Industry news

Good news for Xbox 360 owners: Microsoft's Major Nelson has confirmed last week's reports of USB storage coming to the Xbox 360. And it's coming soon.

The software update that will make it happen is due April 6, giving gamers only a week and a half more of having to rely on Microsoft's proprietary memory cards and hard drives for system storage expansion--at least if they're happy with 32GB.

One detail that was confirmed from last week's leak--and that gamers might find disappointing--is the size limits on storage formatting are relatively quaint. As mentioned before, users can only have between 1GB and 16GB per USB storage device, and only two can be attached at once, maxing out external memory at 32GB. This also means you won't be able to re-purpose one of your old USB sticks as a memory device if they're smaller than 1GB, and that you can't utilize a large and cheap external hard disk drive as an alternative to Microsoft's existing hard drive options. Still, it's a step in the right direction for a console that will celebrate its fifth birthday this fall.

Nelson (whose real name is Larry Hryb and who is the director of programming for Xbox Live) also announced that Microsoft would soon be releasing Xbox-branded SanDisk USB sticks that come ready to be used right out of the box. Otherwise, to use the new storage feature on their own USB keys or external hard drives, gamers need to run a small formatting utility through the Xbox 360 dashboard. The SanDisk sticks are set to be released in May, though Hryb could not offer capacities or pricing.

This is, presumably, the only new feature that's going into April's system update. In the past, Microsoft has released periodic updates mid-year and near the holidays that add a handful of features. The last big one to go out was in November of last year, when Microsoft added apps for Twitter, Last.fm, and Facebook. It also completely overhauled its video store. In this case, fewer features could just be the result of the close proximity to E3, where Microsoft is set to unveil more details about its Project Natal motion-sensing technology and possibly even unveil a new iteration of the Xbox 360 hardware.

After the break, you can see some screens of the new memory management tools, which match up with the screenshots gaming blog Joystiq grabbed a hold of last week:… Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--The 2010 Demo Spring conference has come to an end, and in its wake we have a new crop of companies new and old with ideas that promise to make our cars, pockets, businesses, and living rooms better.

Prior to the start of the conference, we wrote up a few of the top companies to watch. And after seeing their presentations, we're naming our favorite pitches and products from the two-day conference.

Exaudios makes technology that can tell a person's mood by the tone in their voice. It's a potentially huge product for call … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Companies have been trying to shoehorn the Web onto consumer TV sets for the past 15 years. However very few have been able to turn it into a profitable business, or, at the very least, something that finds a balance between being powerful and easy to use from the couch.

Still, some of those early missteps have led to hardware makers now putting Web services like Netflix, Twitter, and Facebook into their latest TV sets and Blu-ray players. There's also a growing group of companies that are trying to bring the entirety of the Web to the living room instead.

Three of these are launching new product iterations this week at the DemoSpring conference: GlideTV, Hillcrest Labs' Kylo Browser, and Viaclix. All three attempt to bring a full Web-browsing experience to TV sets.

Hillcrest Labs has actually been kicking around since 2001, and introduced its "Loop" remote control in early 2007. This is a special circular mouse that has had its buttons and ergonomics optimized for use on the couch. The tech inside it was also the source of a patent dispute with Nintendo over its Wii remote controller.

What the company introduced at Demo was a new browser called Kylo that works on both PCs and Macs, and makes use of the company's Loop hardware to make it easy to hop around the Web, and Web video sites. While users are able to download Kylo free of charge, and without buying a $99 Loop remote, the company is hoping it will spur sales of the remote.

Also offering special mouse hardware was GlideTV, which introduced a revamped version of its couch-friendly browser. Unlike Hillcrest's Loop, GlideTV makes use of a touch pad. Though it too is about finding Web video content to watch in a nontraditional Web browser. Its big new feature is that it scours the Web for new content, then separates it into channels. The new version also adds predictive text input so users aren't pecking out too many characters in a text search. … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Gwabbit, the contact-slurping tool that launched at last year's Demo conference has made the much-needed shift to the cloud.

The new tool offering, which the company is calling the "gwab-o-sphere," takes the contact information gathered from incoming e-mails and syncs it with updated information from places like Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com. If changes are made by these users in any of these locations, the updated information is ferried back over to Gwabbit, where it's synced back out to all the clients with the Gwabbit plug-in installed.

The need for services like … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If you've ever lost your keys, phone, or both at the same time, a new company called Phone Halo has a tool for finding them.

Launching at the DemoSpring conference here, Phone Halo is a $60 gadget that turns your BlackBerry or Android phone into a handheld finder. Unlike some more traditional key finder hardware, however, Phone Halo integrates Bluetooth and GPS to create a tethered radius for your gadgets. So, if one of them goes out the door without the other, you get a message about it back on your phone, or through e-mail and even Twitter.

The hardware itself is a black module about the size of a car alarm dongle that packs a speaker, Bluetooth, and GPS antenna and can be attached to your keys, briefcase, or anything else. When your gadget goes missing, you can just open up the Phone Halo app on your phone, then toggle it to beep. The transmitters also can transmit a beep back to your phone, so you can hit a button on the unit to start ringing your handset. This works even if you have it set to silent, the same way Apple's "Find My iPhone" feature does on MobileMe. … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Flinc is one big idea that could save us all from the horrors of pricey cab rides. Unfortunately, it's years away from showing up in a major U.S. city.

The idea, as pitched in 90 seconds at this year's DemoSpring conference here, is that people who are driving around are often in a position to pick someone else up in return for some cold, hard cash--yet for much less than a taxi.

Sure, it's ride sharing with a receipt, Flinc's organizational system happens entirely in the cloud. The commands get sent … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If you thought Apple's App Store was getting crowded, we've got bad news. It's about to get worse.

Appwhirl and Appvoyage--a pair of new companies launching here at the DemoSpring conference, are trying to make the process of creating an iPhone app and submitting it to the App Store take less than five minutes and something that requires no programming prowess whatsoever. In fact, building them takes place right in your Web browser.

Are these apps capable of building mind-blowing games, or complex business apps? No. For both companies, the expectation seems to … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Among the many companies pitching at the DemoSpring conference, newcomer Visiarc is trying to solve an annoying problem. In this case, it's accessing and sharing large e-mail attachments on underpowered devices on congested networks.

While those two problems are slowly being solved by hardware-makers and the carriers, Visiarc wants to make the transition a little less painful with an app called Mobile Documents that simply streams in large attachments.

The tool, which is being launched first for Symbian 60 devices, changes the way your phone handles e-mail attachments. It lets users browse attachments page by page … Read more

Gadget skin maker Wrapsol this week introduced a new version of its thin adhesive protectors called Wrapsol Ultra that promises to keep your gadgets safe from drops up to 6 feet. And like the Slinky, Silly Putty, and Post-It notes, the technology was created almost by accident.

In a call with CNET on Friday, Wrapsol President Lew Cohen explained that while experimenting with different manufacturing processes for the adhesive layer of the skin, they ended up creating a compound that could take a lot of abuse.

"With more flexibility, we get more impact resistance," Cohen said. "We … Read more