At Xbox, we believe that gaming is for everyone. You hear it a lot, but it's absolutely true. The Xbox community is at the center of everything we do, every decision we make. This month we're recognizing the 400+ million players who make up the gaming and disability community. In their own words, we're inviting Elle Vance, Software Engineer II for Xbox Player Services, to share their story on how being part of the gaming and disability community has impacted their life:

"I understand the world through a different perspective. Unlike most neurotypical people, who understand the world from a top-down perspective; I start with a bottom-up approach, focusing first on the details. Sometimes my perspective is advantageous in my work as a Software Engineer II, and in other areas of my life, too, as I am able to troubleshoot problems at a granular level before processing it from a broader framework which could potentially create bias in attempting to solve that problem.

CAPS—& CATS—FOR CAUSES - Having raised tens of thousands of dollars in our previous Treecaps, Streamcaps, and Ukrainecaps runs, we're excited to launch the fourth installment in Caps for Causes: MT3 NoveltyCats. This time, we want to honor June's "Adopt a Shelter Cat Month" with a donation to the ASPCA on behalf of our Mech Keys community.

For these feline-focused novelties, we used the original MT3 Susuwatari First-Edition Cat Keycap mold to craft some absolutely adorable caps in Black-on-White, Dasher, Fairlane, and Dusk colorways. (If you're a Studio Ghibli fan, you may recognize the talkative inspiration for this particular cinematic cat.) With just 550 packs made—in brand-new colorways, no less—we're not expecting the NoveltyCats to last long. Get yours now, before the cat's out of the bag for good.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

Terra Nil is now available now!
Terra Nil is a game about transforming barren lifeless landscapes into thriving, vibrant ecosystems. Turn dead soil into fertile grassland, clean polluted oceans, plant sprawling forests, and create the ideal habitat for animals to call home. Then recycle your buildings and leave no trace that you were ever there. Terra Nil is an intricate environmental strategy game about transforming a barren wasteland into a thriving, balanced ecosystem. Bring life back to a lifeless world by purifying soil, cleaning oceans, planting trees, and reintroducing wildlife, then leave without a trace.

A reverse city builder
Use advanced eco-technology to purify the soil, creating plains, wetlands, beaches, rainforests, wildflowers, and more—then efficiently recycle everything you've built, leaving the environment pristine for its new animal inhabitants.

EA has started a new program to generate awareness and charitable contributions to fallen Special Operations soldiers, titled "Project Honor." The program is a marketing tie-in with the upcoming Medal of Honor Warfighter, but it's also planning some smart ways to benefit military charities. Various weapon and gear manufacturers will donate to the Navy SEAL Foundation and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Their products will be featured in Warfighter, and they'll also be selling Medal of Honor merchandise with 100% of the proceeds going to one of the listed charities. In addition, EA and Danger Close will be selling a "Military Edition" of the game made exclusively for active, reserve, and former US military. It includes the Limited Edition with some exclusive unlocks. If you fit that bill, you can check out the GovX site for ordering details.

"This partnership with EA and Medal of Honor will raise awareness on the work we do to help the families of fallen Special Operations warriors and facilitate contributions that help provide college scholarships for surviving children and financial assistance to families of severely wounded special operations warriors," said Special Operations Warrior Foundation president John T. Carney, Jr., in the announcement. "This is a great way to give back to some of our country's greatest warriors."

In a 1-for-2 deal, the OLPC founders will ship you your very own OLPC XO, if you give them a $400 donation, which will be put toward buying a child in need their very own laptop computer. If you would like to give a laptop to someone in need, please check out this website. Half of the $400 donation is tax-deductable, and will earn you free access to the T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi service for one year. The OLPC project at this point is doing quite well, with offers coming in from several countries asking for several hundred thousand laptops, mass production starting last week, and EA promising to pre-load the original Sim City on each laptop.

Electronic Arts will be giving a lot of disenfranchised children the gift of educational gaming this holiday season. The original SimCity, a game that simulates the construction of a city, will be pre-installed on all versions of the OLPC, at no additional cost to either OLPC or the customer. The request for SimCity came from OLPC itself, and the 1989 version of the classic game will find a way to such countries as Cambodia, Libya, Nigeria (which ordered over a million OLPC laptops), Pakistan, and Peru. This is the first time a major company has "gifted a game to the world" like this, especially a game that has earned 24 awards in the past.

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world's children, has considerable momentum. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month.

Orders, however, are slow. "I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. "And yes, it has been a disappointment."

But Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, views the problem as a temporary one in the long-term pursuit of using technology as a new channel of learning and self-expression for children worldwide. He is reaching out to the public to try to give the laptop campaign a boost. The marketing program, to be announced today, is called "Give 1 Get 1," in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399. One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.

Peter Wingrove is proud to announce that he has "walked the walk". To raise money for breast cancer victims, Peter Wingrove dressed for the charity walk in womens' clothes, and walked for over 10 miles with like-minded people. Mr.Wingrove's thoughts on the experience:

The walk was quite challenging and made all the more so by the wet and cold conditions for the first 10+ miles but this gave way to early morning brighter conditions which made the going a lot better. With more than 10,000 walkers the 'community spirit' was amazing and a lot of fun and I was proud to be part of it.

The walk was a tremendous success, and it raised a substantial amount of money for breast cancer victims. You can see the picture of a very triumphant Wingrove below.

In the past, we've seen video games dedicated to cancer victims, charities started by gamers, and other hospitable acts towards the less fortunate by gamers. Now, non-profit HopeLab and Cigna have created a PC game that's designed to make cancer patients feel better. Re-Mission is game designed around educating children about cancer. It allows players to see what cancer is, and how to properly combat it. This game is free to any cancer patient, doctor, or medical facility that wants it.

What is truly surprising though is the results of this game. Studies have shown that cancer patients actually have a much better time battling cancer after they've played this game. The game increases cancer patients "quality of life, knowledge about cancer... and their self-efficacy to communicate about cancer." Cancer patients who have played this game also have a much better prognosis.

Even more interestingly, young patients who played the game apparently maintained higher blood levels in chemotherapy and had higher rates of success in staving off the cancer in their bodies, suggesting that the game succeeded in convincing players to stick to their therapy.

If you'd like more information on this wonderful game, please visit Cigna for a copy.

Kensington, a company best known for producing fairly simple computer accessories such as mice and keyboards, has revealed that it plans to support he charity Breast Cancer Campaign with its new Si750 mouse. For each sale of its new optical mouse, which sports a pink design and is aimed at notebook users, Kensington will give 10% of the money it makes (it's unclear whether it is 10% of the consumer cost or 10% of the profit it makes) to the charity. The special edition mouse will go on sale next month for £40 at stores including PC World and Currys.

IBM Previews New Accessibility Tool for People With Low or No Vision to Access Multimedia Web Content

TOKYO & ARMONK, NY - 13 Mar 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new emerging technology that helps blind and visually impaired people experience streaming video and animation on the Internet. Designed at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory, the new multimedia browsing accessibility tool potentially opens a world of rich content to visually impaired people around the world, who number more than 161 million.

NEW ORLEANS - Feb. 26, 2007 - The Gulf Coast region's economic revitalization after Hurricane Katrina was boosted by an announcement today by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer of $1.7 million in donations of cash, software and specialized curriculum to several nonprofit partners in Louisiana and Texas. Microsoft is supporting existing local government, academic and nonprofit organizations as they rebuild and establish community infrastructure, technology and work-force training centers. These centers support displaced residents in accessing the technology skills training they need to succeed in today's technology-driven economy.

Intel Corporation today announced the mobile clinical assistant (MCA) is ready to enable nurses to spend more time with patients, do their jobs on the move while remaining connected, and manage the administration of medications. Motion Computing's C5 is the first product based on Intel's MCA platform and has earned support from clinicians and nurses participating in pilot studies around the world.

As Intel's first platform built specifically for healthcare, the MCA is an important step in the company's efforts to better connect clinicians to comprehensive patient information on a real-time basis. The lightweight, spill-resistant, drop-tolerant and easily disinfected MCA allows nurses to access up-to-the-minute patient records and to document a patient's condition instantly, enhancing clinical workflow while reducing the staff's administrative workload.

In the 1990's, virtual reality was a thing of sci-fi dreams, and involved gigantic helmets that would immerse a subject in the virtual reality world. Now, however, virtual reality is taking a very nice new direction. It is being used to help rehabilitation patients relearn how to cope with everyday environments. Unreal Engine (the exact version is unknown), by emulating a grocery store while a patient walks on a treadmill, can help people deal with vertigo. This is just one example of how the Unreal Engine, among other game engines, is working for the betterment of mankind.

In a small city near the Nile River where cars compete with cattle and modern conveniences are scarce, Intel Corporation is using computers and wireless technology to help Oseem's 200,000 residents tap into vast "knowledge resources" on the Internet in hopes of bettering their lives.

"Technology has expanded what is possible for the people of Oseem," said Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. "Intel is committed to support Egypt's leaders in accelerating access to technology so its people can get better health care, education and work skills."

NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today announced that it has teamed up with the University of Washington's Harborview Burn Center and Seattle, Wash.-based Imprint Interactive on technology related to a pioneering virtual reality system known as "SnowWorld," which mitigates pain for burn victims.

When a child is hospitalized, the experience is anything but normal. However, recent studies show that video games can help children feel calmer during treatment. In a particular case, doctors tested whether or not video games helped children forget the pain of an intravenous line insertion. By inserting the IV needle when children were playing a game with vibrating controller and headset, children felt almost a quarter of the pain that children who were not playing video games felt.

When Nintendo found out about this, they put some serious R&D into hospital "Fun Centers". Nintendo supplies 3500 of the 5000+ Fun Centers that are in various hospitals. The Fun Centers are run through Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, whose aim is to combat the isolation and fear experienced by hospitalized kids. A $3250 donation will buy a Fun Center featuring a Game Cube, DVD player, a flat screen television, and the lifetime upkeep of the unit. Nintendo looks forward to updating all the Fun Centers it owns with the Nintendo Wii in mid 2007.

Cisco has started a large campaign to put video phones into hospitals. What is so special about these video phones though, is that they have a direct button that calls Santa Claus. This means that children who want to talk to Santa, but can't get out of the hospital to visit him, need not go much farther then their room to call Santa Claus and have a video chat with him. Cisco posted a video of it's technology in action here.

The Fairtrade Foundation, which was funded by the World Development Movement (WDM), placed a very interesting billboard in the game Second Life.While it is not easily seen, at the bottom of the billboard is a very interesting counter. It counts how many preventable child deaths occur while people game away in virtual environments such as Second Life (one every three seconds). WDM's Peter Taylor said:

Millions of people are now spending more and more of their time in Second Life or similar virtual environments. We are here to remind them that they can't escape the problems of the real world.

The WDM founded the Fairtrade Foundation, which aims to help eliminate poverty and debt. The WDM is asking Second Life "residents" to remember reality and donate.