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Wii sales have beaten those of more technically advanced and expensive consoles, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3, with its motion controller that can be swung like a bat or a sword, broadening its audience well beyond hardcore video gamers.

Wii Music will let players simulate more than 60 different instruments. Activision’s Guitar Hero turned the music-playing genre into arguably the hottest category for video games.

Guitar Hero already plays on all three game consoles, including the Wii, helping to build the industry’s appeal among players beyond core fighting and race-style titles.

“A true paradigm shift has taken place in the global games market,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told the E3 video game conference, the biggest annual event in the industry.

A more sensitive Wii MotionPlus controller add-on also will debut next spring with a new suite of Wii sports games from the company.

Nintendo widened the uses for the console with its Wii Fit balance board and also this week announced the upcoming launch of Wii Speak, a group microphone that works with its Wii game console and can be used for online games.

The company also said it also planned to release a much-hyped game called Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii this year before the start of the holiday shopping season. The game lets players serve as caretakers of a virtual world that continues to function even when the game isn’t being played.

This is the first time that the Animal Crossing franchise will be available for the Wii. It was already a hit on Nintendo’s past game platform, the GameCube, and the hand-held Nintendo DS.

Nintendo said the DS would also get a version of Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto this winter – Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

The company expects to have sold about 100 million DS units by the end of its fiscal year next march. It had sold about 70 million in the fiscal year through March 2008.

The rise in music-based video games has led the recording industry to target games as a revenue source, in a bid to replace fading sales from CDs.

The world’s most popular heavy metal band, Metallica, will release its next album Death Magnetic as a download for Guitar Hero III on September 15 – the same day the CD arrives in stores.

“It’s exciting, 27 years into your career, to be doing something first,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said this week.

“In five to 10 years it’ll be a normal thing to release an album to Guitar Hero the same day as the record.”

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Fasten your seat belts.

Although Apple should report better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Monday — it almost always does — its shares could be in for a bumpy ride on Wall Street.

Apple’s (AAPL) stock price — having bungee-jumped from $200 in late December to below $120 in mid-March and then back up to $190 in mid-May — has been drifting lower ever since, despite the high-profile launch of a new iPhone and the expectation of sharply higher earnings.

According to Thompson Financial’s survey of analysts, Apple is expected to report net income of $972.6 million, or $1.08 per share, on sales of $7.4 billion. In the same period last year the company earned $818 million, or 92 cents a share, on sales of $5.4 billion.

But these days, even 18% earnings growth from Apple is unlikely to impress the Street. The company could report its best third fiscal quarter (our calendar Q2) yet and still lose market value.

By most accounts, Q3 was a strong one for Apple. In a report to clients issued Friday morning, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster saw good news in all three of its key divisions:

• Macintosh: He believes Apple will announce quarterly sales of 2.35 million Macs — 33% year-to-year growth in an industry that is growing at half that rate. (On Wednesday Gartner reported that Apple is now the No. 3 computer maker in the United States. See here.)
• iPhone: Munster is expecting Apple to report that it sold 730,000 iPhones in Q3 — slightly better than the 700,000 Apple already reported. (The 1 million iPhones that Apple claims flew off the shelves in three days last week don’t count until next quarter.)
• iPod: Although many had predicted that the iPhone would cut into iPod sales, Munster is seeing little cannibalization so far. He expects Apple to report 10.5 to 11 million iPods sold — up from his previous estimate of 10.25 million.

But Wall Street’s antennae are finely tuned for disappointment. Although Apple just had a record-breaking, made-for-TV product launch — with people still queuing up for the iPhone 3G a week after it went on sale — none of that produced much traction in Apple’s share price. Investors seemed to concentrate instead on the fact that Apple’s iPhone activation servers melted down, that most of their stores ran out of product and that the new MobileMe suite of Web services is a mess that the company still hasn’t cleaned up (see here).

Shaw Wu, the top Apple analyst at American Technology Research, is focused on the company’s gross margins, which came in surprisingly low last quarter for reasons that were never adequately explained. He’s expecting gross margins of 33.5%, slightly higher than the company’s 33% guidance. But he notes that lower component prices last quarter did not translate into higher gross margins. “Investors chose to ignore this and gave AAPL a ‘free pass,’” he writes. “Given the macro environment, this quarter investors may not be so forgiving.”

In an article entitled “Why I’m Shorting Apple Ahead of Earnings” that got a lot of attention on the Seeking Alpha website this week, investor Ben Shuleva ticked off a litany of reasons he expects Apple’s share price to get punished after Monday’s earnings report, from cutbacks in education budgets that could eat into Apple’s back-to-school sales to the way Apple books iPhone revenues over 24 months, an accounting complexity the Street still doesn’t understand, no matter how many times Apple explains it.

“I am not bearish on Apple long-term,” Shuleva writes. But… “I am willing to make a significant bet that on a short-term basis, Apple’s share price will deteriorate.” (link)

Finally, there’s the matter of Apple’s guidance for its fourth quarter, which ends in September. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, has been known to send the stock into a tailspin by issuing numbers that are miles below Wall Street’s expectations. “We believe AAPL will likely continue its tradition of conservative guidance,” writes Wu, with considerable understatement.

The question is, how conservative? If it’s the usual 9% or 10% below expectations, it shouldn’t make much difference. Anything lower could damage the stock. And if Oppenheimer offers guidance that’s better than expected, who knows, the stock might actually go up.

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1:45pm UK, Sunday July 20, 2008

Calm has been restored to the outer-solar system following a row over what to call a dwarf planet and exactly how it should be characterised.

The red, speckled appearance of Makemake (Picture: NASA/STScI)

The red-speckled bright object that hovers near Pluto was initially nicknamed Easterbunny because it was discovered shortly after Easter in 2005.

Galactic unrest erupted in the ranks of the International Astronomical Union over what the official name should be.

And after much debate, the name Makemake has been decided on as a tribute to the Polynesian god of fertility and creator of humanity.

As for its status, the newly-named planet which is coated in red methane is now officially a plutoid.

Pluto, which made headlines last year as it was demoted from its planet status, and Eris are the other two plutoids. A fourth dwarf planet named Ceres has been excluded from the plutoid club because it orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Makemake has a diameter of roughly 1,000 miles and is quite bright given its distance from the Sun.

Despite this, it was not discovered until recently, well after many much fainter objects in its region of the solar system.

Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, who discovered the dwarf planet and suggested its name, discussed the trouble he had naming the planet in his blog.

“Three years is a long time to have only a license plate number instead of a name, so for most of the time, we simply referred to this object as ‘Easterbunny’ in honor of the fact that it was discovered just a few days past Easter in 2005,” he writes.

He discusses the trouble the team had finding a name, until they considered the island Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, and its mythology.

“I wasn’t familiar with the mythology of the island so I had to look it up, and I found Make-make, the chief god, the creator of humanity, and the god of fertility.

“I am partial to fertility gods for things I discovered around that time. Eris, Makemake, and 2003 EL61 were all discovered as my wife was three to six months pregnant with our daughter.”

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