Microsoft is facing a Web triumvirate trying to muscle in on its domination of the desktop.

Google Gears, announced today, will enable Google applications such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Reader to be used without an internet connection, although only the last named will initially have this offline capability.

Google is also making Gears open source, encouraging developers to make 1,000s of browser-based applications work offline - storing information on a computer’s hard drive or local network as well as in the internet "cloud".

The ability to look at your Inbox or write a Word document without being online has been a key differentiator of Microsoft’s Office suite. At the same time, Google has tried to argue it is different from Office because it has created applications meant for sharing with other people. But if the programs are used offline, this distinction dissolves and Google’s applications become direct competitors to Microsoft’s.

The other members of the triumvirate are Mozilla, creator of the Firefox browser, and Adobe, developer of the Acrobat portable document format (pdf) and Flash media player that have become standards of the web.

Mozilla is planning to support the offlining of Web applications in the next, 3.0 version of Firefox and is already experimenting with this.

Adobe will introduce Apollo later this year, a platform that enables web apps to run outside the browser on a PC, mobile phone or other device, including when they are disconnected from the net, albeit with more limited functionality.

The walls are clearly coming down between the browser and the computer desktop. Armed with Web apps that are maybe not as good as Office, but seem good enough and are free to consumers, the barbarians of the online world are at the gates of Microsoft’s offline kingdom.

For all its talk about not being evil, Google’s latest maps innovation is, well, a bit creepy. Similar to the now-defunct "block view" feature on Amazon’s A9 search engine, Google’s new "street view", makes it possible to zoom in for an up close view of addresses in Google Maps.

That is well and good for someone who was interested in locating something like the FT bureau in San Francisco, for example. But it veers into the Orwellian when it allows you to peek into the windows of unsuspecting private citizens such as this Boingboing reader, who was startled to see that Google’s street-level photographers had  captured an image of her tabby cat perching in her living room window.

To be fair, Google says it will offer users a way to report inappropriate street view images. But its disarmingly geeky tutorial on the new service makes no mention of privacy concerns. Between intrusive street views and its recenly stated desire to manage its users’ personal lives, one gets the sense the Google is beginning to push the limits of its ‘don’t be evil’ strategy.

People and companies around the world will print the equivalent of more than 50 trillion pages in 2010. Vyomseh, Joshi, head of Hewlett-Packard’s $27bn imaging and printing group, spent this morning in New York outlining how the company plans to capture more of them.

According to HP, an astouding 48 per cent of pages printed in the home now come from the world wide web, in the form of travel itineraries, directions, news articles and other online media. In spite of this huge demand for web printing, formatting remains a problem. Simply put, most web pages look terrible when you print them out.

HP hopes to change that by offering a common platform for web printing. The platform will be based on Tabblo, a web 2.0 site that HP snapped up earlier this year. Tabblo, which allows users to drag and drop photos and text into printer-friendly templates, will soon offer a printing "widget" that can be embedded in blogs and other web sites.

By making it easier to print from the web, HP hopes to encourage more of it, leading in turn to more sales of high-margin ink. Maybe there is hope for dead-tree media in an online world after all.

Who says European entrepreneurship is dead? Last.fm, a music site that pools its users’ preferences to offer personalised music recommendations, became the latest EU-based startup to be bought out on Wednesday after it agreed to be acquired by CBS for $280m. The company, which operates from the gritty streets of East London, is the latest in a string of internet deals for the US television network. Other recent deals include CBS’s acquisition of Wallstrip.com, an innovative web show; and investments in Joost, the online TV site created by the founders of Skype, and Spot Runner, a web-based TV ad group.

Richard Jones, a Last.fm founder, outlined the company’s reasoning about the deal on the recently-launched Last.fm blog:

The team here have spent a lot of time this year discussing what the future should hold for Last.fm, and while contemplating raising some additional venture capital we were approached by CBS. As you can imagine, we have been approached numerous times in the past few years from all the usual suspects regarding acquisitions and so on; CBS are one of the few companies who needed no explanation of what we are doing, and we were impressed at how progressive their plans are. This deal with CBS gives us a chance to really make Last.fm shine, and gives us more flexibility than other funding options would for doing all the crazy stuff we’re had scribbled on whiteboards for years.

US presidential hopefuls reliance on the internet for their 2008 campaigns extends to it telling them where they should next hold their rallies.

Eventful Demand, a service offered by the events website eventful.com, is used by more than 12,000 musicians to help them plan tours according to where their fanbase is located. Fans “vote” for bands to visit their cities, revealing where they are most popular.

Now the tool is being embraced by presidential candidates, says Jordan Glazier, Eventful’s chief executive.

A rally of 20,000 people in Atlanta for Barack Obama was fired by Eventful requests. Campaign managers for John Edwards, Jim Gilmore, Barack Obama and Ron Paul use Eventful as well as supporters of Sam Brownback, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Gravel and John McCain.

TechPresident.com now tracks Eventful requests alongside Flickr photos, MySpace friends, Facebook supporters and YouTube videos as measures of candidate’s online activity and impact.

“They are all about online activity, we stand alone in providing an online service that translates into live events,” says Mr Glazier.

"Eventful Demand could be to 2008 what Meetup was to 2004," agrees Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident.

With MySpace able to track online donations and offer fundraising tools, the online world is providing the political oxygen of money and support that could extend the life of many a campaign.

Fabrik is attempting to take online storage to the next level and the backing of venture capital group 3i this week ought to help.

Fourth-round funding of $25m will help Fabrik launch an integrated service in the autumn that will give users control through a single interface over documents, photos and video stored online, offline and on any local or network-attached devices.

The Silicon Valley company is led by Mike Cordano, formerly with the Maxtor hard drive company. The chief executive says he saw a need for applications and services to be developed for storage.

Fabrik’s first iteration is myfabrik.com, which offers 1Gb of free storage and charges 49 cents a month for each extra gigabyte needed.

Online storage companies abound, but Fabrik has differentiated itself with its appealing user interface and the ability to embed its stored media in blogs and social-network pages.

In February, Fabrik paid $43m for the consumer business of SimpleTech, a maker of external hard drives, and more acquisitions can be expected after the 3i cash injection and the appointment of Ross Levinsohn to the board this week.

He was most recently president at Fox Interactive Media, overseeing more than 10 acquisitions including MySpace.

“We think there are some very nice opportunities in this broadly defined storage space to do some unique things and grow at a clip,” Mike Cordano told us.

The games console and phone are increasingly blending into one, and convergence is happening from all angles. Nokia has for a long time been talking about putting its N-Gage gaming platform onto a series of smartphones. Now Sony has done a deal with BT to put voice and video call capabilities on the PlayStation Portable.

Of course, given that the PSP can connect to the internet via a wi-fi connection, you can already make internet calls on the device, if you can be bothered to set up Skype or something similar. However, from around September this year, BT are planning to make calls from the device a much easier, one-click operation.

There are advantages on both sides from the deal. BT are keen to get more wi-fi devices and paying users for its expensive network of 2000 wi-fi hotspots and 13 wireless cities around the UK.

Sony, on the other hand, is keen to add features to increase the appeal of the PSP, which saw sales fall by 5.7m units last year.

The pricing model is still shrouded in some secrecy – Sony is due to make announcements on this at the Leipzig Games Convention in August. And there is a the slight drawback that – at least initially – you will be able to call only other PSPs and BT internet phones.

However BT and Sony have taken one lesson from Nokia’s ill-fated N-Gage console, whose failure was partly attributed to its large “taco” shape. You can make calls on the PSP through a headset or loudspeaker function – no one will have to hold the hulking console to their ear.

Electronic Arts became the world’s biggest video game publisher without ever having a serious impact in Asia.

That may be changing. On Monday, it announced it was taking a 15 per cent stake in The9, one of the leading online game operators in China, for $167m.

EA has been unable to make an impression in China with its boxed titles due to rampant piracy. Gamers also seem to prefer playing massively-multiplayer online games in internet cafes. Vivendi’s World of Warcraft has been the only Western game to make a significant breakthrough into a market dominated by home-grown or Korean games.

EA thinks it can find a paying-subscriber market in China with the help of The9 and soccer. The9 now has exclusive publishing rights for the online version of its FIFA game, EA’s biggest international sports franchise.

EA is repeating its earlier strategy in Korea, where it invested $105m in the online gaming company Neowiz in March for a 19 per cent stake. Last year, it partnered with Neowiz to launch FIFA Online in Korea and the game has attracted 4.4m subscribers.

“We’ve got the right business model and the delivery mechanism right [in Asia],” said John Riccitiello, EA’s new chief executive, in his first earnings conference call with analysts this month.

That hasn’t been the case in the past, but partnering locally to develop its franchises for Asia and delivering them online to regular subscribers is now keeping EA “in the game”.

Microsoft’s $6bn acquisition of aQuantive today isn’t just Microsoft’s biggest acquisition ever. It may be the biggest deal for an advertising company in history. Are things getting out of hand in the suddenly red-hot online advertising sector?

AQuantive’s stock price shot up more than 77 per cent today after word of Microsoft’s $6bn takeover. Paying $6bn in cash for a company on Friday that was worth $3bn on Monday might seem over the top, but a closer look at the numbers shows that the valuation Microsoft put on the company falls somewhere between what Google paid for DoubleClick and what Yahoo paid for Right Media.

As Jason Jones points out on Internet Outsider, aQuantive would be worth about $60 based on the multiple Google paid for DoubleClick (33 times earnings). On the other hand, it would be worth about $75 a share if Microsoft used the multiple paid by Yahoo for Right Media (10 times enterprise value divided by revenues). aQuantive’s shares were trading at just under $64 yesterday. Rich? Yes. Insane? Maybe not.

The Nintendo Wii has extended its domination over Sony’s PlayStation 3 to an embarrassing level, according to the latest US sales estimates from the NPD Group.

It says 82,000 PS3s were sold in April compared to 360,000 Wiis - meaning Nintendo’s next-generation machine is outselling Sony’s by more than four to one.

In March, the ratio was only two to one - 260,000 Wiis to 130,000 PS3s, but Sony’s sales are slumping while Nintendo’s continue to soar.

Microsoft sold a respectable 174,000 of its Xbox 360 consoles, down from 199,000 in March, but, with its year’s headstart, it leads the next-generation console race with a US installed base of 5.4m, compared to 2.5m for the Wii and 1.3m for the PS3.

Nintendo is also dominant in the handheld market - its dual-screen DS sold 471,000 units in April compared to 183,000 for the Sony PSP and has sold 10.9m in its lifetime to date, with the PSP at 7.4m units.

Nintendo was helped by some big game releases.   Pokémon Diamond version and   Pokémon Pearl version for the DS were the top-selling games of the month, with a total of 1.757m units sold in just 14 days. Their sales were more than the rest of the Top Ten’s combined figures,  consisting of two Wii, two Xbox 360 and four PlayStation 2 titles.

Analysts criticised Sony this week for a dearth of compelling games for the PS3 when it reported a loss for its gaming division.

It responded on Thursday by showing off its software titles for the second half to the press at a San Diego event. More than 30 games for the PS3 were demonstrated, including Warhawk and Heavenly Sword, with more than 15 games and services exclusive to Sony’s console.

This sounds promising, except that they will be up against Microsoft’s own exclusive property, Halo 3, in the second half, and Grand Theft Auto 4, for both consoles, could also weaken sales of Sony’s first-party titles.