Stories by: Ian Lamont

Olympics fever has taken over the world, and Microsoft has come up with a clever idea to boost the use of Silverlight: Partner with NBC to show clips of Olympic competitions with the Silverlight player.

The Boston Police Department has demonstrated its Web 2.0 savvy by using blogging software and online video to highlight the case of alleged kidnap victim Reigh Rockefeller. While the department's blog has only basic features and does not permit discussion of the case, updates relating to the kidnapping have been posted within hours of new developments and information on the blog has been reposted by local and national media organizations.

The most important iPhone announcement from Monday's keynote presentation at the Apple WWDC wasn't the 3G news. Faster speeds were pretty much a given, considering the pokey download speeds of the first-generation iPhones. Nor was it the news about MobileMe. The syncing service is helpful to some of us, but many others -- particularly those iPhone owners who use PCs, but not Outlook -- won't realize the benefits.

Like many people, I "own" a few personal domains for my blogs and a few old business ideas that never got off the ground. And, like many people, they have been parked at Yahoo Small Business, partially because I already had a Yahoo account when I registered them a few years ago, and partially because I was lured by the US$1.99/year offers for new domains that they had running at the time. The rate increased to $9.95 after the first year, but I was OK with that. I was able to reserve the domains and set up redirects to my blogs, and have the option of building real sites if I ever get too frustrated with Google's Blogger service.

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

In the wake of last month's hyped-up launch of Halo 3 for the XBox 360, comes the news that the game earned more than US$300 million in sales in its first week. Microsoft has a hit on its hands, and it looks like it will be a strong holiday season for the XBox 360.