As some of you may know, the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray officially came to a dramatic conclusion on February 19, 2008 when Toshiba, the world's largest manufacturer of HD-DVD players at the time, called it quits. This came after several studios that once either backed both Blu-ray and HD-DVD or HD-DVD exclusively, decided to switch to Blu-ray exclusively. Incidentally, 20 years earlier, another format war effectively ended. That one did not end in Sony's favor, as they were the main proponent of the superior quality BetaMax format that eventually lost out to VHS. This time though, Sony, Blu-ray's brainfather, came out victorious.

The question now for the masses is no longer what format to get, but what Blu-ray Player. Since many factors, including steadily decreasing prices and more offerings of HD channels, have cause people to get high definiton televisions, the logical next step is to get a Blu-ray player with which to watch high definition movies. Yet, with the average cost of a new Blu-ray player still being around $550, some are deciding to wait it out and watch the prices falls. Others have decided to bite the bullet and get the most out of their movie watching experience right now. What do you plan to do?

But, hold on and drop that chalupa! Just when you thought it was all over and settled for another decade or so, Pioneer, which plans to starts selling Blu-ray players this year, decides to up the ante with a new HD format that may hold up to 16 times as much data.

Here we go again?

Can Mahalo, a new search engine, steal some market share away from Google?

Last month, another company, Mahalo (Hawaiian for "thank you"), inaugurated a search service with manually edited results. It started with several advantages: venture capital backing, 30 editors, systematic focus on the most commonly requested search terms, and the added idea of supplying Google's search results for any search not covered by its own best-of-the-best lists.

The Human Touch That May Loosen Google's Grip - New York Times

Google may be making a move into the television advertising market, according to TechCrunch.  Google is one of the dominant advertising force on the Internet, selling keyword-related ads for Google searches.  (Those "sponsored links" you see on the side of the search page.)  Google's financial success is largely due to its innovations in making advertising easy and accessible to everybody from big corporations down to the Mom and Pop shops.  After having recently moved into radio advertising, it will be interesting to see how the move into television pans out.

The WSJ is reporting (behind paywall) that Google is conducting a small scale test of television advertisements in the Northern California town of Concord (east of San Francsicso), and there are additional rumors that Google is close to signing a deal with Dish Network, a satellite television provider, to supply advertising to its television subscribers.

Google Testing TV Ads in California