Synology today announced the new 2-bay Synology DiskStation DS723+, the smallest expandable option in its lineup of all-in-one solutions for home offices and small businesses. Powered by the versatile Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system, the DS723+ offers comprehensive solutions to protect and manage business data, easily collaborate on documents, access files remotely, and monitor physical assets, all within a compact desktop format.

"This new unit delivers impressive performance and capability for its size," said Michael Wang, Product Manager at Synology. "With its extremely compact form factor, it will certainly appeal to those that have smaller storage requirements but don't want to give up on the convenience of centralized storage and the possibility to scale in the future."

NVIDIA today announced that it is unleashing the full graphics potential of enterprise desktop virtualization with the availability of NVIDIA GRID vGPU integrated into Citrix XenDesktop 7. NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology addresses a challenge that has grown in recent years with the rise of employees using their own notebooks and portable devices for work. These workers have increasingly relied on desktop virtualization technologies for anytime access to computing resources, but until now this was generally used for the more standard enterprise applications. Performance and compatibility constraints had made it difficult for applications such as building information management (BIM), product-lifecycle management (PLM) and video-photo editing.

Two decades ago hardware-based graphics replaced software emulation. Desktop virtualization solutions stood alone as the only modern computing form without dedicated graphics hardware. As a result, an already busy virtualized CPU limited performance and software emulation hampered application compatibility. The situation began to improve a year ago with the introduction of the non-virtualized GPU in Citrix XenServer. But efficiency gains were limited because each user still required a dedicated GPU.

Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 crossed the $1 billion mark in sales since its launch on November 8, 2011, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information. Highlighting the trend of interactive entertainment gaining a greater hold of audiences worldwide, the game achieved this milestone in just 16 days, eclipsing the record set in 2009 by the feature film "Avatar," which reached the $1 billion milestone in 17 days.

While 2011 box office revenue is on the decline - down 4 percent this year at $9.4 billion, compared with $9.8 billion in 2010 -- the number of people purchasing and participating in gaming is on the rise, with no sign of slowing.(1) With more than 30 million gamers, the Call of Duty community now exceeds the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid.

Synology Inc. today launched DiskStation DS110+ and DS210+, high-performance and secure NAS servers for SMB users to share and backup data efficiently and increase productivity with rich business-oriental features.

The Synology DS110+ and DS210+ are ideal for users who require a reliable data storage solution and demand high-performance speed for file sharing. The performance test conducted by Synology's lab showed that in a Windows environment, the Synology DS110+ serves an average of 108+ MB/sec reading speed and 68+ MB/sec writing speed while the Synology DS210+ delivers 108+ MB/sec reading and 58+ MB/sec writing. The web server responsiveness is impressive, too. The Synology DS110+ and DS210+ take 85.08 and 78.14 seconds respectively to handle 1,000 simultaneous requests.

The newest addition to the Call of Duty (COD) franchise, Call of Duty: World at War, has outsold the first week sales of Call of Duty 4 by greater than 200%. This title is all set to become Christmas number one, and has gone to the top of the All Formats charts in the UK, according to data from GfK Chart-Track.

The figures are rough, and GfK Chart-Track didn't provide a per-platform breakdown, to provide how the game is being received by different platforms. COD: World at War added more console platform support, with Sony PS2 and Nintendo DS over its predecessor.

The games industry managed record sales of $17.9bn in 2007, up 43% from $12.5bn in 2006. The Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 all saw their most successful sales figures in December, shifting a total of 1.4m, 1.3m and 800,000 units respectively, meaning that the Xbox 360 has now sold 8.5m units since its launch, the Wii 6.3m and the PS3 2.8m. However, the best selling console over Christmas was actually the Nintendo DS, which achieved sales figures of 2.5m in December. Meanwhile, the most successful game last year was Halo 3, which sold 4.82m copies, with Wii Play in second place on 4.12m and Call of Duty 4 in third on 3.04m.

In a press release published yesterday, Nintendo has announced its Wii and DS software line-up for the first half of 2008. Some of the innovative Wii games in the list include Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Ninja Reflex from Electronic Arts, No More Heroes from Ubisoft, DeBlob from THQ, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed from LucasArts and Okami from Capcom, in addition to compelling Nintendo DS games like FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES: Rings of Fate from Square Enix, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword from Tecmo and Quick Yoga Training from Ubisoft.

Though Nintendo will eventually allow Wii owners to download DS demos and transfer them to the portable system, those plans do not include whole games, as was indicated earlier this week. "In the future, the Nintendo DS will be able to receive demo versions of some DS games from Wii, but not the entire game," a Nintendo of America has told Gamasutra. "The demo will be erased once the Nintendo DS is turned off," the company continued, allaying any hopes of a potential storage device to store and execute multiple demos.

Nintendo DS owners will eventually be able to download both demos and whole games from the Wii, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime informed The New York Times. The games and demos will presumably be downloaded through the online Wii Shop Channel and then transferred to the portable via the wireless capabilities of both systems. At present, the Nintendo DS can only hold one demo at a time in its internal memory. Once downloaded, users cannot power off the system or run any other software without losing the demo.

Nintendo managed the most successful sales figures in the USA for November, a month which saw console sales rocket thanks to Black Friday and the holiday season. Top of the pile was the Nintendo DS, which shipped 1.53 million units, followed by the Wii on 981,000 units. Microsoft's Xbox 360 came a reasonably close third, selling 770,000 units. Meanwhile Sony's three consoles came last despite improved sales, with 567,000 PSPs, 496,000 PS2 consoles and 466,000 PS3s being sold.

This fun piece of trivia does more than make you the life of the party when playing "trivial pursuit". It indicates just how popular the Nintendo DS really is. Nintendo claims that they have sold over six million Nintendo DS units in America this year, citing internal estimates. There also seems to be no slowdown of sales in sight. The Nintendo DS is extremely popular to both the casual and hardcore gamer, and Nintendo fully intends to propel that momentum into 2008.

To further increase your trivial pursuit scores, these recent sales figures indicate that the sale of a Nintendo DS happens more than...

• A bad car accident (those happen once every 14 seconds)
• A man making a sexual advance on a woman (that happens once every seven seconds)
• Two or more script kiddies having a "flame war" on internet message boards over the previously mentioned console (which happens once every six seconds).

Nintendo has announced that it plans to launch two new DS Lite bundles in North America this Friday. One is a gold DS featuring Zelda's Triforce symbol, which will be sold with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and the other is a metallic rose DS featuring the Nintendogs' paw print, which will be bundled with Nintendogs - Best Friends Edition. Nintendo's marketing Vice President said the following:

Our new bundles will be collector's items for current gamers while offering an attractive way for people new to video games to play with style.

No official price has been given, but judging by online retailers, each model should sell at around $149.99.

Critically Acclaimed Warhammer 40,000 Franchise to Make Handheld Debut

AGOURA HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 19, 2007--THQ Inc. (NASDAQ:THQI) today announced Warhammer(R) 40,000: Squad Command(TM) will bring the carnage of the 41st millennium to the popular handheld Nintendo DS(TM) and PSP(R) (PlayStation(R)Portable) systems, scheduled to be released in fall 2007. Taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of the Nintendo DS and PSP, Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command features a new and immersive single-player campaign, along with a robust global multiplayer component.

Nintendo has continued its recent console success throughout May, with the DS taking top spot and the Wii in a comfortable second in terms of sales. The Nintendo DS sold an impressive 423,000 units and the Wii 338,000 units, with the PSP next in line with 221,000 units, ahead of the PlayStation 2's 188,000 units. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are continuing to lag behind, with Sony's latest console on just 82,000 and the Xbox 360 on 155,000 units - the PS3 only beat Game Boy Advance figures by a mere one thousand units. Sales in May totalled $815.5 million, up 49% compared to figures from last year - a strong month for the games industry.