Microsoft today has unveiled significant plans to extend its entertainment offerings on the Xbox 360 to new heights. The announcements were made by Microsoft UK Head Neil Thompson in London. The big announcement is Microsoft has reached an agreement with NBC Universal International Television Distribution to bring films produced by Universal Pictures to Xbox Live. People will be able to easily rent and watch the latest movie titles in high definition on the Xbox. Read the full story

Here is the most comprehensive list of all the WordPress plugins you need as of today to maximize the potential of your own blog. For months, I’ve been able to bookmark hundreds of plugins, and now I’ve done all the work for you by sorting the best plugins you only need to truely leverage WordPress! In no particular order, here they are! Read the full story

AOL’s popular social network, Bebo, has introduced a bunch of new features including a revamped layout of user profiles. It has added LifeStream, which allows you to see all of your friend’s updates in a timeline format from various other online sites including Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Delicious. LifeStream also easily lets you add events and media to your timeline. The new features make Bebo more open, letting you see what your friends are up to across various networks, similar to FriendFeed, however, no where near as comprehensive in terms of variety for support of many networks. Bebo also has SocialInbox, which essentially lets you display your entire friends’ feed to other non-Bebo members. Bebo also claims its new open features give it an edge over Facebook for simply being open. Facebook remains a private network, which could change in the near future, as more people want to stay up to date from friends on other networks from a centralized network.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced support for a new program partnered with the GSM Association that aims to bring affordable and reliable mobile banking to less developed nations. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has announced $12.5 million to kick-start the Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) Program.

There are over 1 billion people in emerging markets today who don’t have a bank account but do have a mobile phone,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board of the GSMA.

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The world’s largest chipmaker has filed a suit against Nvidia in Delaware claiming Nvidia does not have the right to produce compatible chips that are integrated with memory controller functionality, which are already patented by Intel. Nvidia claims it already has an agreement in place with Intel. Nvidia CEO Jen-Huang now says he is confident the court will rule in Nvidia’s favor. If the court rules in favor of Intel, Nvidia will not be able to produce the newer model chipsets, and even chipsets that do not rely on QPI, including lower end computers. The injunction could even block Nvidia from making the next-generation Atom chips.

Facebook has just introduced its first widget, the Facebook Comment box for Facebook Connect. Now, you can easily add the Facebook Comment system to your own site which offers a great opportunity for you to tap into the Facebook community as users have the option to make their comments appear in their news feed, potentially reaching thousands of people.

There are a number of other services online that offer advanced commenting such as Disqus and IntenseDebate (recently acquired by Automattic (the company the owns WordPress)). I’ve recently contacted IntenseDebate and they’ve told me there are no current plans to support Facebook Connect. They do currently support OpenID, but I do think the opportunity to tap into the Facebook community is a significant advantage, enough so to ditch all the other services…if you consider the other services such as IntenseDebate, all you are really getting is gravatars, reply to comments, and the comments karma feature which no one really uses anyway.

Now, if you would like to easily get Facebook Connect set up on your WordPress blog, you can easily do it with these simple steps. Read the full story

G-Map U.S. West and G-Map U.S. East are new iPhone Apps that brings turn-by-turn GPS navigation to the iPhone. The app costs $19.99 and brings many advanced navigation features including address search, distance countdown to each turn, POIs, the ability to avoid certain roads such as tolls roads, highways, route recalculation, among other features such as 3D intersections (select intersections). However, the app does have one fairly large raw back: it doesn’t have voice prompts. A future update should fix these problems, really bringing GPS navigation to the iPhone.

IntoMobile has gotten a sneak peak at the new HTC TouchFlo 3D, the upgrade to the current home-screen HTC plug-in found on newer pocket pc phones such as the HTC Fuze. The new version allows for a lot more customization, as well as to customize which tabs appear on your phone. Additionally, there are a few new features, such as the addition of a Stocks tab to keep tab on your investments. It also features a new feature called “pushed internet”, the feature only pre-caches websites you pre-select so you can easily access the website quickly. Additionally now, the People tab is now integrated with all communications from a contact. Unfortunately there was no option to embed the video, but you can check it out here.

Facebook has just announced the company is reverting back to its previous legal agreements from the new and highly controlling caveats introduced a couple of days ago that would have allowed Facebook to indefinitely store and use your data in any way it pleased. Facebook has now also introduced “Facebook Bill of Rights” which is simply a group for people to provide feedback and suggestions concerning the Facebook TOS. The Electronic Privacy Information Center EPIC was also close to filing a U.S. federal complaint with the FTC. Facebook founder Zuckerberg wrote in a new blog posting, “We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now.”

SynthaSite is an online service that makes building websites effortless. The company has now announced a new $20 million Series B fund from Reinet Fund (currently has $2 billion in capital). The VC firm previously also firstly invested $5 million. The valuation was not disclosed. SynthaSite says it currently has 1 million registered users and it is growing rapidly. There are already a number of other services online that let you easily create websites without programming knowledge, including Webjam, Sampa, Weebly, Webme, among others. There are also some big players in this Space, including Google and Microsoft. The thing is, all of these services offer very little differentiation. SynthaSite currently makes money by selling domain names with its affiliate Network Solutions. SynthaSite will also begin to generate revenue from premium accounts that will include more advanced features, unique templates, among other features. Even the free services don’t even have any ads, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they started including ads as more people use the service.