NetFlipper.com

After kicking off on Monday, the Game Developers Conference being held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center is well underway, and today the conference brought in one of the industry’s most respected executives, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, to deliver a keynote address.

Iwata, who last took the stage at GDC just before releasing the Wii in 2006, took no time to tell the audience of peers and press that Nintendo has shipped more than 50 million units of its popular Wii gaming console worldwide, making it the fastest-selling game console in history.

In the month of February alone, 750,000 of Nintendo’s Wii consoles were sold in the United States, according to the NPD Group. In the same month, Microsoft sold 391,000 Xbox 360 units and Sony sold 276,000 PlayStation 3 units.

Nintendo has also sold 588,000 portable DS players, while Sony sold just under 200,000 PlayStation Portable units.

“It is in the power of game developers to invent things that gamers have never seen — or even imagined — before,” Iwata said.

Third-Party Developers

After briefly talking about the success of Nintendo’s Wii, Iwata did not hesitate addressing what has been on third-party developers’ minds for some time: whether they can continue to successfully sell their games on the Wii platform.

More third-party games were sold for the Wii last year than for any other platform, Iwata said, according to GameSpot, which blogged live during the event.

“We all work in a time of rapid change,” Iwata told the audience. “When this is the case, it is normal for people, even game developers, to feel unsettled.”

“Other people believe that only Nintendo software [is successful] on Nintendo systems,” Iwata added. “Later, I will explain why this is not the case, but that I understand the concern.”

Surprises for Consumers

Before announcing a few surprises for consumers, the…

The Great Firewall of China was activated earlier this week, as the eastern nation moved to block all access in the country to the online video-sharing service YouTube.

According to reports first published by the BBC, China shut off access in response to the posting of a video depicting a raid by hundreds of Chinese army soldiers on a Tibetan monastery. The video includes graphic footage of a man being beaten with batons and a group of men (including a monk) being assaulted while lying on the ground.

There is no information regarding when the film was shot or at what location.

YouTube Slowly Disappears

Following the posting of the video over the weekend, Google noticed on Monday that less YouTube traffic was flowing to China. As of Tuesday morning, traffic had stopped altogether.

According to Google spokesperson Scott Rubin, China didn’t inform the company that it was blocking YouTube, and hasn’t offered an explanation. “We don’t know the reason for the block,” Rubin said, “and [we] are working to restore access to users in China as quickly as possible.”

There has been limited direct comment from the Chinese government, apart from a statement at a news conference early in the week in which a spokesperson said, “We encourage the active use of the Internet, but also manage the Internet according to law.”

International Controversy

This is the second Tibet-related block of YouTube by China in the past year. In March 2008, a similar shutdown followed the uploading of video clips showing riots in the streets of Tibet.

The move to cut off access for Chinese citizens has been condemned by human-rights groups. In a statement to the BBC, the Center for Democracy and Technology accused China of failing “to live up to international norms.”

“China’s apparent blocking of YouTube is at odds with the rule of law and the…

Tuesday’s session of the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco opened with a provocative topic: Why the iPhone Has Changed Everything. For an industry that has long regarded Apple as an afterthought when it comes to serious gaming, it was an eye-opening presentation.

The talk was delivered by Neil Young, founder and CEO of ngmoco, one of the leading developers of games for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Among the company’s titles are the popular Word Fu, Rolando, Topple, Dropship, and Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon M.D.

Functionality is the Key

As an introduction to the power of the iPhone in the gaming industry, Young reviewed the market battle between the handheld Nintendo DS and the Sony PlayStation Portable. He argued that although the PSP may have superior technical specifications, the DS proved more popular because it offered greater functionality.

That positions the iPhone to be a particularly powerful platform, Young suggested, because of the enormous number of features built into the device. Future games will be able to take advantage of the iPhone’s social-networking capabilities, its camera, the contact list, the weather app, and so on. In Young’s words, game developers will be able to “leverage every surface of the device.”

ABI research analyst Zippy Aima agreed with Young. “In the current scenarios,” she said, “the iPhone indeed is a revolutionary product. Earlier gaming was limited to portable video-game devices, and then came along the likes of Nintendo and now we have the iPhone, which is a complete package, including gaming.”

Superheated Market

If ngmoco is any indication, iPhone games are a significant part of the success of Apple’s App Store. Young told the audience that ngmoco games have been installed on more than seven million devices.

“The market is superheated. The pace of adoption is going way faster than the DS,” he said….

Michael Dell may have been speaking from halfway around the world, but the voice of the CEO for a $20 billion company carries a long way. The topic was small-screen devices and specifically smartphones, a market with which Dell has flirted with but never quite taken the plunge. But Dell said that may change.

“It is true that we are exploring smaller-screen devices,” he said. “We don’t have any announcements to share today, but stay tuned, as when we have new news we will share that with you.”

Crowded Market

The biggest question surrounding the possibility of a Dell smartphone product is whether it’s simply too late. “The smartphone market is cluttered and crowded,” said Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. Moreover, Sterling added, the market is overwhelmingly dominated by Apple’s iPhone, which makes it very difficult for new entries to distinguish themselves.

In fact, there are reports emerging that last year, Dell built a prototype smartphone that was rejected by the major cellular carriers for a variety of reasons, including a thin set of features, lackluster design, and cost.

Now new rumors are circulating that Dell might try to leapfrog into the smartphone race by purchasing Palm, a company increasingly short on cash and in need of a major boost from the soon-to-be-released Pre.

“I think the possibility that Dell might buy Palm is an interesting story,” Sterling said. “Palm’s predicament is that too many expectations are being heaped on the Pre. It’s an interesting phone, but it can’t carry the whole company, which will undoubtedly disappoint investors.”

Mobile Internet Device?

A more interesting possibility, Sterling suggested, would be for Dell to consider manufacturing a device larger than a smartphone that might have more capabilities.

“In the field of mobile Internet devices,” he said, “there are some really interesting possibilities. If you solve the connection problem,…

A new wireless video game console is debuting in Brazil. Dubbed Zeebo, its makers are billing it as the first affordable 3-D game console designed specifically for emerging global markets — and it’s backed by Qualcomm.

Secure 3G wireless game delivery is one of Zeebo’s hallmarks. The console fills a gap in emerging markets where content for the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PlayStation 3 is too expensive for the middle class, or is not culturally or locally relevant. Software piracy also makes these markets unattractive for content providers.

“The Zeebo console will deliver a truly engaging and entertaining gaming experience to a potential billion new consumers around the world, many of whom have never experienced gaming in the home,” said John Rizzo, CEO of Zeebo. “The system provides an intuitive, quick and easy-to-use home-shopping user experience featuring popular, culturally optimized content from leading game publishers and developers around the world. It also delivers high value and warranty protection compared to gray-market products, with no need for a separate wireless access plan.”

Untapped Consumer Markets

The Zeebo system ships with four embedded games and gives users the ability to download a fifth title free. It carries a suggested retail price of US$199 in Brazil. That’s nearly one-fifth the price of mainstream leading consoles. In other international markets, Zeebo is expected to retail for less than US$179 this year and well below US$149 in volume next year.

Game publishers and developers like Capcom, Com2uS, Digital Chocolate, EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu, Id Software, Machineworks Northwest, Namco Networks and THQ are porting console, PC, dedicated handheld, and high-end mobile titles to the Zeebo platform.

“Zeebo is bringing an innovative console and distribution model to untapped consumer markets with significant potential,” said Michael Pachter, director of research for Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Can Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser reclaim chunks of market share swiped by upstart Firefox?

The arrival last week of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), just two years after Microsoft’s last major browser upgrade, IE7, should help answer that question.

IE8, which can be downloaded free, has cool new features: “Web slices” let you quickly call up selected content from a Web page — such as updates from an eBay auction page — via the IE8 favorites bar; “accelerators” make it easier to cut and paste text from one page and insert it on another.

Beyond that, IE8 has restored some of Microsoft’s lost bravado. Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, insists IE8 is uniformly faster at loading Web pages than Firefox 3, despite debate in tech circles about this claim.

“I feel very good that IE8 will be a reason to keep using IE,” Nash said in an interview. “And for our previous customers, who may not be using IE today, IE8 will be a compelling reason to come back.”

Web browsers were once so mundane that Microsoft took five years to upgrade IE6, introduced with Windows XP in 2001, to IE7. Millions still use IE6. Meanwhile, Firefox, introduced in late 2004, has racked up significant market share and popularized features, such as tab browsing, which lets you quickly click back to several open Web pages.

As of last month, Firefox commanded a 22 percent global market share vs. 68 percent for IE, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, Opera, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are staking out potentially huge new turf for browsers on computing devices other than laptops and desktop PCs.

Web browsers have emerged as the doorway to an interactive Internet, which people are increasingly accessing on mobile devices, cars, TV recorders, even video gaming consoles. “We’re really happy to see Microsoft…