MYSPACE has begun courting videogame developers as it moved to capitalise on the booming popularity of playing games online at social networks.

"We initially embraced games a few years back with a gaming platform but at the end of the day it was fairly isolated in certain parts of MySpace,''

MySpace co-president Mike Jones told AFP at a Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

"MySpace is going to put as much weight behind games as we put behind music.''

After being eclipsed by online social networking star Facebook, MySpace (owned by News Corp, the parent company of the publisher of news.com.au) made itself into an internet community for people who make or love music.

MySpace sees its prime demographic as internet users between the ages of 14 and 36.

The social network claims more than 100 million users, about 30 per cent of whom rack up about a total of a billion minutes of online game play each month.

Mr. Jones believes that by better weaving online games into the fabric of the online community those figures can be doubled to 60 per cent of MySpace users logging more than two billion minutes of play monthly.

MySpace is striving to reclaim lost glory and expand its popularity in a social networking world dominated by Facebook, which boasts more than 400 million users.

The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday.

"The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites," Jon Klein said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit here. "That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us.

"The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information," Klein said. "You click on links they send to you and you trust them.

"Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news," he said. "We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you.

"That's a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge," Klein said.

"So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox," the News Corp-owned station which is CNN's major competitor in the cable news arena, Klein said.

The CNN executive said his network's "mission" is to drive social network and other Web users to "link back to something on CNN."

Besides expanding its footprint on the Internet with news and video, CNN is looking at mobile devices, Klein said.

"Online is a big growth area for us, mobile has enormous growth potential and domestic US cable is actually a growth area," he said. "There's a lot of room to grow.

Minuscule tubes coated with a chemical fuel can act as a power source with 100 times more electrical power by weight than conventional batteries.

As these nano-scale "fuses" burn, they drive an electrical current along their length at staggering speeds.

The never-before-seen phenomenon could lead to a raft of energy applications.

Researchers reporting in Nature Materials say that unlike normal batteries, the nanotubes never lose their stored energy if left to sit.

The team, led by Michael Strano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coated their nanotubes - cylinders just billionths of a metre across - with a chemical fuel known as cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.

"One property that nanotubes have is that they conduct heat very, very well along their length, up to a hundred times faster than in metals," Dr Strano told BBC News.

"We asked what would happen if you perform a chemical reaction near one of these, and the first thing we found is the nanotube will guide the reaction, accelerating it up to 10,000 times."

The team used a laser or an electric spark to set off the reaction in a bundle of coated carbon nanotubes, filming the results using a high-speed camera.

But they also found that, through a mechanism that is still poorly understood, the process creates a useful voltage - a phenomenon they have dubbed "thermopower waves".

Their nanotube bundles carry, gram for gram, up to 100 times as much energy as a standard lithium-ion battery.

Since just a tiny amount of energy is needed to start the reaction before it becomes self-sustaining, Dr Strano says it could be initiated in a small device with the energy in the push of a finger.

And unlike standard batteries, the stored energy would not leak away over time, and requires none of the toxic, non-renewable metals in many batteries.

Sony India is targeting a 30 percent market share in the liquid crystal display (LCD) television segment in 2010-11 from the present 25 percent, a top company official said here on Wednesday.

"We are targeting to achieve 30 percent share in the LCD TV segment in 2010-11. The total market size of LCD TV is 1.6 million units now, which is going to increase by 70 percent to 2.7 million units in the next fiscal," Sunil Nayyar, general manager, sales, Sony India, told reporters.

He was here to launch the 3D Bravia NX TV priced between Rs 45,900 and Rs 3.50 lakh.

Riding on three factors, technology, picture quality and design, the company plans to double its sales in the next fiscal. "We plan to double our sales in 2010-11 from 4,00,000 to 8,00,000," Nayyar said.

TV makers are gearing up to launch 3D TV sets in Australia from next month but overseas pricing reveals a steep price premium over existing models, with a family of four required to spend $US600 on glasses alone.

Samsung's 3D TV technology range will be launched in Australia next month, followed soon after by Sony's July launch - both riding off the back of recent popular 3D movie releases such as Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.

Overseas pricing, announced this week, reveals the TV sets alone will cost several hundred dollars more than equivalent existing sets.

But it's not just your TV you will need to upgrade - a new 3D-ready Blu-ray player is required (unless the user owns a PlayStation 3), as well as a new HDMI cable and pairs of 3D glasses.

Australian TV networks, unlike their US counterparts, do not appear to be gearing up to offer any 3D broadcasts, but movies on 3D Blu-ray discs will start hitting the market alongside the new TV sets, and game developers have flagged significant investments in true 3D games.

It took him two years to perfect algorithms that allow rich content to be streamed on low bandwidth. But just twelve weeks into the commercial launch of the product, vMukti, the Ahmedabad-based start-up cofounded by Hardik Sanghvi has raked in eight enterprise customers. "These are customers who have signed on for two to five year contracts," says Sanghvi who will use this product to beam e-learning content to remote learning centres primarily in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

On the first day of EmTech, the emerging technology conference hosted by Technology Review, published by Technology Review, an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Sanghvi emerged as one amongst 20 Indians below the age of 35 who were honoured for their innovations in fields ranging from biotechnology to the arts and entertainment, software development to semiconductors , transportation, energy and new materials research.

Cisco unveiled a new Internet technology Tuesday that it says will provide the ultra-fast data speeds necessary to stay ahead of users' rapidly growing online video demands.

The new technology, known as "CRS-3," is a network routing system that will be able to offer downloads of up to 322 Terabits per second, according to the company.

Translation: Well in Cisco terms, the router will be able to provide download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second for everyone in San Francisco, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second and stream every movie ever created in less than 4 minutes.

Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers acknowledged that many skeptics will say that those speeds and network capacity are not necessary, but he argued that the fast-growing media usage on mobile phones will ultimately demand it.

"I know this is not that exciting to the average consumer right now, but it is the foundation for future speeds," Chambers said in a Web cast Tuesday. "When it comes to mobile devices, I want to get any video, anytime and be able to share that on any device in your living room. The foundation of that is the CRS-3."

"Anyone who currently owns an iPhone and was hoping they would be able to use it as a mobile Web access point for a Wi-Fi iPad just got some bad news.

Reportedly, Steve Jobs has said this will not happen. Swedish blog Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Jobs directly to ask him whether or not you'd be able to tether your iPad and iPhone and received a terse 'No' in reply. According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone."

Google (GOOG) is reportedly working with Dish Network Corp. (DISH) on the development of a new search service that will allow audiences to locate content on satellite television, as well as search for video on the Web, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said search the feature would be available on set-top boxes that contain Google software.

The search-engine giant is testing the search service on a small group of its employees and their families and could discontinue the test any time, the paper said, again citing people familiar with the matter.

SUch a service would be the latest among many media and technology companies' attempts to merge video on the Web with traditional broadcast television.