Nowadays, headphones are not only meant for listening. Headphones are not only designed for audio, it has become a fashion statement. People who listen to MP3 or MP4 songs from their iPod wants to have equally attractive headphones to go with it. These headphones do not only produce quality sound but it is expected to look good as well. Aesthetic factor is a strong design factor developing a headphone which is salable.

Some users are ladies who do not want to damage their hairdo. So, they would expect to find headphones which go behind-the-neck. Some headphones are used by professionals and the design is expected to help enhance their profession. So, there are multitudes of demands on headphones out in the market.

From audio perspective, headphones are designed to meet different expectations and requirements from various types of customers. Some headphones are designed for to delivery quality sound for audiophiles. Some are designed for games. Some are phone operators or call center operators. Different audio quality is required and the cost varies as well.

Grado headphones are designed to meet these expectations. Grado has various ranges of headphones to meet these requirements. One of the most interesting models from Grado is the RS-1 model which is considered as a true contender for the Rolls-Royce of headphones.

Unites States recorded an increase on Internet retailers sales increased of 19% from Nov 1 till Dec 27 compared against the same period last year. However, this increase is below the sales increased last year, which was 26%, compared to 2006 for the same period.

Online retailers attributed this to the warm weather in early November. However, the online spending increased to 21% between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November each year. This year’s Thanksgiving was on November 22.

The Queen has launched the Royal Channel on YouTube to share the Christmas message to the public. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the The Queen’s first televised Christmas message in 1957.

The Royal Channel is known as ‘The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarch’ will feature her Christmas message plus footage of the monarch and the royal family members.

According the the Palace spokesperson, it is hope that by using YouTube, the Queen’s Christmas message will reach out to more people especially the younger generation who is spends more time on the Internet compared to television.

The Royal Channel can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel and the Queen’s Christmas message can be downloaded at http://www.royal.gov.uk

Seven gaint chip makers - IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, AMD, Chartered, Freescale and inifneon - are collaborating to develop the chips containing transistors in only 32 billionth of a meter wide. This will mean more transistors can be stored in the chip which will give it more processing power.

However, the cost of developing chips are often very expensive. By coming together the seven companies are sharing cost of early development. They have agreed to work together through 2010 to design, develop and produce chips using tiny circuits.

Strangely, Intel, the largest supplier of chips to computers, is not part of the alliance. According to analyst from Future Horizon, Intel is very focus in the personal computer chips. Hence, Intel is very focused in a niche market.

‘Weblog’ was coined 10 years ago on 17th December by Jorn Barger to describe his work in his ‘Robot Wisdom’ site.  This word is derived from a combination of ‘logging’ about his interest on his ‘web’ site. Hence, the term ‘weblog’ was coined.

Since then ten years have passed, Technorati, a blog tracking site, has registered more than 70 million weblogs developed on various platforms such as Wordpress, blogspot, etc.

However, the real growth only took place in 1999 when there were many tools in the market to make blogging much simpler. Since then, anyone with a computer can maintain their journal online.

The websites have evolved from a simple online journal to highly specialized in their content and targeting very specific audience. Maybe high profile people like sportsmen, artists and politicians maintain their own websites to keep their fans and supporters updated on their movements.

Nowadays, even ordinary people like students, professionals and homemakers have their own websites to share with their acquaintances about their daily activities.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish my loyal readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May 2008 bring us more interesting and exciting events for us.

I am taking a vacation and will return after Christmas.

The first step to setting up a new website is to buy a domain name. Prior to that, you need to have a few names in mind before you embark on buy the domain names. Domain names are very important to reflect the nature of your business. There must be a clear connection between domain names to nature of the business.

Domain names must be easy to remember, catchy, easy to spell and pronounce. It must also sound natural and does not have any other meaning.

If the domain name is an exact match to the search keywords, the websites will appear to the top of the search keywords. This will help to bring in traffic to your site. You can check against some search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Everyone knows of .com extension. However, there are many other extensions that are available for webmaster to purchase like .biz, .net. When you decide on a domain name, you may have to check against other extensions as well to make sure your competitors are not using the same domain name with different extensions. You may need to decide if you should consider buying all the extensions to block out any possible competitors in the future.

Even though you may have purchased your desired domain name, there are other similar domain names which you may want to consider purchasing as well to protect your branding and increase your traffic via multiple domain name searches. You can easily route the traffic from other domain names to your website by using the forwarding feature.

Unfortunately, most of the nice and cool names have been taken up. However, you can still try to purchase your favorite domain name that you like.

There are some websites that offers these exclusive domain names for sale. One of these sites where you can purchase or book a domain name is www.buydomains.com. Through this site, it can even help you sell your domain names for a nice premium.

Sony is not making it any secret that it is going into video downloading business just like its competitors Microsoft and Apple. According to Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony, Sony will venture into this business with chosen partners. Sony will not go into it alone.

Sony is testing the service that will sell videos, music and other digital content via its Internet-connected PlayStation 3 machines. Hence, the network is dubbed PlayStation Network.

Stringers suggests that he will let any studios, music labels and gadget makers to piggyback on Sony PlayStation system as long as they support Sony’s digital rights management (DRM) technology. This would open the possibilities of having as many choices of games, videos and songs for the consumers.

By allowing other companies to collaborate in selling their products via Sony’s PlayStation Network, Sony is squaring off its competitors like Apple and Microsoft who are into this business much earlier than Sony.

In the industry, mixed experiences are encountered by Sony’s competitors. According to market research Gartner, Microsoft with its Zune is running on software not available on other gadgets. Very much like Apple’s iPod. But, iPod is having much success due to its tight integration between hardware and software over the network.

Microsoft is beginning field test of Windows XP on a low cost laptop, so-called $100 laptop, or XO, in early 2008.

XO is a project pioneered by a non-profit group led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. XO is the work of One Laptop Per Child project to boost access of technology to developing world by building low cost laptop for educational use only.

The first order came from Uruguay for 10,000 units and second order came from Peru for 40,000 units.

The XO laptop does not have hard drive and it uses a lightweight flash drive instead.

Microsoft has undertaken the project to run Windows on flash-based machine. Making Windows run on XO laptop is seen as a prerequisite for success for this projects. Many countries are holding back because the machine cannot run on Windows.

Porting Windows XP to run on XO is a challenge to re-write many drivers for the operating system that control functions like the laptop’s webcam and wireless connections. Besides these challenges, the engineers will have to make sure Windows run on a smaller amount of storage.

Virtualization simply means a single computer which can run multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously. This is a breakthrough technology compared to the conventional where a single computer operates a single operating systems. Virtualization can reduce the number of computers and related computer hardware in a data center that can bring savings in term of cost savings in electricity and real estate rental.

The company VMWare, majority-owned by EMC, has raised US$1.1 billion in its initial public offering in August 2007. This is one of the largest IPO since Google went public in 2004.