Wii boosts Nintendo's bottom line

Nintendo's profit for the first nine months of the fiscal year nearly doubled from the previous year, propelled by booming sales of its hit Wii game machine.

The company said group net profit at Nintendo, which also makes Super Mario and Pokemon games, totaled 258.93 billion yen ($US2.43 billion) for the nine months ended December 31, up 96.3 per cent from 131.92 billion yen for the same period in fiscal 2006.

Nintendo didn't give a quarterly breakdown.

The Wii, with its wandlike remote-controller, is winning over novices - including the elderly and women - to video games.

The machines, which first went on sale in late 2006, have been snatched up as soon as they arrive at stores, outstripping the competing Play Station 3 from Sony and Xbox 360 from Microsoft.

Nintendo said it has now sold more than 20 million Wii machines worldwide, 14.29 million of them during the latest three quarters.

New Wii games, including "Wii Fit," "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Wii Sports," have been a success.

Sales during the nine months jumped rose 84.7 per cent from a year ago to 1.316 trillion yen ($US12.35 billion) from 712.59 billion.

The Kyoto-based company kept its profit forecast at 275 billion yen ($US2.58 billion), for the full fiscal year through March 31, but raised its sales forecast to 1.63 trillion yen ($US15.29 billion), up from an earlier estimate of 1.55 trillion yen.

Nintendo said its DS portable machine, which comes with a touch panel, has also been very popular, marking 24.5 million units in sales during the nine months through December 2007, adding to cumulative sales of 64.79 million.

The DS has also introduced new kinds of gaming, including brain teasers, virtual pets and cooking recipes.

Nintendo said it expects to sell 18.5 million Wii's and 29.5 million DS machines for the fiscal year through March 31.

Nintendo shares slipped 2.4 per cent in Tokyo to 53,200 yen ($US499) shortly before earnings were released.

Gmail Storage hit 6GB

Gmail storage today hit just over 6 GB of storage for their email accounts. Google Apps accounts sit at 6069 MB and Gmail accounts sit at 6073 MB.

Google Apps is a service that Google provide webmasters to administrate email accounts for their domain so that email is @yourdomain.com and is not hosted by your webhost so that your webhost space is not used for emails.

Google Apps comes in a variety of flavours but the two important ones are free and enterprise.

Free includes 1000 user accounts each with 6069 MB of storage for emails. The Enterprise editions include 25 GB of storage for each email account but comes at a price of $50 per user per year.

These services are continually being improved with Google continuing to create new software for use on the internet to combine with their email such as their online spreadsheet and word processor.

All of these services Google has created run off AJAX an extension of JavaScript(not Java) which allows parts of a page to be refreshed without the need for the whole page to be refreshed speeding up the delivery of data between server and client.

WeberTalk - An Upcoming IT Blog???

WeberTalk an upcoming IT blog was started in July 2007. It has great potential in the areas of promoting google services and promoting new features, creating forum signatures for free and maximising profit just for starters at the time being.

This is a webmaster blog for webmasters to find out about some services they may be using.

To find out more about WeberTalk and to visit the blog visit http://webertalk.blogspot.com/ .

Website Coding And Testing

When you create a webpage or website using standard html, css and other programming languages you should check your pages with W3C the standards Consortium for HTML and CSS by going to http://validator.w3.org/. This was set up to try and ensure that websites all reached a certain standard to ensure the best possible browser compatibility across different browsers such as Netscape, Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE) and other browsers.

This however is not where testing should stop as browsers like IE have not been built to deal with code in the right way or as set out by the Standards Consortium and this is why you should also check your that your website displays properly in 2 or 3 of the most used browsers.

Another point to think about before you start coding your webpages or website is what other programming languages you are going to use and what browsers you would like to support and how old the browsers you are going to support are. I would suggest you should support IE as a must, firefox, Netscape and Opera (the Mac browser) as a minimum and by testing in these browsers most other browsers should be able to display your site correctly.

Online Gaming Site - KnightFight

I found an online gaming site the other day called KnightFight located at http://world6.knightfight.co.uk/index.php . The site is quite good and fun to play although you don't get to actually fight you just tell the character to go on a mission and he/she comes back with the money you earn't on the mission and then you can go and upgrade your estate and equip your character with more weapons, etc.

The only concern I have is when you refresh the page you get ad's that pop up and there is a section where you can pay for a premium account.

I was wondering whether anyone else had played this game before and what their thoughts were on it?

I would like to see actually being able to fight others which would make the game a lot more worthwhile.

New Logo for Wired - Wired.profusehost.net

Wired has a new logo, seen below.

We would like to know what people think about it and what we could do to improve it?

Which do you like more the blue or the red based text logo?

Wired.profusehost.net is now PR 2

Wired.profusehost.net has reached a Page Rank (PR) of 2 with Google. We checked the page rank by using the site http://pr.blogflux.com/index2.php .

We are currently in the process of re-designing and upgrading our site which is in the aim to attract more visitors to our site and to increase the page ranking and thus popularity of our site.