Recommendations can influence much of what we read on the web, from friends emailing us links to stories through to Digg votes and the less overt tagging of pages that signpost areas of interest.

When companies such as Amazon make recommendations, the aim is to sell more of its inventory by recognising the user’s interests.

Its collaborative-filtering technology is product based – “if you like this product you’re looking at, you might like this related product or you might like to know that other people looked at these related products,” is how it goes.

CleverSet, which has just announced new funding of $2m, takes a different approach, combining product information with data on a customer’s behaviour and the company’s website structure.

Noting times spent on pages, the clicks made and how users navigate sites can provide significant clues to what customers might be looking for, says Todd Humphrey, CleverSet’s chief executive.

“We are more concerned with the visitor and where they might end up next,” he says.

The company, whose technology is used by more than 60 online retailers, including Overstock.com, says it has managed to significantly increase sales through more relevant recommendations.

It has competition in a growing market for recommendation software from companies such as Aggregate Knowledge and ChoiceStream. Aggregate Knowledge has been successful in turning media sites onto the power of recommendations for content within their properties, which can increase the time visitors spend on the site and increase ad revenues.

Sphere is doing a similar job recommending relevant blog posts ….hey Sphere! What about this one then?

Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of the iconic BlackBerry family of wireless communicators, is gearing up to launch a slew of new products over the next few months.

These include the ‘Indigo’ which is due to be unveiled at next month’s 3GSM tech fest in Barcelona and is expected to marry a full Qwerty mini keyboard with the BlackBerry Pearl’s cool multimedia capabilites and the ‘Crimson’ about which relatively little has leaked out so far.

Jim Balsillie, RIM’s chief executive, remained appropriately tight-lipped during an interview at RIM’s Waterloo, Ontario HQ this week.

He did nevertheless promise "different form factors and different protocols" along with "better GPS and mapping, better video, better music and memory: all kinds of application capabilities." He also said new devices would feature better global capabilities, better partnership frameworks and new carrier launches.

"This conversion space is the most interesting space imaginable, and the most interesting time imaginable, so we’re going full on to keep up," he said.

Meanwhile he was showing off the latest white version of the BlackBerry Pearl, which he dubbed the ‘pearl Pearl’ and said he had given a pair to his teenage son and daughter who apparently have taken to them like the proverbial ducks to water.

Dad said, like other young Blackberry converts, they mostly use their new toys for messaging, media and browsing, but don’t talk on them very much.

Paul Taylor, New York

As a fan of film noir and the novels that provided its inspiration, it is fascinating working in San Francisco, where so many locations have been mixed with dark fiction and cinema.

Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in an apartment on Post Street, just up from the FT’s bureau, the movie Born to Kill features Ocean Beach, while Dark Passage and D.O.A are centred on the Malloch and Chambord apartment buildings respectively. Hitchcock’s Vertigo is shot all over the city.

In any event, the trend towards video game noir is currently piquing my interest.

Nintendo will release Hotel Dusk: Room 215 tomorrow for its dual-screen handheld, the DS. It describes it as a film noir “video game book” that tells the story of a disgraced detective Kyle Hyde. He checks into a seedy Los Angeles hotel and stumbles upon a 30-year-old murder mystery.

Rockstar Games, developers of the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto series, are currently working on L.A. Noire, an interactive detective story set in the 1940s

It “will truly blend cinema and gaming,” they claim, with action, detection and complex storytelling taking place in a perfectly recreated Los Angeles before freeways.

With these games and the much-anticipated Alan Wake, a “psychological action thriller” coming to the Xbox 360, the video game industry is making a welcome move away from pure “shoot ‘em ups” to titles that are atmospheric in their settings and involving in their story lines.

It is video games becoming more like the movies, not in the verisimilitude they promised, but in their ability to capture us with compelling plots and locations.

Sun and Intel’s differences dissolved over a “very good bottle” of Barolo at San Francisco’s Delfina restaurant a few months ago, according to respective chief executives Jonathan Schwartz and Paul Otellini.

The two sat side by side at this morning’s press conference to announce Sun would begin using Intel’s Xeon processors in its servers from late in the first half, while Intel would start promoting Sun’s Solaris operating system from today.

It would have been hard to imagine Scott McNealy, Sun’s contentious former CEO, forming a similar double act. But Mr Schwartz seems to have adopted a conciliatory approach since taking charge in April last year.

Sun and Intel are neighbours in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley and Messrs Schwartz and Otellini are San Francisco residents, prompting the Sun chief’s invitation to dine at a favourite local restaurant.

“We thought there’s an opportunity here, let’s get busy,” he said of the outcome.

Mr Otellini said the deal was driven by momentum for Solaris and Sun’s servers and for Intel’s new processor line.

It all makes sense in expanding markets for both companies, but there will still be rivalry at the upper end – Solaris still does not support Intel’s Itanium processor, which Mr McNealy once caustically referred to as the sinking “Itanic”.

In what was supposed to be a difficult transition year between console generations, video game hardware and software sales in the US still rose 18 per cent in 2006, according to the annual NPD figures.

Demand for games – software sales were up 6 per cent to $7.4bn - is being fuelled by the ever-growing installed base out there, augmented by the Xbox 360, the PlayStationPortable and Nintendo DS.

Total hardware and software sales for consoles, portables and PCs were $13.5bn – up 18 per cent on 2005 and 15 per cent higher than the previous record set in 2002.

Dollar sales of console hardware were up 88 per cent, reflecting the success of the Xbox 360 and the continuing strength of Sony’s PlayStation 2.

Revenues for PC games were up 1 per cent after several years of declines. PC games are expected to get a further boost this year with the launch of Windows Vista, which has been optimised for video games.

The top game on the PC was Vivendi’s World of Warcraft. WoW’s first expansion set, The Burning Crusade, was released this week. Various versions of EA’s The Sims occupy five of the Top Ten best-seller slots for 2006. It announced laptop "romantic comedy" versions of the game this week.

EA’s Madden NFL was the top selling video game in all formats, followed by THQ’s Cars and LucasArts’ Lego Star Wars II.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether PS3s sitting on shelves at retailers mean Sony has solved its supply issues or has a problem of weak demand for its pricey console.

American Technology Research found 28 of 52 stores had the PS3 in stock this week but none had Nintendo’s Wii available. Sony says it is airlifting 100,000 units a week to the US to ensure adequate supplies. Techbargains has the latest details of online availability.

The best Web 2.0 sites use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to guide users to great content. Flickr uses its audience to guide users to great photos, while YouTube does the same for videos, and Digg does it for news. Stockpickr, the brainchild of James Altucher, a hedge fund manager (and FT columnist), hopes to do the same for stock picks.

New users are prompted to enter a few ticker symbols, and can compare their portfolios to those of other members of the site. Even more interesting, Stockpickr lets users compare their picks to those of the pros - including investment titans like Warren Buffet and George Soros, in addition to institutional investors. Private users who upload their portfolios are given an opportunity to say why they think their picks will rise or fall.

The financial markets are awash in the kinds of unstructured data (company filings, earnings releases, news reports, etc)  that crowds are good at processing. The stock market itself does the same thing of course, but without the same visibility into other people’s motivations for picking individual stocks. Add the prospect for financial gain, and it’s little wonder people are excited about business opportunities at the nexus of Web2.0 and finance.

This writeup on TechCrunch gives a good overview of what Stockpickr is all about.

So Intel has a technological lead with its spiffing new dual-core and quad-core processors, it has a manufacturing lead with its smaller, more cost-efficient 65-nanometre chip circuitry and yet its margins remain below 50 per cent.
This was the big disappointment of its fourth-quarter earnings and first-quarter forecast this week. Margins were more than 60 per cent a year earlier with older products, inferior to its rival Advanced Micro Devices, that were made on 90nm chips.
The reason margins and profits will disappoint in 2007, despite its best new product line in years, is Intel’s apparent determination to grind AMD into the dust.
Intel intends to keep its prices low to win market share and it is accelerating its cycle of innovation to try to take an unassailable technological lead.
There will be two-year renewals of its architecture instead of five, while further miniaturisation will take place every other year now.
All this costs money and eats into margins – start-up costs for 45nm manufacturing will subtract a couple of percentage points this year and Intel will probably struggle to get full utilisation out of older plant being left behind.
Reasserting its traditional dominance over AMD will play well for Intel in the long term but it will not satisfy investors looking for a boost to dividends and a share price that has been in a long slump.
Joe Osha, Merrill Lynch semiconductor analyst, says in a report that what has happened to Intel is simple: it has created too much manufacturing capacity.
“Until Intel starts to think more about running its business for returns and less about market share and the next process node, results are likely to continue to disappoint,” he said.
“Above all, we think that there would be real opportunity if Intel management accepted the fact that the processor market is now a duopoly, albeit a lopsided one, and acted accordingly.”
The evidence is to the contrary and Merrill Lynch sees Intel as a company with peak earnings power of $1.20 to $1.30 a share as a result.
By Intel’s processor standards, that represents an underclocking of the company’s earnings potential and Wall Street is not happy.

Any negative comments about Apple’s forthcoming iPhone have focused on its proprietary nature and hefty price tag. At $499 and $599 its price points match those of Sony’s PlayStation 3.

ISuppli, the chip research firm, took apart a PS3 recently and discovered the sum cost of its materials and manufacturing was $805.85 for the 20Gb model and $840.35 for the 60Gb version – representing a $306.85 subsidy of the cheaper version.

In contrast, iSuppli has not yet got his hands on the iPhone but has estimated Apple is charging around double what it will cost to manufacture.

It says the 4Gb version will cost $245.83 for parts and manufacturing and the 8Gb version $280.83. The most expensive component will be its 3.5-inch touch screen at $33.50.

This represents the usual healthy profit margin for Apple and buyers can expect no relief from Cingular, with iSuppli predicting the operator will not offer it at a subsidised price.

ISuppli’s analysis is at variance with the opinion of Nomura analyst Richard Windsor, who sees the iPhone as a crunched down Mac Mini with added cell phone parts that should cost around $800.

The iPhone will be available by mid-year in the US and later elsewhere. Mobile phone users in Europe and Asia, who can’t wait, will be able to buy an iPhone lookalike as early as next month from LG.

Today it unveiled the Prada-branded KE-850, a touchscreen phone with a 2-megapixel camera that will sell for 600 euros in Europe.

Initial reactions to the Skype founders’ new internet television service seem positive. Nikolaj Nyholm, writing on O’Reilly Radar, dubbed the new service, which on Tuesday dropped its code name "the Venice Project" and took on its official name, Joost,  "the iPhone of TV."

Joost bills itself as a "new way of watching TV on the Internet." Its software allows users to stream TV content to their computers, surf through ‘channels’ and even chat with other users.

Meanwhile, Netflix announced Tuesday that it will begin offering streaming movie downloads to subscribers. Together with Apple’s new Apple TV box - which was unfairly overlooked in the frenzy surrounding the launch of the iPhone - the stars seem to be aligning for internet video to move beyond YouTube towards longer-form content in 2007.

Rumours that Intel will build its first Asian chip factory in China and Microsoft will begin selling its Xbox 360 console there as early as next month do have some substance behind them.
"We’ve said many times before we’d be interested in building a wafer fab in China," Chuck Mulloy, Intel spokesman, told me today.
"We haven’t announced any plans and this falls into the category of a speculative report."
The bulk of Intel’s chip manufacturing takes place in the US, but it has factories in the Irish Republic and Israel. It has assembly and testing facilities in Asia, including two in China, but a fab, costing upward of $2bn, would be its biggest investment to date.
The 360 has been available in Hong Kong since launch and, as far back as 2005, Microsoft announced it intended to sell the 360 in the rest of China, but has never given a timeframe.
More than 10m units of the 360 have been sold in 37 countries to date. The key factor determining the Chinese launch will be the approval of the government’s culture and information ministries.