By Fred Schruers at TheWrap

By Vito Pilieci, Postmedia News

OTTAWA - Microsoft Corp. rolled out the new dashboard for its Xbox 360 console on Wednesday, bringing mainstream television programming to millions of Canadian Xbox owners.

 

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The Microsoft logo is seen at the XBOX 360 booth during the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif. Microsoft Corp. has just rolled out the new dashboard for its Xbox 360 console.

The company, which has partnered with cable providers in other countries, announced Monday that the Rogers On Demand service, LeafsTV and DisneyXD will all be offering TV content to viewers through the Xbox 360 gaming console.

The initiative is another push by Microsoft to make the Xbox gaming console the heart of entertainment systems. The console has allowed users to play video games and DVDs since it was initially released in 2005.

It was updated early on to allow users to play music and movies stored on a nearby computer. In more recent years, Microsoft has added Facebook connectivity, Netflix and Internet radio to be streamed over the device. The announcement marks the first time the console has streamed TV shows from major networks and providers into the living rooms of Canadian consumers.

"It's been a passion in terms of how we've been evolving the Xbox platform," said Glenn Purkis, Microsoft Canada Xbox Live manager.

By Alex Thayer, PartnerPoint Contributing Writer

The business of digital games is booming. Sales are estimated to exceed $70 billion by 2015, and the potential for growth is better than ever given the strength of the console and online gaming markets. But like all software products, digital games must be localized for different markets around the world, a process that can be costly without the right approach, knowledge, and expectations. Without specific knowledge about how to localize games and capitalize on the huge worldwide market, your entry into that market will be far less likely to turn a profit.

 

What is localization, exactly? Localization is the process of modifying a product, solution, or service for a specific culture, locale, language, country, or community. Localization is a strategic process that requires a great deal of planning and active management to complete in a successful manner. As the Internet and digital technology have changed the ways in which companies interact with clients, and the ways in which countries interact with each other, localization has become an area of specialization for members of the technical and professional communication and software development industries. Large software companies increasingly regard localization as an essential activity; localization managers who guide the process of making a software application usable for different cultures are a growing component of the workforce.

How Kinect could apply to art, education, health and other domains.

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | 

By Chris Foresman

Microsoft is enticing gamers with a $400 entertainment bundle that will include the Xbox 360 250GB video-game console, the Kinect motion sensor and one game. The bundled Kinect-ready Xbox is the slimmer, glossy black console introduced in June at the E3 game conference. The console, which includes built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi, costs $300 by itself.

Today at gamescom 2010, the world’s largest consumer-oriented games showcase, Microsoft Corp. premiered the first wave of Xbox LIVE games launching on Windows Phone 7 this holiday. With even more games and applications to come, Windows Phone 7 is putting the power of Xbox LIVE into the palm of your hand — from Xbox LIVE Avatars to staying connected with friends, Xbox LIVE is now at your fingertips, anytime, anywhere.^*

Months before the launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is offering a glimpse of a mobile gaming experience that aims to stand apart.

Today at Gamescom 2010, the world’s largest gaming conference underway in Cologne, Germany, Microsoft announced the first wave of video games that will be available for Windows Phone 7 at launch or shortly after. The first 50 titles – a mix of new and familiar games that target both the casual and hardcore gamer – are just a sampling of what will ship this holiday, said Kevin Unangst, senior director of PC and mobile gaming. But the list conveys the wide range of video games that will be available on Windows Phone 7.

At Hot Chips today, Microsoft's Xbox team unveiled details of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that powers the newer, slimmer Xbox 360 250GB model. Produced on the IBM/GlobalFoundries 45nm process, it's fair to say that the new SoC (pictured above) is the first mass-market, desktop-class processor to combine a CPU, GPU, memory, and I/O logic onto a single piece of silicon. The goal of the consolidation was, of course, to lower the cost of making the console by reducing the number of different chips needed for the system, shrinking the motherboard, and reducing the number of expensive fans and heatsinks.

Whoops! In a strange turn of events, the next installment in one of Microsoft's most beloved (and lucrative) video gaming franchises, Halo, has been leaked.

Microsoft unveiled the first wave of games for the Windows 7 smartphone operating system on Tuesday at the GamesCom 2010 conference in Cologne, Germany.

At the on-going gamescon 2010 convention, Square Enix has announced  new sprint action game called Gun Loco exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console. Gun Loco is a third person shooter that will offer single player as well as multiplayer gaming options. Square Enix claims that this game will bring a new approach to the third-person shooter genre.

We recently heard a new announcement from Microsoft’s end for its upcoming video game, Fable III. After alluring gamers with the Village Maker Tool, the company has now introduced the official Fable III Limited Edition Wireless Controller for Xbox 360.

If an invitation provided to Joystiq by several tipsters is accurate, Microsoft will soon begin the "Xbox Live and Kinect Beta Program." Several readers claim to have received the invitation via Microsoft Connect, a Microsoft service used to gather customer feedback on its products. The invitation itself includes little information about the program, though it notes that participants will be provided with "a unique opportunity to see pre-release software."

 Kinect is more than an Xbox 360 peripheral, it's the future of Microsoft, or at least a very possible one. It's the beginning of Microsoft's plans for natural user interfaces, the step beyond the thing you're staring at right now.

Kinect is as much a product of serendipity as anything else. When Microsoft hired Dr. Ilan Spillinger, VP of hardware and technology for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, it was to be "deeply engaged on the next-generation Xbox." Microsoft was looking to go beyond the Wii for its next big project, and about two and a half years ago, it started looking at natural user interfaces. At the same time, it had started looking at 3D cameras and input systems. Virtually in parallel, all of the necessary technology pieces to make Kinect fell into place—in particular, PrimeSense's 3D sensor.

What Microsoft considers revolutionary about Kinect—and they do consider it revolutionary—isn't that it tracks your body with full depth mapping, or responds to voice commands, or that it has a standard video camera: It's that it brings all of three of those things together for the first time. It's natural user interface in its infancy.

Raghu Murthi, the general manager for Natural User Interface Hardware, is holding a Kinect, stripped naked, as a dozen people gawk at its innards. The exposed metal seems cold. He's telling us about the optical system—how it sees with the three holes in its head that seem like eyes. Without the plastic housing they look like they're bulging out. We're at the beginning of day-long tour of Kinect, gathered in the Great Room, the living room you wish had, but tucked behind a sliding wall inside one of the many food courts on Microsoft's sprawling campus. 3D sensing has been around for 15 years, Raghu explains. What Microsoft has done, he says, is taken 3D depth-mapping technology that typically costs $10,000 to $150,000, and made it at volume, for cheap.

The way the optical system works, on a hardware level, is fairly basic. A class 1 laser is projected into the room. The sensor is able to detect what's going on based on what's reflected back at it. Together, the projector and sensor create a depth map. The regular old video camera is held at a specific distance away from the 3D part of the optical system in a precise alignment, so that Kinect can blend together the depth map and RGB picture for dynamic, on-the-fly greenscreening.