External hard drives can be great for PC backup and carrying your data around with you, but I can think of two non-PC uses straightaway for the pair of drives launched by Seagate on Monday.

They both reside under my TV, as do two other possible destinations for external storage that are less friendly to hard drive manufacturers.

Seagate’s FreeAgent XTreme is a fast large-capacity drive, costing $300 for a 1.5 terabyte version. I could plug that into the USB port on my satellite DVR receiver. Its internal drive fills up in no time with all the high-definition movies and TV shows I record, so the top model of the XTreme would lift my total storage capacity to 2 terabytes or 220 hours of HD recording.

The xTreme has more storage than Seagate’s Showcase external drive, brought out specifically for DVRs in 500Gb and 1Tb versions.

Then there’s the FreeAgent Go, a small sleek portable drive in 250Gb ($120), 320Gb ($150) and 500Gb ($240) sizes that looks very Apple-like in design and comes with its own dock in the Mac version. It would work very well swapped between the PC and the new Slingcatcher, now available and on my Christmas wishlist.

One useful attribute of the Slingcatcher is that it allows you to transfer photos, videos and music onto an external drive and then plug it into the Slingcatcher attached to your TV. You can then use its remote control and appealing interface to watch or listen to your media on the big screen.

The two other devices under my TV where I would struggle to increase the storage, despite them having the same USB connections, are the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games consoles.

I can understand why Sony and Microsoft have not gone out of their way to make extra storage plug and play - it messes with their pricing strategy.

The common tactic has been to keep a console’s price constant by offering more storage for the same price. Storage prices are constantly falling away so this move appears to offer fresh value while maintaining margins.

The ability to add easily a cheap external hard drive would be disruptive for this model.

“They’ve controlled that pretty tightly because they want a portion of the opportunity,” Brian Dexheimer, president of Seagate’s Consumer Solutions Division, told me.

“Microsoft wants you to buy their 120Gb drive accessory that attaches to the side of the Xbox.”

“I think it’s going to be very hard for them to keep those models closed because storage lifecycles move at a very different pace to device lifecycles,” he added.

He reckoned a 20Gb Xbox drive would fill up in six months with all of the HD content now available through Xbox Live, but the console would be expected to last for five to seven years.

Mr Dexheimer said that while he expected Microsoft and Sony’s attitudes to change,  consumers could be turned off by too many external hard drives under their TVs linked to consoles, DVRs and other devices.

“You really want to solve that problem with the network,” he said.

“Our view is storage will move to become a seamless expandable asset that you will want to get access to like your power supply - it’s just there when you need it and if you need more your storage bill would go up at the end of the month. But until we reach that point, people will want to solve these problems in piecemeal ways.”

It’s always amusing to see the spin the console makers put on the key monthly sales figures in the US, released by the NPD research firm.

The bald facts of the August stats just released are that Nintendo sold 453,000 Wiis (down more than 100,000 from 555,000 in July), Microsoft regained second place  with 195,000 Xbox sales (down from 205,000) and Sony brought up the rear with 185,000 PS3s, down from 225,000.

Clearly, August was a slow month, but Microsoft’s sales held up better than its rivals, perhaps helped by the release of the latest instalment in Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL franchise - 1m copies were sold for the Xbox against 643,000 on the PS3 and only 116,000 on the Wii.

Sony’s spin on the figures consisted of a hint from Jack Tretton, its US chief, that a transition from 40Gb to 80 Gb models may have affected sales.

“We … began shipping the new 80GB PS3 model in late August to address any short term inventory transitions from the 40GB to 80GB model,” he said.

From January to August 2008, more than 2m PS3s had been sold in the US, representing a year-to-date hardware sales growth of more than 92 per cent, Sony emphasised.

Nintendo also focused on the bigger picture, saying its figures brought the lifetime US total to nearly 12m Wiis sold, “extending its lead as the best-selling video game console of this generation.” Microsoft has sold 10.9m Xboxes in the US.

Microsoft’s take was that the Xbox “owns sports games,” with Madden helping it to a record-breaking software attach rate averaging eight games per console.

The company expects a big boost in console sales in September, having reduced the Xbox Arcade version to $199 on September 5.

“Console sales across all Xbox 360 models were up over 100 per cent between Friday, September 5 and Sunday, September 7. The Xbox 360 Arcade system, now the lowest priced next generation console on the market at $199, showed the largest lift, selling at six times the rate it was the weekend before,” it said, citing Microsoft internal data.

The 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit is being celebrated today with Texas Instruments announcing Kilby Labs, a centre that will focus on further semiconductor breakthroughs.

TI new employee Jack Kilby demonstrated the first IC to management on September 12 1958, after spending his first summer there developing a circuit on a single chip made of germanium.

Robert Noyce, Intel’s co-founder, is credited as a co-inventor in coming up with the same idea shortly afterwards at Fairchild Semiconductor, except basing it on a silicon chip.

Noyce died in 1990 and Kilby in 2005.

TI said Kilby Labs would be based in Dallas and bring together university researchers and TI engineers to develop new chip advances. It has also recreated Kilby’s original lab at its headquarters as “a visual reminder of the power of science and technology.”

Jim Tully, Gartner analyst, said in a note:

“The integrated circuit is the engine of the information age. It has been a catalyst for the democratisation of knowledge and changing global social structures. It facilitates mass communication through mobile phones and large-scale access to information and entertainment through the Internet.”

According to Gartner, sales of ICs have been growing at about 10 per cent annually for the past several decades and around $270bn worth of ICs will be sold globally in 2008.

Not a bad outcome for a one-man summer project.

Yahoo has been showing off its Fall collection to journalists in a series of presentations at its Sunnyvale campus.

Nothing really new to report: a dash of colour here, a widget there, but this blog’s fashion trendspotters can report that the theme this season is Open and Yahoo was sporting a fetching pastiche of styles and services, stemming from it opening up its platforms to others.

Ari Balogh, chief technology officer, kicked off the event by saying the Yahoo Open Strategy, launched last April, was about Yahoo merging with the web.

He showed its Digg clone, Buzz, as an example of how Yahoo was open with content. More than 5,000 publishers had taken part since its launch in February and 2m articles buzzed, including 1.5m hits sent to the New York Post’s website for one favourited article.

Content owners must love Yahoo becoming more open - it can claim 500m users and hitching your content to that wagon is sure to drive ad revenues. Getting their content also makes Yahoo more of a magnet for readers and advertisers.

Scott Moore, head of Yahoo’s media properties, said Yahoo’s Olympics coverage had outstripped host broadcaster NBC’s in popularity with 32m unique visitors in the US, compared to NBC’s 22.9m, according to data from the comScore research firm yesterday. He said Shine, launched in April, had rapidly become the leading women’s site on the web.

Coming up next is another revamp for Yahoo Music. The site’s openness will mean Flickr integration plus modules for outside blogs and reviews and music services such as Pandora and The Hype Machine.

Ash Patel, head of the Audience Product division, showed how outsiders could even earn real estate on the Yahoo home page through greater personalisation for users. His example was a Netflix box, that also showed up in Yahoo Mail and search. Users could see Netflix synopses of films and add them to their rental queue as a service that supplemented their normal search results for movies.

Hilary Schneider, head of Yahoo US, recapped some advertising numbers and said Yahoo taking full control of Right Media had given it a 77 per cent growth in total participants in its network and growth of more than 30 per cent in yields. Jerry Yang, chief executive, is expected to do the hard sell on Yahoo’s network at the Ad Week event in New York later this month.

Finally, Marco Boerries, head of the Connected Life division, gave a rerun of his talk at the CTIA cellphone conflab in San Francisco, talking about Blueprint and OneConnect. Paul Taylor was at his earlier presentation.

But he added he did have “one last thing” - a demonstration of the “cinematic internet”, or the Widget Channel, a television application announced by Intel and Yahoo last month.

The widgets were contained in a ticker-like strip along the bottom of the TV screen and could be easily navigated and expanded. There were weather, stock-ticker, Flickr and news and sports widgets, and even examples of ad widgets, with a Macy’s food mixer on sale and available to buy at the click of a button.

Talking to Yahoo folk afterwards, the feeling was that the software and Intel boards that would drive the service should debut in set-top boxes at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The ultimate aim is to wire it with the internet directly into TVs, something Sony has already committed itself to achieving and may be an interested customer.

Tesla was right in the end about so many things, it seems.

An assistant to Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla advocated and developed alternating current over Edison’s direct current as the best means of distributing electricity.

Although Tesla invented the spark plug for the internal combustion engine, his invention of the AC induction engine has led to electric cars, such as Tesla Motors’ 130mph sports car, threatening to replace petrol-powered ones.

Edison also believed the filament was the best method for generating light, while Tesla, the inventor of radio, advocated radio-frequency powered discharges.

I have just had a Tesla-like demonstration proving he was right, from a Silicon Valley company called Luxim.

On Monday, it released a solid-state high-intensity light source it hopes will be adopted in place of current TV studio lights and rigs used in theatres and concert venues.

Tony McGettigan, chief executive, put the light, powered by a single bulb the size of a large matchstick head, next to a standard spotlight and aimed them at colour cards. The Luxim light had the same intensity and rendered the colours truly while the spotlight gave them a washed-out appearance.

Luxim says its “LIFI” solution reduces power consumption by 50 per cent compared to conventional High Intensity Discharge (HID) bulbs and lasts 10 times longer. It promises its bulbs will pay for themselves in savings over two years.

Although it is solid state, this is not LED technology. Luxim instead has borrowed from Tesla’s thinking and the mobile base station technology of the wireless industry.

Radio frequencies oscillate within an electrically-charged alumina drum containing the bulb, but instead of the energy build-up being released outwards generating radio waves, it is contained by an outer core and focused inwards on the bulb, provoking a chemical reaction inside and generating intense light.

Sunnyvale-based Luxim, backed by VC firm Sequoia Capital,  started out  providing bulbs for rear-projection TVs, but that market has collapsed from 5m units a year to around 300,000 this year.

Now it is focusing on event and architectural lighting before moving into street lighting, where it says switching to LIFI from HID bulbs would cut annual carbon dioxide emissions by 500m tonnes worldwide.

Spore, the much anticipated evolution game from Electronic Arts, has won high marks from the gaming press but has currently earned only one star out of five from amateur reviewers on Amazon.com.

The reason - unusually restrictive digital rights management software that limits installations of the game.

Spore, released in North America on Sunday, only allows three activations of the game before players have to call EA for permissions to install it again, according to the Amazon protesters.

As someone who has so far installed the game three times - twice on computers that failed to run it - I can understand their concerns.

According to one of the 864 reviewers on Amazon:

“The DRM for the game utilizes securom which is essentially a virus that installs itself without warning when you install the game. There is no way to completely remove it without reformatting and it is constantly running in the background if not removed. Sucking up computer resources.”

Another complains:

“DRM is a show stopper. I doubt this game will work for me after a few years given my habit of new hardware purchases and system snapshots. Like others have said, this game is for rent not sale. The EA Spore DRM is a bit reminiscent of the Sony root kit. It installs software that you definitely don’t want or need.”

Spore has a rating of 87 out of 100 on Metacritic.com based on 25 media reviews but currently has 796 one-star reviews on Amazon.

I have asked Electronic Arts to comment on the claims and will update this post with its reaction when received.

UPDATE: Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications at EA, told me on Tuesday that in its last financial year only 0.5 per cent of players activated EA computer games on as many as three machines, with 90 per cent activating on only one machine. He said EA Customer Service would talk through any special circumstances with customers calling to request further activations. He described EA’s SecuROM DRM as standard for the industry and cited Apple’s practice of only allowing downloaded music to be played on three devices. “We are extremely pleased with the popularity of Spore and the critical response to it,” he said.  The latest figures on Amazon are 1,676 one-star reviews out of 1,812.

Pandora and Last.fm may seem to have the online music discovery market cornered, but another variation on the theme emerged today with The Echo Nest opening up its platform to developers.

The Echo Nest’s selling point is what it describes as its Musical Brain - technology that can automatically listen to and classify music, read what is being written about it and learn from user reactions to music.

It uses this knowledge to create a number of services, such as enhanced music search, recommendations and interactivity.

The Echo Nest presented at the Demo conference today, showing how it is powering personal radio stations on the imeem social network and allowing users to mix in cowbells and Christopher Walken phrases to songs they upload to MoreCowbell.dj.

Rather than take on Pandora and Last.fm directly, it hopes to encourage developers and media companies to spread its technology across their sites and eventually earn licensing fees.

“We don’t want to be the next Pandora or Last.fm, we want to power the next 1,000 Pandoras and Last.fms,” Jim Lucchese, chief executive, told me.

The Echo Nest, based in Massachusetts, was founded by two former MIT Media Lab members, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan and its investors include a co-founder of the lab. It also announced first-round VC funding on Monday from Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

Electronic Arts finally got its Spore video game out of the door last night with a spectacular launch event at the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

Prior to a guided tour of the galaxies in the planetarium, Frank Drake, who formulated the Drake Equation on extraterrestrial life in 1960, gave a talk and Will Wright, Spore’s creator, made a presentation in his own inimitable style.

Wright, who justifies the genius tag, made it seem that his whole life had been a preparation for Spore. He described how he spent all his time building models as a kid growing up in the 60s. He was inspired by the race to the moon and the future predictions of that era - from nuclear-powered cars to space colonies.

He has been building robots since the 80s and has had a lifelong interest in astronomy.

All of this fits with the Spore experience where players create and evolve their own lifeforms and go on to populate planets and conquer space.

Wright began the research on this much anticipated game seven years ago, so its own evolution has been lengthy. It also makes you wonder where Wright has left to boldly go.

From SimCity and SimEarth in the 80s and 90s to the 100m-selling Sims in this decade, and now Spore, Wright has pretty much covered life as we know it and beyond.

But when I questioned him afterwards about whether he could take on the subject again on such a grand scale, he said:”You’d be surprised.”

“I’ve had some ideas I’ve been working on in the background. There are plenty of different ways of seeing the world. The Sims and Spore are both about life on different scales, but they are essentially about what life means.”

So another variation on his theme is apparently in the works, but probably on a Spore delivery timescale:

“It might take a while,” was his parting shot.

What happens when start-ups get swallowed up by the Google machine?

Sometimes they can have a big effect - like the Keyhole acquisition that powered Google Maps, other times they can just disappear - like the mobile social networking site Dodgeball.

Their gestation into new services can take a long time - we are still awaiting what will happen to the Twitter-like Jaiku, bought nearly a year ago.

However, Neven Vision, a start-up bought for its photo recognition software two years ago, has finally reappeared in the shape of a new function in Google’s online photo-sharing site.

An upgrade to the Picasa Web Albums site has added a ‘name tags’ feature. Users can now sort their photos according to who is in the picture.

The technology scans all photos uploaded to find faces and then prompts the user to enter a name for similar faces that it finds, removing any incorrect ones.

People can then be found in searches and albums, and slideshows can be created of particular people and groups.

Another start-up, Riya, offers similar functionality and was rumoured to be a Google target before it settled on Neven.

The feature should give users more control over their photos by making tagging and sorting much easier, but it may not be enough to persuade others to switch their online photo storage from services such as Yahoo’s Flickr.

However, installing Picasa 3.0 - the latest version of its free photo editing and organising software - could provide an added incentive. One new feature is web sync, which makes automatic changes to the online copies of photos that match any improvements made on the desktop program to the locally stored originals.

Herewith, 10 initial thoughts on Google’s new Chrome browser, based on its cartoon introduction:

1. Why a cartoon? What happened to the YouTube explanatory video? Are online cartoons the next big thing and is Google Chrome the red herring?

2. It’s a major rethink of the browser and a much more fully formed product than the usual Google beta.

3. Why couldn’t they work with Mozilla on this? Answer: they need more control over the user experience and their ability to serve ads - Microsoft and Mozilla have been taking some of that away with their latest releases.

4. Google makes a lot of solving the problem of browsers crashing when too many tabs are open and a javascript fails to execute- but who, other than superusers, really considers this a problem?

5. This is very OS-like - even down to imitating the Windows operating system Task Manager.

6. There is a fuller integration of Google Gears, making it easier for Google applications and the browser to replace the Windows desktop.

7. The address bar innovation seems aimed at combating Firefox’s similar “awesome” bar, which must have taken some search queries and advertising dollars away from Google.

8. Privacy innovations seem to match Microsoft’s “porn mode” in IE8.

9. Google says it is making the browser open source so others can take advantage of its innovations, but it needs to do so to make other browsers more compliant with its business.

10. Could this comic book be the cue for a geek superhero movie?