86dn.net

It’s not clear what the memorandum of understanding involves, and whether it would be legally enforceable (by either party) and in which circumstances. Complicating matters is that Comcast doesn’t actually run its own Usenet servers. It outsources that to a third-party provider based in Austin, Texas, called Giganews, which previously confirmed to us that it had been contacted by Cuomo’s office.

Comcast responded this week by saying it signed a memorandum of understanding with Cuomo’s office. United Online’s NetZero also signed an agreement that deals with Usenet, the pre-Web collection of discussion groups.

But in reality, Cuomo’s pressure tactics have misfired. They led Time Warner Cable to pull the plug on some 100,000 Usenet discussion groups, including such hotbeds of illicit content as talk.politics and misc.activism.progressive. Verizon Communications deleted such unlawful discussion groups as us.military, ny.politics,Louis vuitton Watches, alt.society.labor-unions,OMEGA Watches, and alt.politics.democrats. AT&T and Time Warner Cable have taken similar steps.

New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s recent threats of adopting unspecified “legal remedies,” potentially including criminal prosecution, against Comcast apparently worked.

Cuomo, a Democrat, is pitching these agreements as a way to reduce the amount of child porn on Usenet. His latest prepared statement: “I commend the companies for working with my office to aggressively eradicate online child pornography and strongly urge all outstanding Internet service providers across New York and the nation to get on board.” His Web site even offers a handy “ISP complaint form.”

Comcast told us the agreement did not involve writing a handsome check to Cuomo, as Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint did. But it still has not answered questions we posed on Tuesday evening about what the agreement means,Gucci Watches, what will be done differently, and what Usenet newsgroups will be removed.

Later in the day, Jason Devitt of Skydeck passed along the statistic (unsourced) that 10 percent of iPhone users also have a BlackBerry. I wonder if the iPhone 2.0 improvements for business users, such as better Outlook integration, will change that.

Skydeck, by the way, makes an interesting application that digs into the records for your cell phone account to help you track whom you’ve been calling–and, with their permission, who your contacts have been calling! I found that fairly stunning, and I wonder how many of Skydeck’s customers give permission for their call records to be passed along like that.

Before the conference opened, I spoke with Saeed Amidi, president of the associated firm PlugandPlayRealEstate.com and a general partner at Amidzad Partners, which funded many of the companies in the center. From what Saeed told me, his companies have been very busy, and very successful, for many years now. A good person to know, I think.

Since AT&T wouldn’t talk about anything related to the iPhone, and nobody from Apple was speaking at the conference (or in the audience, as far as I noticed), it was left to various speakers to discuss iPhone-related rumors.

Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures, for example, said he knows of cases where third-party iPhone applications have been blocked by Apple because they conflicted with Apple’s own product development plans. He also said that when a third-party iPhone application carries service fees (such as subscriptions), Apple also gets 30 percent of that revenue.

Actually, I see in my notes that Young did offer one interesting tidbit, saying he believes some iPhone developers have agreed to give Apple more than 30 percent of their gross revenue in order to get more prominent positions in the App Store: “What I hear is that they’re cutting side deals beyond the core 30 percent to be featured.” I hope I’m not getting him in trouble for passing that along, but it was in a public panel session.

First, the event took place in a building I haven’t visited in many years. Back when I was with Microprocessor Report, it was the local headquarters of Philips Semiconductor. I met there occasionally with the folks making Philips’ MIPS processors, especially for early Pocket PC systems.

Later in the morning, during a different panel discussion, Rupert Young of AT&T declined to give any figures about iPhone sales, except to say the company’s iPhone business has been “meeting any expectation that anyone might have had.”

AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui told us that ads from major brands can bring in more than $30 per thousand views, with per-click fees ranging up to about 20 cents. Do the math! Even assuming that these figures are just the high end of the range, the total numbers are very promising indeed. Who knows what AdMob’s business could be like, once all cell phones are smartphones?

And, finally, the most impressive statistic of the day (in my opinion) came in the last panel of the day (hosted by CNET’s own Dan Farber) from AdMob, a start-up that facilitates placing ads into mobile applications.

One speaker, Mike Rowehl of Skyfire, took the contrary position: that mobile-application developers should focus exclusively on more portable browser-based applications, unless there’s something they simply can’t achieve without writing native code. Since Skyfire makes a browser for mobile phones, this recommendation was fairly predictable, but I can’t argue with it. If a browser-based application is good enough, it’s good enough.

I have to say that I sometimes find myself preferring software I have to pay for, rather than the free stuff, because it seems to me that (despite whether it’s true) that at least someone’s putting his or her professional reputation on the line when they sell software. I don’t have any idea if that’s true of iPhone users generally, though. (Here’s a piece on Pinch’s site giving the data.)

Rowehl brought up another theme frequently echoed through the day: that simplicity and fun are key factors in the choices of many mobile-application developers. He said Google’s Android platform is “just more fun” than others, and singled out Symbian as an example of a platform that’s not so much fun.

I heard something from Greg Yardley of Pinch Media that really surprised me: the great majority of downloads from the iPhone App Store are not the free applications, but rather the paid ones.

I can see why Apple deserves 30 percent of an application’s selling price, but I don’t understand why it should get part of any service revenue, since Apple presumably incurs little or no corresponding expenses. (And just for the record, I also have no idea whether Carolan’s comment is true.)

The event was hosted by VentureBeat, where a great many blog posts can be found that go through all the sessions and significant announcements from the conference. (My thanks to VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi, who invited me to the conference.)

So rather than covering all that ground over again, I’ll summarize some of the interesting bits of information I picked up during the day.

Today, the building is owned by Plug and Play Tech Center, a venture incubator where some 140 start-ups have office space, and access to venture capital and advice. It seems like a great setup for entrepreneurs who aren’t yet ready to fill a whole building with engineers.

The first morning session was a panel aimed at developers of software for mobile devices. It set a tone that carried through the rest of the day: Apple’s
iPhone, by virtue of the iPhone 2.0 software release and the App Store, has instantly become the single most important mobile-application development platform.

Perhaps in response to these figures, AdMob won a sort of popularity contest among MobileBeat attendees at the end of the day, receiving more votes than all the other start-ups that had been given a chance to give short presentations to the audience. Well deserved, I think.

On the same panel, Rick Segal of the BlackBerry Partners Fund–a venture fund associated with Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry–said his firm is now more interested in cross-platform applications than those that run on a single platform. That seemed to imply interest in more than BlackBerry-only applications. He said there are 6,500 applications available for the BlackBerry today, but that most are for vertical markets such as health care.

Sam Altman of Loopt, during a demo of his company’s location-based service platform, opined that “location (support) is really badly broken on everything except iPhone,” but I didn’t quite catch why he thought so.

AdMob says it is now serving 3.5 billion ads per month to mobile devices. (See this live sampling of AdMob’s traffic.) That’s pretty good for a small company that’s only been around for two years.

On Thursday, I attended MobileBeat 2008, a new conference here in Silicon Valley focused primarily on cell phones broad enough to encompass closely related gizmos like
Apple’s iPod Touch and–at least in theory–mobile Internet devices.

Among changes in the new SDK are the addition of the phone’s new home screen as well as some new applications for controlling the camera, playing music, setting alarms, viewing pictures, and dealing with SMS and MMS messages.

For further details, see Google’s not terribly illuminating Android developer road map, SDK change list, discussion group, and some porting tips for programmers moving their code to the new SDK.

Google had hinted in May that the new Android SDK was imminent, but the company ended up sharing it only with finalists in an Android programming contest until Monday. The Android Developer Challenge is awarding $10 million to coders to try to jump-start development efforts; on Monday, Google said a second challenge will be announced later this year that “will give developers a chance to build polished applications once hardware is available.”

“We know that these changes will affect many developers who have worked with the prior early looks at the SDK, and we are very sorry for the resulting inconvenience,” Google said in the release notes. “We look forward to the possibility of restoring some or all of this functionality in a later version of the Android platform.”

Google hopes Android phones will be open to run innumerable applications, not just locked down to handle a relatively small number of authorized packages. To achieve this promise though, one key step is helping programmers to write that code. And SDK does just that, for example, by providing a software emulator that can run Android applications without an actual Android phone.

Google on Monday released the first beta version of its software developer kit (SDK) for Android phones, a significant step in the company’s hope for “open” phone technology.

Google's promised advantages of Android.

Android phones, notably HTC’s Dream, are due to ship in the fourth quarter.

When it comes to Android’s APIs (application programming interface), though, some significant features were removed in the new API. “Due to significant API changes in the upstream open-source project and due to the timeline of getting certain Bluetooth profile implementations certified, a comprehensive Bluetooth API will not be possible or present in Android 1.0,” Google said.

Google, which is leading the 34-company Open Handset Alliance to create the largely open-source Android software stack for mobile devices, already had released an “early look” SDK in November 2007. With the new beta SDK, though, the company is telling programmers they can get started in earnest creating software that will work on Android phones due to start shipping later this year, though stopping short of promising full compatibility.

“Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0,” Google developer advocate Dan Morrill said in a blog post.

(Credit:
Google)

Also removed is GTalkService, an API for instant messaging. “Due to the security risks inherent in accepting arbitrary data from ‘outside’ the device, the data messaging facility of the GTalkService will not be present in Android 1.0,” though the phone can use Google’s servers for Google Talk IM, Google said.

This is all the more troubling because Sun seems to want to embrace development communities. There may be a disconnect between “want” and “need,” or between executive desire and company culture. I don’t know.

Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit.

commentary

As Stephen O’Grady notes, this isn’t a huge blow to Sun’s OpenSolaris project, because Fielding doesn’t have the same role within it as Linus Torvalds does with Linux. Still, it’s yet another voice suggesting that Sun has much to learn about community, something on which its friends and critics alike seem to agree.

One thing is clear: Sun needs to figure this out sooner rather than later. Perhaps letting the MySQL team run amok would help.

Over the years, Sun has been progressively pushed by the open-source community to open up. OpenOffice, Java, etc.: the company’s efforts to embrace open source have never been quite enough for some.

For Valentine’s Day this year, Sun received another arrow, this time from Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, who quit Sun to protest its alleged inability to relax its control over OpenSolaris and truly forge a community around it. As Fielding notes:

Sun agreed that ‘OpenSolaris’ would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris.

“We’re going to follow our nose,” Ballmer said, indicating that Microsoft hopes to shorten the gap before a consumer version is available.

Mark Bolger, director of marketing for Microsoft's surface-computing effort, shows off the company's new touchscreen tabletop PC last May. The company is still working to ship the product.

But the company got a lot of pushback on that timing, Ballmer said.

That said, at the moment, Microsoft still has its hands full trying to ship the first machines to its handful of early customers: folks in the hotel, casino and retail businesses. The tech giant had hoped to start having models up and running for those customers by the end of last year, but now is aiming to do so by spring.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday that the company is trying to speed up that process after getting a lot of demand for a consumer version.

When Microsoft announced its plans for Surface last spring, the stated plan was to bring the technology to consumers eventually, but the company warned that it could be five years before a version of the products would be on shelves at the local Best Buy.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

When people get a chance to try out Microsoft’s Surface touch-screen tabletop computer, they often wish they could take one home.

Much of what makes Crave great is staying the same: We continue to have an amazing staff at our disposal, including CNET’s leading gadget reviewers, as well as the intrepid reporters from CNET News covering Apple, Microsoft, handsets, gadgets, notebooks, the latest chip technology, open source, photography, and more.

Plus, we have those wacky Brits over at Crave UK, and the gadget fanatics at CNET Asia and the CNET Blog Network to complement our coverage. And, as always, look out for our weekly Crave video show, hosted by kinetic electronics expert Brian Tong.

That’s where we come in. I’m Erica Ogg (pictured at left on
iPhone 1.0 launch day last year), your new chief Crave correspondent. The fabulous Leslie Katz is the gal behind the scenes making sure all is functioning properly here at Crave Central, and together, we’re your new Crave caretakers.

First, some of you may have noticed our new (OK, maybe just slightly tweaked) look. It’s being rolled out to visitors in beta form a bit at a time, so if you don’t see it yet, try not to panic. You will eventually.

You’ve likely seen our bylines before here on Crave: Leslie has long been the editor of CNET News’ personal-technology section, where I’m the consumer electronics and PCs reporter.

But the best part is that we have you, our readers. We welcome your feedback, and especially your news tips. Inventing an amazing gizmo? We want to be the first to know. E-mail us at crave at cnet dot com.

In all, Crave still has the same mission: to bring you news of the most Crave-able gadgets, from the utilitarian to the downright weird, but keep checking back as we continue to scour the globe for Craveworthy gear and add more photos, audio, and video.

There have been a few changes here at Crave in the past week, and we wanted to bring them to your attention.

In other changes, you’ll also notice our domain has changed, which reflects Crave taking a larger role at CNET News.

Thanks for reading.

Welcome to Crave 2.0!

Second, we’re sad to say that Crave’s founder and faithful caretaker since its birth in November 2006 has moved on. Starting this week, Mike Yamamoto will take his careful editor’s eye, and his distrust of the creeping Hello Kitty-gadget empire, and move on to bigger and better things. (Although, really, such a scenario is impossible to imagine.) But we miss him already, and we wish him the best!

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

P.S. We’re on Twitter at twitter.com/Crave. Come follow us!

American Airlines will initially enable 15 of its 767s with broadband, and eventually it will offer Internet connectivity on 500 planes. Virgin plans to provide broadband on all its planes, according to a blog posted on GigaOm Tuesday.

The new service, called Gogo, will cost $12.95 for cross-country flights and $9.95 for flights lasting three hours or less.

The second major factor is ensuring the quality and speed of the service. If people are paying for Internet access, the network better work and it better work well. Unfortunately, I’m a little skeptical that the service on these planes will work as expected. My colleague Caroline McCarthy, who was onboard JetBlue’s New York to San Francisco Wi-Fi test flight, wasn’t impressed with the Internet service.

Several carriers, including American Airlines, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines, and Southwest, have already said they would test broadband service on their planes using one of these two service providers. And in December, JetBlue demonstrated its in-flight broadband, delivered via a JetBlue subsidiary called LiveTV, on a flight from New York to San Francisco.

Aircell, a company that sells air-to-ground telecommunications equipment to airlines, said this week that its in-flight broadband system will be used on some Virgin America and American Airlines flights originating from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York and Miami.

How much are people willing to pay?
Now, the true test will be whether passengers actually use the service. And that will depend on several factors. The first is price. How much are people willing to pay for in-flight broadband? Judging from the in-flight phone business, not that much.

I don’t have to check e-mail, file stories, or post blogs from 45,000 feet. I can kick back, watch a movie, read a magazine, or take a snooze. And of course, without broadband or cell phone service on planes, I also don’t have to be subjected to listening to my seat-mate’s annoying phone conversations.

In 2006, Verizon Communications exited the in-flight telephone service business, which it had inherited from GTE. The service had been operational for more than 20 years.

The reason Verizon got out of the in-flight phone business was simple. People weren’t using the service because it was too expensive. Verizon charged non-Verizon customers $3.99 to connect domestic calls and $4.99 for each additional minute. International calls required a connection fee of $5.99 and $5.99 for each minute of calling.

In-flight broadband is coming soon for travelers on some American Airlines and Virgin America flights. But will the companies hit the right price point to attract customers?

She had trouble connecting to the network and was only able to access “light” versions of services like Yahoo Mail.

“If BetaBlue’s connection were my home ISP, I’d ask them to cancel my subscription,” she writes. “It was hardly ultra-reliable, and the instant-messaging application took quite a bit of time to boot up.”

Finally, American Airlines and Virgin America are offering a commercial in-flight broadband service.

Let me know what you think about in-flight broadband in the “TalkBack” section below this story. Is $13 too much for you to pay?

Other companies, such as Aircell, which uses a network of some 92 antenna towers across the country to transmit wireless signals to planes flying above, and Row44, which provides in-flight Internet service via satellite, have been pushing forward despite Connexion’s failure. Both of these companies use Wi-Fi routers inside planes to provide broadband access to passengers.

But the service was canceled in 2006 when the company was unable to find business among domestic airlines. A big problem with Connexion was that the entire system was bulky and weighed around 400 pounds, making it nearly impossible for it to be used on smaller domestic planes.

Aircell’s service is priced much more reasonably. At $10 and $13, the price point could appeal to business travelers. After all, many travelers pay Boingo $9.95 for Internet access in airports. If Aircell could strike a deal with Boingo or some other aggregator like T-Mobile, it could make the service even more compelling in terms of price.

Editor’s note: This blog initially misidentified the provider of JetBlue’s in-flight broadband service.

Airlines have been talking about offering in-flight broadband for years. But so far the service hasn’t really gotten off the ground (forgive the pun, I couldn’t resist). Boeing was the first to come up with a service, called Connexion, which debuted in 2004 on a few international carriers including, Lufthansa, SAS, All Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines, and Singapore Airlines.

So, I am interested to see the initial real-world user response to these services. But I have to admit that I secretly hope they are a disappointment. Even though I know having broadband access on a plane could make me much more productive when I travel between New York and San Francisco, where CNET is headquartered, airplanes have been the last bastion of solitude for me as a business traveler.

I’m not sure if the issues she experienced were because JetBlue’s LiveTV network was overloaded or because there was something wrong with the Wi-Fi router configuration on the plane. Or perhaps there wasn’t enough broadband capacity being piped into the plane. All of these things could impact performance and could ultimately affect whether people are willing to pay the additional $10 or $13 to access the Internet on their flights.

Despite the known outage, there hasn’t been an update to the MobileMe Status Blog since July 29. The blog was provisioned specifically to address any known issues with the service. For now, most of the chatter has been on Apple’s support discussions with dozens of threads from users frustrated by the lack of communication and lost productivity.

As a reminder, if you’re a MobileMe subscriber with continuing issues, Apple has a special customer service chat tool for you access.

Monday’s problems centered on a lack of access to Mail on three fronts: through the Web, on the
iPhone, and on IMAP for use on desktop e-mail applications. The same thing happened in mid July, with enough blowback to cause Apple to offer a 30-day extension to both free trial and paying users.

Apple’s MobileMe suite of Web services suffered another outage Monday that affected an unknown number of its users.

Of the included services, Mail was inaccessible for approximately two hours. Earlier in the day we had received scattered reports from users who were unable to access their mail. Those reports were later confirmed both through Apple’s MobileMe status ticker and Twitter’s real-time search tool. For those affected, all other aspects of MobileMe were reportedly up and running.

Have you experienced problems with Apple’s MobileMe today?

( polls)

Related: Gmail is down, Twitter sizzling with the news

Update: corrected customer service chat reference from a call-in service.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Related:
How I got burned by Twitter’s API, and how to fix it.
Which way will Twitter go? by Dave Winer.

You can follow me on Identi.ca, but I hang out more on Twitter and Friendfeed.

It’s unknown when (or even if) Twitter will open up a push interface or unlock its XMPP support, or how Twitter and Twhirl will work together to make setup easier than it is for Identi.ca.

The two-step requires users have two logins: One for Identi.ca, and one for Gtalk, and that they enter them into both Identi.ca and Twhirl.

In other words, the Twhirl client won’t have to ping the Identi.ca servers to get updates; instead, updates will be sent directly to the Twhirl client. This makes nanoblog conversations more live–you can have a back-and-forth without hovering over the “update” button. It also means that your Twhirl client doesn’t have to be hitting the Identi.ca servers every few minutes for updates, which reduces the load profile on the service, theoretically at least.

Twitter does support the XMPP standard for sending out the “fire hose” of its content, but it’s not open. Only four sites right now get the feed: Summize, which Twitter bought, Twittervision, FriendFeed, and Zappos (yes, the shoe company).

The latest version of Twhirl gets push nanoblog entries from Identi.ca.

Read to end of story for the download link and instructions.

Identi.ca, by the way, is cool because it’s open-source. But other than that I find little reason to use the service: it doesn’t have Twitter’s user network nor newbie Plurk’s user interface innovation. Seeing Identi.ca updates pushed to Twhirl just raises the obvious question: When will we get this feature on Twitter?

How to
To get the version of Twhirl that supports Identi.ca, grab this download. Log in to the Identi.ca site, go to the IM tab and enter in your Gtalk ID. Also check the “Send me notices through Jabber/Gtalk…” box in Preferences. In Twhirl, go to the configuration panel for Identi.ca, go to the Network tab, and in the “XMPP Settings” box, enter your Gtalk ID and password, and “talk.google.com” in the server field. You’ll know it’s working if you see a little lightbulb icon in the lower-right of the Identi.ca panel light up.

You need both an Identi.ca and a GTalk ID to get the push feature to work.

The next update of Twhirl will get support for yet another nanoblogging service, Identi.ca, and on that platform Twhirl will feature a communication method that Twitter users have been asking for: push updates.

The new version of Twhirl will probably be announced Monday, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur told me.

In practice, the push capability of Identi.ca is more complex. Identi.ca doesn’t do the pushing itself. Instead, Identi.ca sends its updates to Google Talk, a Jabber-based IM platform that supports the open XMPP standard for instant messaging; and it’s those XMPP messages that get pushed out to the Twhirl desktop clients installed on users’ computers.

“They made a small investment in us…and they knew from the beginning that we were interested in working with other (content providers), just like they’re interested in partnering with other boxes,” he said.

Will Netflix feel jilted by the move? Woods says no, that both companies intended to work with others all along.

It’s been known for a while that Netflix and Roku’s four-month-old relationship isn’t exactly a monogamous one. But it looks like Roku is hoping to play the video-streaming field even more than we initially thought.

So who’s next, I wonder? Hulu? YouTube? Amazon? I guess Roku figures if there are lots of fish in the sea, why not swim with them all?

“We’re opening up the platform to anyone who wants to put their video service on this box,” Wired cites Wood as saying. “We’re going to release the software developer kit, so anyone can publish any channel, and users can access Web content on their TVs.”

But Roku isn’t waiting around for Netflix to make those deals.

Roku makes the $100 Netflix Player, which enables customers to stream movies from the Netflix site to their TVs. It’s a product that could be a hit, if only Netflix could secure partnerships with more of the major movie houses and seriously beef up its “Watch it Now” library.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The Netflix Player by Roku

CEO Anthony Wood told an audience Wednesday at the Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, Calif., that his company is focused on enabling its set-top box to stream video from any content provider, according to Wired.com.

For its part, Netflix announced deals Monday with CBS and the Disney Channel that will allow the movie rental service to stream episodes from current seasons of shows. In July, Microsoft said it would allow Xbox 360 owners with Netflix accounts to stream “Watch Now” movies and TV shows through their game console, without any extra hardware or software.

Now, writes Kuchera, courtesy of his source, “the mole,” Microsoft is planning to roll out new pricing on the entire line of Xboxes. For a console with no hard drive, the price could be $199; for one with a 60GB hard drive, it could be $299; and the high-end model, known as the Elite, with a 160GB hard drive, could go for $399.

According to Kuchera, Microsoft may well be readying a new round of price cuts for the Xbox 360.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Update (Monday, 2:43 PM): This story has been modified to reflect correspondence from Microsoft this morning.

Remember, just prior to E3, Microsoft lowered the price of the 20GB Xbox 360 from $349 to $299.

If I hear from Microsoft with comment about this, dear readers, so will you.

Right now, the lowest-priced of the next-generation consoles is Nintendo’s
Wii, which runs $249. Sony’s
PlayStation 3 can be had for $399 for a model with a 40GB hard drive, and this fall it plans to introduce an 80GB model for that same $399 price.

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there’s actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its
Xbox 360.

If the Ars Technica report is true, then, Microsoft could be the first to break the magic $200 barrier and such a move could go a very long way to helping the company reach its declared commitment to winning the console wars.

Microsoft said it does not comment on rumors.

If the report is true, however, Microsoft could be making an important move. According to many industry observers, the magic price point in video game machines is $200. Go below that, the theory goes, and you potentially open up your machine to the truly mass market.