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Sony has provided a rare set of hard figures from the strange virtual economy of massively-multiplayer-online games (MMOGs). Its Station Exchange, the first ‘official’ online exchange for the virtual items in an online game - Everquest II - saw $1.87m worth of items and characters such as Dark Elves change hands in the first 12 months since its launch in mid-2005.

But given that there were - last time I checked - about 13m MMOGH players, that seems a little slim.

One member, Sony says, earned $37,435 in that year — but surely there are B-list bloggers who earn more than that?

Of course, World of Warcraft now eclipses Everquest in terms of players, and, more importantly, there are many unofficial online exchanges for all the elves, gold and swords you could ever wish for. However eBay is no longer one of them - last week it decided to prohibit sales of virtual game goods although it exempted Second Life, saying there was "an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game."

[More analysis of the Station Exchange figures from Ralph Koster and the Indiana University crew. And some good overall MMOGH stats are available here, though they haven’t been updated for several months.]

Winning recognition for the "Open XML" formats in the new Office 2007 as international standards is a vital step for Microsoft. Without it, governments around the world will be less likely to adopt the new formats (and the Microsoft software in which they are embedded.)

So it is at the least inconvenient for Redmond, and potentially more worrying, that the International Standards Organisation has just added another three months to its review of the matter, following representations from the UK (and possibly other countries.) The ISO already recognises the rival Open Document Format, which has been gaining ground, so matching that is a must for Microsoft. How damaging could this be? Impossible to tell until more details of potential objections become clear, but being forced to return to the drawing board at this stage could cause Microsoft real problems.

Meanwhile, Texas has become the latest US state to join the rush to "open" document formats.

Sometimes the marketing moves of the video games industry beggar understanding.

An announcement by Electronic Arts this morning left me scratching my head as hard as when Nintendo decided last year to call its new console the Wii instead of sticking to its original choice, the Revolution.

That one grew on me a bit but I have yet to work out the logic of calling EA’s latest action game titles, The Orange Box and The Black Box.

Orange boxes I associate with something you stand on to get a better view or to store stuff under the sink in. Black boxes are aircraft flight recorders (although they happen to be bright orange).

Action game titles should be called something like Medal of Duty or Metroid Halo Gears of Destruction.

But EA “today announced the naming and product configurations The Black Box and The Orange Box, two of the most anticipated action game offerings shipping worldwide in Fall 2007.”

The Black Box, just for PC gamers, contains Half-Life 2: Episode Two, a new action game Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box, for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 includes The Black Box’s content, plus the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One.

I suppose it will soon become a cool code among gamers – Are you getting the Black or the Orange? – but as names go, only The White Box could top these for minimalism.

Two aspects of the "new" Microsoft were on display in San Francisco on Tuesday at the computer security industry’s biggest annual gathering, the RSA conference.

One came in the person of Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. A 15-year Microsoft veteran with a background in supercomputing, Mundie’s has long had an influential voice in Microsoft core strategic thinking. In the past, though, he has stayed pretty much in the background. At RSA, there he was sitting alongside Bill Gates, chatting broadly about the company’s longer-range vision for security. Tellingly, he talked about how he and Gates had between them come up with the five-year-old "Trustworthy Computing" initiative, which marked a watershed in the company’s thinking. As Microsoft prepares for Life after Gates, the history books are being rewritten to shift attention to a broader group of executives.

The other aspect was the drum-beat insistence on interoperability that creeps into just about every major presentation by a Microsoft executive these days. Gently, Mundie owned up to Microsoft’s fallibility in this department. "We didn’t do well in the past," he said, since for system-wide issues like security, effective interoperability is vital.

In future, according to Mundie, Microsoft will model its approach to interoperability on the chip industry. Chips are tightly integrated pieces of technology that have clear interfaces that other companies can "plug" their own technology into. So it will be with software: Microsoft is getting "more hardcore" about tight integration between the proprietary elements in its software, Mundie said. But it will also provide clear interfaces that other security companies can link to. As the company moves beyond its narrow vision of a world where all software is Microsoft, it is as clear a statement of intent as we’ve yet heard.

John Thompson, Symantec’s chief executive, still seems sore with Microsoft about its move onto his anti-virus turf.

Symantec and McAfee, two of the leading companies in the field, complained about the new Vista operating system before its launch. Its improved PatchGuard security was inhibiting their access to the 64-bit version of the operating system’s kernel so that they too could prevent hacker attacks.

That spat has been resolved but Microsoft is still taking on Symantec and McAfee with products such as OneCare and Windows Defender protecting its operating system.

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco today, Mr Thompson followed a keynote by Bill Gates with his own speech, including remarks about Microsoft’s place in the security ecosystem.

“You wouldn’t want the company that created your company’s operating platform to be the one that is securing it from a wide range of risks, it’s a huge conflict of interest,” he said, to loud applause from delegates.

He said he refused to plug Symantec’s own products in his speech, but jokingly referred to Norton Internet Security 2007 on numerous occasions.

Another Web site creation service might sound like a yawn, but actually Nexo Systems does a pretty good job of making the often tedious task of creating of a group Web site for a family, friends, club or team, pretty painless.
This sleek free Web publishing service, launched at last week’s Demo tech conference,  sets out to make it easy for virtually anyone to create a group Web site designed to keep members informed and in touch with each other. It builds on the success of current market leader Yahoo! Groups, delivering drag-and-drop simplicity as well as power and flexibility.
Aside from the home page, group features include shared calendars, forums, tasks, blogs, feeds, polls, photos, videos and file sharing. Once set up, the organiser can invite others to participate and contribute to the Web site.
All in all, Nexo is easy and fun to use and an excellent example of how so-called Web 2.0 technologies can be used to create an innovative new service.
Paul Taylor, New York

Beijing: With Google trailing far behind in Chinese internet search, Nasdaq-listed market-leader Baidu.com has been putting the boot in with a video commercial that mocks foolish foreigners’ ignorance about China. The spot, (available on Google’s own YouTube here ), features a local hero who crashes a wedding between a top-hatted Caucasian and his Chinese fiancée, woos the bride-to-be away, and leaves the foreigner vomitting up what looks like blood.

"I know you don’t know I know…you don’t know I know you don’t know," the Chinese scholar hero tells him in what is intended to be a demonstration of the importance of local linguistic understanding.

Google might be forgiven for feeling Baidu is being a bit ungrateful, given that Beijing-based company owes its business model and the ideas behind most of its services to its US rival (a lookalike video search function is expected next week). And it’s far from clear that Baidu’s success is purely the result of Chinese acumen - it has hardly been hurt by government disruption of Google’s uncensored international service.

Indeed, Sergey Brin, Google’s president of technology, said last week the Communist government’s efforts to "purify" the internet could be largely driven by protectionism, saying: "I think a lot of these challenges and policing may be side effects of lobbying by local competitors there”. (See the FT story).

One of the taglines to the advert - "(Baidu) conforms to Chinese customs" - may be a veiled dig at the very public soul-searching Google went through before launching its censored domestic Chinese service. Baidu, by contrast, is happy to restrict access through its services to information that might upset the government. That policy is perfectly understandable from a business point of view, but it does mean - to misquote the advert - that there are lots of things Chinese users of its heavily censored searches "don’t know they don’t know".

About this time last year, at Demo 06, the Bay Area robotics company Ugobe was unveiling its first product - Pleo the dinosaur - and promising the cute pet would be available by Christmas for around $200.
Christmas came and went and Pleo made our Tech Grinch list as its launch was pushed back to March and the cost rose to $250.
Now Ugobe has announced Pleo won’t be available until the summer and will cost around $300.
This sounds like the familiar tale of an over-ambitious ground-breaking product that needs lots of bugs working out and has escalating costs.
But there’s also an element of perfectionism about the Ugobe team, who showed us a greatly improved Pleo at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, where the skin and movements had become increasingly realistic.
Ugobe says the delay is due to an extra sensor - that makes 35 in all now - being added under the chin where people have been tending to stroke the robot. They are also upgrading the internal speakers and improving Pleo’s sound library.
Ugobe is meanwhile trying to  assuage the impatience of dinosaur robot fans by launching a contest on its website with ten of the first Pleos off the production line as prizes.

If you are a musician, organising, travelling to and setting up practice sessions with other band members can be a hassle, particularly if the jam-session participants are geographically dispersed.

Pulling together a virtual music session over the internet would seem to provide a solution, but the problem until now has been that varying network latencies (delays) has made it impossible to stay in synch with other band members. EJamming believes it has the solution.

The company’s proprietary technology all but eliminates latency problems, enabling musicians to practise together in real time and in synch. Certainly, the live demo eJamming gave on stage at Demo 07 was impressive.

EJamming’s founders say the technology works best over relatively short internet hops up to about 200 miles, but they have managed to host transcontinental and even transatlantic jam sessions successfully.

EJamming’s software integrates with the company’s web portal, which includes musician profiles, music postings, blogs, job listings, an education centre, classified ads, backing tracks and music distribution, making it a must for all those budding Claptons, Hendrixs and Joplins out there.

Not to be confused with eJamming, Jaman’s services enable film buffs to discover, download and share their thoughts on independent films from around the globe that might otherwise never reach a wide audience.

Jaman combines a better-than-DVD-quality broadband download service with social networking features, enabling its users to compare notes on films, share experiences and make recommendations.

The potential market for the service, which charges $1.99 for a movie rental and $4.99 to own the film, is enormous. Apparently less than one per cent of films produced ever get distributed in the US. Film buffs take note.

Despite the proliferation of desktop and embedded video cams, video messaging/video email has not really taken off.

Eyejot, one of the startups showing their technology at the Demo 2007 conference, plans to change that with a simple to use video messaging service that uses flash technology and requires no complicated downloads, enabling anyone with a video cam to create video messages.

To create a video email, you go to Eyejot’s webpage www.eyejot.com, log on, record a video and press send. The intended recipient is alerted via an email message that a message is waiting and logs onto the Eyejot site to view it. Eyejot messages can also be viewed on any email and browser-equipped mobile device. The service is free initially but Eyejot plans to launch an enhanced $30-a-year service shortly.

Interestingly, users can also send video messages from a blog or embed them in a MySpace home page. Consumers can also view their Eyejot mailbox using Apple’s iTunes or via an RSS reader. Overall, Eyejot is impressive and could just be the service to turn video email into a mainstream service.

Meanwhile Brevient Technologies’ free voice and SMS messaging service dubbed Jyngle, combines real-time mobile technology and online social networking to facilitate group communication. Jyngle users create, send and receive mass messages using either a Web interface or their cell phones and, by joining public groups or creating their own, they can remain up to date on social activities and business information while on the go.

Sign me up! Jyngle looks like a cool way to stay in touch with family, friends and potentially colleagues.