(Editor's Note: The weekend has landed! Easter eggs are rolling all over the place in this edition of QuickJump QuickPeek.)

From the ubiquitous Konami code that unlocks 99 lives all the way up to GTA: Vice City Stories' very much, err, literal "Easter egg" via the helipad, gamers have a different meaning for the Easter bunny's painted gifts. Start scouring through the bushes! Here in QuickJump QuickPeek 39, we're touring around gaming town for Easter eggs. Wohoo!

In life, it helps to have someone who can hold you accountable for your actions. In the case of electronics companies, it seems that Greenpeace is their accountability partner. The organization has recently released the current company rankings in its Greener Electronics Scale. To find out how certain companies fared, get "green-minded" and turn to the full article after the jump.

(Editor's Note: Don't you just love weekends? We make it easier for you to catch up on all the highs and lows of the week with yet another QuickJump QuickPeek edition! Clear the decks! This one is huge!)

Last week started out the year with a big bang - and this week, it's been blown out of proportion... in a good way of course! Get ready for a lot of clicking, folks! We've spammed up the whole page with tons and tons - and tons - of links!

(Editor's Note: QuickPeek is sixteen, going on.. err.. seventeen - baby, it's time to think... Obscure lyrics to The Sound of Music songs aside, QuickJump QuickPeek's 17th issue is now out, complete with this week's top stories in the gaming industry. If you've been deprived of updates this week - due to your own viable reasons or whatnot *coughProvingGroundcough* - then we're reaching out a helping hand to you guys.)

Following last week's edition of QuickPeek, we've got quite a lot of news to catch up on. QuickJump QuickPeek 17 is up and about, touting a hefty dose of your weekly updates. What's in store for you in this edition? There's lot of announcements from Capcom - they've got their happy party going on in London, a party otherwise known as Capcom Gamers' Day event.

Other interesting stuff have also washed ashore this week: more confirmation on new SKUs, announcements of game demos to be made available online, and other general tidbits on science and technology that you guys might wanna hear about. It's another meaty edition for QuickPeek so without further delay... Here we go!

Click the Full Article link below to see the rest of QuickJump QuickPeek 17!

QuickJump QuickPeek 17 originally posted on October 20, 2007 at 01:23 PM.

"Made in Vietnam" could be the newest thing you'll see printed on the back of your iPhones or Nintendo Wiis in the near future. Taipei-based Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry), the world's largest contractor for electronics, announced that they will be expanding their operation to Vietnam.

Responsible for the production of products such as Apple's iPhone and iPod, as well as Nintendo's Wii console, Foxconn decided to continue to diversify their plant operations to Vietnam to maintain their cost-efficient business practices within the most efficient manufacturing area outside of China.

A deal was already signed last August 29 with Foxconn's chief executive Terry Gou and Vietnam's Ministry of Planning and Investment investing a US$ 5 billion contract into various high tech and supporting industries projects. Also, Foxconn has invested US$ 160 million in two plants in the Que Vo Industrial Zone, as well as hiring about 500 local university graduates with plans of hiring up to a maximum of 300,000 employees.

Tung Kim Nguyen, a partner at Indochina Capital, had this to say about Vietnam:

Vietnam is the next outsource manufacturing centre of Asia, this is because of a China-plus-one strategy that manufacturers are adopting and a response to anti-dumping suits that will be hitting the Chinese point of origin manufacturers hard over the next few years

Intel has already had their eye on Vietnam for some time. They announced that they would build a US billion plant near Ho Chi Minh, prompting other manufacturing giants such as Toshiba and Matsushita to pledge future investments.

 

Here's a nice little idea which demonstrated how XNA development tools can work in conjunction with a Wiimote to create cute results in a PC. The Wiimote is able to control a flock of graphical butterflies by getting Windows Vista to talk with the controller.

M.B. Burke of MSDN says it's fairly simple on the programming part. What held him up for a while was the fact that the Windows Vista stack doesn't recognize the Wiimote signal. He had to look for four days for one that has a stack that's compatible and he found that in Toshiba. With a EPoX BT-DG05A Bluetooth USB Dongle, all was set.

Sadly, though, the Wiimote-controlled butterfly application doesn't work if you try to run it on the Xbox 360. Still, the idea is a nice demonstration of possibilities. And if we know tech-heads like we do, it's a given that they'll come up with a really crazy brew one of these days. To know how exactly everything was done, follow the read URL.

The triumvirate of next-generation consoles are all out. The war is now on. And IBM Corporation is sitting comfortably on its fortune at the backstage. As all of you might be aware, it was this company who developed the Power chip that powers Xbox 360 and Wii, as well as the Cell chip found inside the PlayStation 3.

The videogame deals earned IBM up to US$ 2.9 billion last year and US$ 2.5 billion in 2004. At the end of 2006, which by the way is just few days away, the company is expected to see about US$ 3.7 billion in sales of chips and associated design services. Aside from the actual sales, IBM has formed a new "technology collaboration solutions" unit that is expected to post US$ 4 billion in revenue this year.

This is actually a glaring contrast to status of the company before the deals. Prior to 2004, IBM was struggling to attract enough outside chip-making work to cover the enormous cost of manufacturing. As a result, their hardware division suffered a lost of US$ 252 million in 2003. The head of the said division, William Zeitler, couldn't hide his astonishment:

I think of this at the same stage of development that outsourcing was in the early '90s. There were a lot of people skeptical and now it represents a large part of IBM's portfolio. We had exactly the right proposition at exactly the right time. Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that all the game processors would have used IBM product. Nobody would have thought of it because all we had was standard things.

Now that they've conquered the videogame market, IBM is looking on new prospects. They reported that possible future application of the chip includes computers for medical imaging, defense and complex simulations. Currently, IBM is expecting to ink a deal with companies like Mercury Computing Systems and Toshiba.

Computer and electronics companies including LG, Panasonic, NEC, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba are planning to come up with a set of standards for WiHD or WirelessHD. WiHD is a high-definition digital interface - it will let devices communicate with each other to share high-definition audio/video streaming and also to allow high-speed data transmission.

Basically, it's like a WiFi standard, only more robust and manly. WiHD aims for 5 gigabits of data per second - and up to a distance of 30 feet. Transmission will take place at the 60GHz frequency. To compare, WiFi operates at around 2.4GHz to 5-point-something-GHz.

60GHz! That's a high frequency usually only used by the military or in ship-to-ship communications!

The companies plan to have a standard drafted and ready by early 2007. Then they'll put WiHD into all their HDTVs and all their audio video gadgets. So...

• Will the PS3 take advantage of WiHD in the future? Did somebody mention HDTV? Yeah, Sony is one of the companies (that's their old Bravia ad in the YouTube vid; we chose it for this article because we love the music).
• Where's Microsoft and Apple? Will they follow suit, team up, or make their own standards? Like WiFi, will we end up with several standards - will there be a WiHD.a and WiHD.b and other standards?
• The Nintendo Wii shunned HD, right? Will this new development make Perrin Kaplan eat her words?