project images to either one person or to multiple people.

Read the comments on this post