Irish startup PortoMedia will soon be offering movie rentals on flash drives instead of your typical media device. It’s a pretty simple concept. The company sells you a flash storage device along with a special $50 card reader that has a super fast proprietary USB connection of 95 megabits per second.

Just take the flash card to any location that has a company kiosk. The kiosks will contains hard drives that store hundreds or even thousands of movies. Enter your ATM pin code, choose your movie, and download it in less than a minute. After that, you just go home and watch it. It does have it’s advantages over DVD or Blu-Ray. They would never run out of movies, no return neccessary, no long lines and you could get movies anywhere, whether it be the mall, supermarket, even a gas station.

You can’t have a good format war without some fallout. With the fall of HD-DVD, the question has been raised regarding Netflix’s ability to sustain its subscribers and demands for the Blu-Ray Format. Netflix said today that its subscriber count will be 3% higher than forecast because of price increases from Blockbuster and cheaper online advertising rates. Of course, the raise in price led to a loss of thousands of subscribers for Blockbuster, many of them switching or even returning to Netflix.

Now there is another place that will take your old game console, if it’s collecting dust in some closet. Best Buy is willing to take it off your hands. One thing though. And it’s odd…This new service won’t let you just drop off your old hardware at the local store. You have to ship it off to them.

After removing video clips that were deemed as offensive to officials in Pakistan, the country decided to lift a country-wide ban on the YouTube website that it had imposed last week. The popular video sharing site had videos of cartoons originally published earlier in a Danish newspaper depicting the prophet Mohammad in which Pakistan lawmakers described as “blasphemous”.

The government of Pakistan has today ordered all local internet providers to block access to Google’s YouTube video sharing site “until further notice” due to offensive content. According to officials, the YouTube website contains cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad which angered a large number of Muslims.

The same cartoons were published earlier in a Danish newspaper which led to protests, rioting and eventually more than 50 deaths in countries including Pakistan. Internet surfers in Pakistan trying to access the YouTube site were met with a simple message saying the site was unavailable, with the local ISP’s unable to restore access despite upset users.

Apparently the FlyTech Dragonfly really is an awesome flying device. Nine out of ten hawks agree, that the things look pretty damn tasty. The toy has been fooling quite a few birds of prey lately.

Some kid on Long Island had his FlyTech Dragonfly snatched out of the air by a hungry hawk that mistook it for actual prey. I guess this is a testament to the toy’s ability’s, or maybe hawks are hard up for food. After investigating the story, WowWee’s Customer Service Department said that it has received 45 different calls over the past 2 months. That’s right, hawks everywhere and other birds of prey are swooping down and snatching people’s FlyTech Dragonfly out of the air.

Soon, Cell phone owners won’t have to be left out of the Second Life world as Vollee plans on rolling out technology which makes it possible to play the game Second Life on 3G handsets. This thanks to Vollee’s streaming media service. This does seem like a tall order, with Second Life being very graphics intensive. It would require a LOT of streaming data.

So, it might be a good idea to start thinking about an unlimited data plan unless you want a huge bill at the end of the month. Only time will tell what the end result of this will be, but at least someone is trying.

Six American film studios have filed a lawsuit against the Chinese file-sharing firm Xunlei Networking Technology for copyright infringement. They were offering hundreds of movie downloads illegally. The firm is part owned by Google. The studios are seeking more than $1 million in damages and costs, according to the Motion Picture Association, though that seems a low number.

The MPA trade group said in a statement on Friday that in addition, the plaintiffs are seeking a public acknowledgement of the infringements and a pledge from Xunlei to stop them. The MPA said that Xunlei facilitated the unauthorised transmission of hundreds of Hollywood movies produced by its members, like “Spiderman 3,” “War of the Worlds” and “Miami Vice.”(Who the hell watches Miami Vice? Now that they have, I assume they have learned their lesson. Some movies aren’t worth the trouble.)

Stores and malls in England have been using an ultrasonic device known as the Mosquito Alarm to keep kids from loitering. Because everyone knows that kids are just large insects with ipods and skateboards. It emits a high-frequency noise which is audible and unfriendly to young ears, but people over 20 usually can’t hear it. (I know there’s a Logan’s Run joke there somewhere.)

This is the same frequency that kids have been using for their cellphone rings, so older people don’t know when they have incoming calls. Anyway, there is now an uproar from the children’s commission for England and groups like civil liberties group Liberty. Their campaign is called “Buzz Off”. The device effects everyone under 25, and guess what? That includes babies. Then they site that it discriminates against all kids, whether they’re bad seeds or not. Obviously, they have some valid points. I propose that anyone who turns 30 needs to be introduced to carousel and euthanized. Should they run, a sandman needs to be dispatched who can shout, “We’ve got a runner.” and go for their blaster. Ah…There’s the joke.

Has there been a week recently when China-made products have not been in the news? Normally it’s tainted food and toxic lead. Now it’s a malicious virus-infected digital photo frame. Computer Associates identified it as Mocmex , “a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence” and “a nuclear bomb of malware”.

It’s a malicious self-propagated worm that has been steadily spreading worldwide with variants of over 67,500 kinds. That’s cause for some concern. It was first identified as a Trojan horse that collected passwords from online games, but after further study, it’s able to get around more than a hundred antivirus vendors as well as Windows security layers. Now it could potentially collect personal and private data.

According to a company source at Toshiba, the company is in the “final stages” of giving up the battle in the next generation DVD format war against Sony’s Blu-ray. After years of fighting it out and causing confusion among consumers over which format to purchase it looks like Blu-ray is actually going to come out on top, and HD DVD will go the way of the Betamax.

The most significant move that seemed to cause this battle to take a turn in Sony’s favor happened when Warner Bros. Entertainment announced they would only release movies in the Blu-ray format. The companies plan was to end consumer confusion allowing them to make a decision and subsequent purchases of one format or the other, in this case Blu-ray.

Microsoft announced Monday that it is going to acquire Danger, software maker for the popular consumer-targeted Sidekick mobile device. Reportedly the purchase came after months of negotiations, with Danger receiving a number of different offers and Microsoft doubling their original offer to keep Danger out of others hands. That offer has been rumored to be as much as $500 million, but no official terms of the deal have been revealed.

While Microsoft has done well making software for smartphones the company mostly targets business users and fewer general consumers. The Sidekick from Danger is almost the opposite and is aimed at the younger consumer-based market in which Microsoft seems to be keen on getting into. Microsoft also recently made a $44.6 billion offer to Yahoo to help build a larger online, consumer-facing presence and could have Danger in mind to be part of that overall strategy, working against dominate competitive figures like Google and RIM.

And the show down continues…Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s take over bid, Microsoft looks like it will go forward with it anyhow:

“It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

Here’s another huge blow that the struggling HD-DVD format did not need. Netflix, the online and mail video rental giant will follow its rival Blockbuster’s footsteps and carry Blu-Ray exclusively. With endorsement to The future is Blu campaign, the company will now only buy Blu-Ray discs going forward and will phase out their stock of HD-DVD by the end of the year.

“We’re now at the point where the industry can pursue the migration to a single format, bring clarity to the consumer and accelerate the adoption of high-def.”, said a company spokesman. Netflix stated that they expect all studios to begin to publish movies on the Blu-ray format. With Netflix’s over seven million subscribers, I think it’s fair to say that this is a killing blow in the format war, whether the effects are immediate or forthcoming.

You can be pretty certain we haven’t heard the last from Microsoft regarding their offer to buy Yahoo!, but for now Yahoo! is saying a “no thanks” to the $44.6 billion buyout offer. Jerry Yang and other directors say Yahoo! are seeking at least $40 a share, or nearly $60 billion. Microsoft may not be willing to pay.

The bean counters of Yahoo! feel the number is on the low end. Others would like to get cozy with Google in order to improve search revenues, despite the fact that there may be some antitrust implications with that. Stayed tuned on this one. Things are getting very interesting.