Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC XO laptop have received a lot of news this past year without much production of any machines. The latest news had come as a promotion scheme for the laptop looking to the generosity of US and Canadian customers offering a “Give 1 Get 1” deal. The promotion looked to the generosity of North American consumers and allowed them to buy the $100 (now $188) laptop for $400, getting one for them and giving one to a poor child in another country.

It appears now that production which was supposed to start in October will be delayed until November 12, which is also the day that pre-ordering the Give 1 Get 1 program would start. According to the OLPC, the delay will not only push back planned deliveries to Peru and Uruguay but will also not support the deliver of the promised 25,000 North American orders before Christmas. According to Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child Foundation, some consumers will still get the XO before the holidays but it will be on a first-come first-serve basis.

Today Microsoft has officially launched the highly rumored Xbox 360 Arcade console at a reasonable $279 bundled with games and trying to pick up on the “entire family” of gamers and bring some more attention to the Xbox Live Arcade games.

“As families gather together this holiday, it’s the perfect time to launch a new low-priced, high-value Xbox 360 that plays games, TV shows and music for everyone to enjoy,” said Jeff Bell, vice president of global marketing, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “In addition to offering an incredible all-in-one package for families to get right into the fun, the Xbox 360 Arcade system features the industry-leading Family Settings, which allow parents to control what their kids are watching and playing — and we know how important that control is to families around the world.”

Microsoft is working hard to be competitive with its rivals Sony and Nintendo in Japan’s market which has proven so far to be fairly difficult for them. Despite a stellar month in September for US Xbox 360 sales, the company has not faired as well with the Japanese market over the past year in keeping up with the home town’s PS3 and Wii game consoles. As the holidays are nearing the company is keeping pace and making moves with its console trying to spur some additional sales with an announced price drop for the Xbox 360 core system and the 20GB bundle.

Starting on November 1 in Japan, the Xbox 360 20GB bundle will start retailing for ¥34,800 ($306) which is a $44 cut from its previous price. The 360 core system will start going for ¥27,800 ($245) which gives it an $18 cut. Microsoft is also putting out a limited Value Pack for the console for ¥34,800 ($306) which comes with Viva Pinata and Forza Motorsport 2 titles but no HDMI cable.

The Croucher Brewing Co. in Rotorua, New Zealand is offering a lifetime supply of free beer for the return of a laptop that was stolen from the business last week. The brewer states that the actual laptop was not special and the data was of no great value to anyone but the company, and they would like it back. The theft was a result of “Opportunistic kids and a flimsy padlock”, said co-owner Paul Croucher.

“We’d love it back. We’re at such a critical stage in our little business that every hit like that is quite big,” he said.

As much publicity as this news is getting, this stolen laptop could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the small brewer. The bounty for the return of the laptop is a twelve-pack of the Crocher Brewing beers every month for the rest of your life. Did you hear that? THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Croucher estimated that this would likely end up to be a $19,500 value.

After almost a year of trailing in console sales, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has finally pulled ahead of the widely popular Nintendo Wii marking the first time since the Wii’s launch last November that it hasn’t been number one. As anticipated by many, Microsoft pulled this off with a little help from the launch of Halo 3 which earned $170 million on its first day and $300 million its first week and ended up spurring a number of Xbox 360 sales along with it.

Those sales totaled 527,000 units of the console in the month of September which was a significant jump from the 276,700 sold the previous month. Nintendo was no slump for September either marking 501,000 Wii units and 495,800 handheld DS consoles. Both figures were also significantly more than in August.

The internet giant is never content to sit back and let anyone else take a large piece of the pie. Hey, that’s how they got so rich! That’s why they are following Microsoft’s lead where health and medical records are concerned. They plan to roll out Google Health sometime early next year if they keep to their schedule.

It makes sense since users all begin at the Google page to search for health and medical information anyway. So they will be applying Google’s expertise in indexing, searching, and managing vast amounts of information to the idea. It also doesn’t hurt that they will have the health industry targeted with their Adwords program. If Google’s history has shown us anything, it should be a huge success and give the giant still more dominance in the industry.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that “Halo 3″ would be the best-selling game for the month of September. We also know that the game sold $170 million dollars worth of product on its launch day, but how well did it do in the days that followed? Today we learn the answer to that question thanks to the sales figures released by NPD Group which calculate that a whopping 3.3 million copies of “Halo 3″ were sold in the game’s first twelve days of release. That’s correct, the 3.3 million figure is not even for two solid full weeks let alone a whole month. To give you an idea of how staggering that figure is consider that the number two best-selling game on NPD’s list is Nintendo’s Wii Play with Wii Remote which sold 282,000 units, or roughly 3 million less than “Halo 3″ did.

Microsoft was also able to translate the “Halo 3″ hype into moving more of its Xbox 360 game units off of store shelves. The console leapt to the top of the sales charts with 528,000 360s sold in September, well over the Wii (with 501,000) and the PlayStation 3 (119,000). However Nintendo posted its best month ever selling Wiis for September and usually the company is in first place for console sales, so enjoy your one month of being at the top of the heap, Master Chief.

Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they feel a website should abide by when publishing potential copyrighted content. According to the Wall Street Journal, the principles of the agreement are to prevent the any copyright infringing content to be uploaded before it is accessible by the public.

While the YouTube Video Identification tool that Google announced yesterday …

It looks like the RCA dogs (and we don’t just mean the products) are set to find a new home today as it was announced Audiovox will acquire the rights to the RCA consumer electronics brand from Thomson. Total cost? $19.7 million plus some other fees – that’s a lot of dog bones.

The acquisition of the RCA brand by Audiovox extends to Thomson’s U.S., Canada, China and Hong Kong consumer electronics audio video business. Audiovox earlier this year had purchased Thomson America’s CE accessory business, granting it the rights to to the RCA brand for consumer electronics accessories.

Sony has announced today that the 40GB Playstation 3 that was recently announced for Europe and Japan will indeed be coming to the US this fall as well. The new 40GB PS3 will retail for $399 and start selling on November 2. It looks like it has the same configuration as the other releases as well including the lack of backwards compatibility for PS2 games, no memory card reader and two USB ports short. No word on a white version of the console for the US, but the 40GB PS3 will also come bundled with Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray disc.

Sony states in the press release that those wanting backwards compatibility should look to the 80GB model which is also receiving a price cut effective immediately. Sony has given the 80GB PS3 a $100 price drop from its original launch price of $599, pricing it a $499 today. We can never complain about price drops but even with the cut the PS3 is still the most expensive latest-generation console on the market compared to its rivals Wii and Xbox 360.

This week the news seems to be all about hard drive manufacturers pushing the limits and getting big results. Today Western Digital announced that it broke a record for hard drive density. They accomplished the milestone by using their own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) technology, and achieved 520 Gb/in2 areal density in a demonstration. Why is this important? Because, this is the highest density ever reached using continuous media. It produces a 3.5-inch hard drive that stores 640 GB per platter as well as single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. If you are doing the math, that’s more than double today’s max of 200 GB per square inch.

Following an earlier demonstration in California, they announced the news this week at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo. As usual you won’t be able to get one overnight.(Though that would be nice.) They estimate a release date sometime in 2010.

After Apple iPhone developers have already had a couple of volleys with hackers who want to run 3rd party applications on the new phone Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has today let the hacking community know that they can stop, or at least slow down for a few minutes. Jobs has announced that Apple is going to open up both the iPhone and the iPod Touch for third party application development on the device in February of 2008.

Prior to this the only way to get any third party applications on the iPhone was through an “open” platform on the Safari web browser which runs on the device and was still fairly limiting. Jobs attributed the these development restrictions to security issues stating that open development increases risks of viruses. He also states that these security risks are also why it will take until February to release an SDK for developers.

How do you know the analog television era is truly coming to an end? When retailers announce publicly they are no longer going to carry these products on store shelves. Such is the case with an announcement today from Best Buy.

Best Buy, the largest CE retailer across the land, has “pulled all remaining analog television products from store shelves and will only sell digital video tuners in the future.” It will also take part in a national coupon program to help people purchase digital converter boxes for existing analog televisions.

Today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs said that iTunes will be reducing the price of their DRM-free tracks from the current $1.29 down to 99 cents. These songs from iTunes were launched as iTunes Plus back in May and offered a number of titles, mostly from EMI, without any digital rights management restrictions. They also came in a little higher quality for a little more money with 256 kbps AAC encoding compared to the 128kbps encoding for the rest of the 99 cent versions. “It’s been very popular with our customers, and we’re making it even more affordable,” said Jobs in the interview.

This move brings Apple’s prices a little closer to those of Wal-Mart and Amazon who both offer song downloading services with DRM-free music with some titles going for less than 99 cents. This also will make iTunes slightly more desirable compared to new players coming into the online music game such as Doug Morris and Universal Music Group who are looking to make some competition for Apple in a different way.

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.