Kev's Development Toolbox

At this rate within a couple more years Balmer won’t have any execs left working for him at Microsoft – another one just left to join, you guessed it, Google.

Vic Gundotra, a 15 year veteran and ‘platform evangelist’ has left Microsoft to join Google. Gundotra is the second senior exec to leave in the last month – Martin Taylor, who had been working closely with Balmer and with the company for 13 years, was responsible for promoting the Windows Live platform (Microsoft’s online hosted app service, still a work in progress) and marketing Microsoft to beat the pressure from Google.

Fosfor Gadgets has a link to a site that has the first reviews of the first movies released on the new Blu-ray DVD hidef format.

The conclusions so far by this one reviewer is that there is room for improvement. The review noted that they felt the quality of the video was at times in consistent, as at times was not even as good as over-the-air broadcast HD TV. This doesn’t sound good for Blu-ray so far, which is being touted as superior to HD-DVD. The reviewer says there is definitely room for improvement, and in some ways sounds like the first movies that were released on DVDs with over-compression and showing compression artifacts, the movie studios have got to get to grips with what is possible with the new format and what can be achieved.

Now this is cool. Sony is planning on releasing PSone emulation for their PSP handheld, with the PSone back-catalog of games available for online download.

Also, expect a firmware release for the PSP when the PS3 ships in November which will offer yet uncomfirmed interaction between the PSP and the PS3 console, but expect to see some sort of remote game control from the PSP connecting wirelessly to the PS3. Already demo’d at E3 was the ability to use the PSP wirelessly as a rear-view mirror for some racing games. Gimicy, but very cool…