Move your body to Wii Fit

Marc Saltzman
Special to the Star
If you’ve been procrastinating on your New Year’s resolution to exercise more, the Nintendo Wii console might hold the incentive you need to get moving.

Announced on Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Nintendo’s unique Wii Fit product will be available on May 19.

When used with the bundled Wii Balance Board peripheral, which looks like a regular bathroom scale, Nintendo Wii owners can exercise, stretch and do yoga with on-screen avatars – all designed to help keep you fit and lose weight.

For example, you may be asked to step on and off the wireless board in time with music or keep one foot on the board while lifting another up towards your waist.

Fun mini-games will also be included, such as using your body to ski downhill, leaning left or right to head-butt soccer balls out of a net or rolling marbles around so that they fall into a hole in the floor – without falling off the edge.

Wii Fit will also include access to the Wii Fit Channel, an interactive online channel that lets users check in daily to track fitness progress through weight and body mass index (BMI).

Nintendo has not yet confirmed the price for the Wii Fit and Balance Board bundle.

At GDC, Nintendo also announced WiiWare, a new digital distribution game service set to launch May 12, which allows consumers to download new games directly to the console, including episodic content, while also giving game developers a platform to test out new ideas with lower financial risk.

Xbox opens its doors to developers

Speaking of digitally distributing video games, Microsoft announced on Wednesday at GDC it would soon allow its 10 million Xbox Live members to download, play and rate community-created games.

While Microsoft already offers downloadable Xbox Live Arcade titles over the Internet, opening up the platform to developers will make it the largest library of video games, with more than 1,000 titles available by year’s end.

As a taste of what’s to come, seven new independent games are now available to download from the Xbox Live Marketplace, including the arcade racer JellyCar, action side-scroller Little Gamers and the TriLinea puzzle game.

Google offers tools for building websites

Feb 28, 2008 

Michael Liedtke
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO–Google, already the world’s most popular spot for finding websites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating them.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is taking its first step toward that goal Thursday with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people working in the same company or attending the same class in school.

With only a few clicks, just about anyone will be able to quickly set up and update a website featuring wide an array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.’s YouTube subsidiary, said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application.

“We are literally adding an edit button to the Web,” Girouard said.

All sites created on the service will run on one of Google’s computers.

Google acquired many of the website tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.

The tools are the latest addition to a bundle of applications that Google offers to consumers and businesses as alternatives to similar products sold by Microsoft Corp., one of Google’s fiercest rivals.

Google’s latest service represents a challenge to Microsoft’s SharePoint, which charges licensing fees. Google is unveiling its alternative just a few days before Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft hosts a SharePoint conference in Seattle.

While Microsoft’s programs typically are installed on individual computers, Google keeps its application on its own machines so users can access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.

By gradually introducing free versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and calendaring programs over the past two years, Google has been threatening to siphon revenue away from Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software sales.

Microsoft, in turn, hopes to take a bite of out Google’s bread-and-butter in online search and advertising by buying Yahoo Inc. for more than $40 billion.

Google says more than 500,000 companies, government agencies and schools use at least some of its applications. The company won’t say how many of those organizations subscribe to a premium version of its software suite, but the fees haven’t made much of a dent at Google so far.

Last year, Google’s software licensing and other products generated US$181 million in revenue while $16.4 billion poured in from advertising.