QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class award-winning Turbo NAS servers, VioStor NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Media Players today announced the availability of the new V3.4 NAS management software. The V3.4 NAS management software is embedded into the NAS as V3.4 firmware, which enhances several key aspects of the QNAP Turbo NAS units allowing owners to maximize their investments in a QNAP NAS. New enhancements in V3.4 include:

SAPPHIRE Technology, the largest manufacturer and supplier worldwide of graphics solutions based on AMD technology is announcing the first products in a second generation of video cards to support the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and delivering spectacular video clarity, speed and visual effects, including over multiple monitors and 3D stereoscopic displays.

The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series features the second generation of graphics technology from AMD designed to support all the features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. The new GPU's are built in AMD's 40nm process to deliver high performance with low power consumption. Advanced hardware features include an enhanced Tesselation unit, dedicated HDR Texture compression, multi-threaded communication with system CPU cores, embedded support for many of the DirectCompute 11 instructions, 3D stereoscopic support and HDMI 1.4a.

ASUS is proud to unveil an array of display products catered towards the needs of different market segments. The Designo ML Series LED monitors, the VG236 and PG276 3D monitors, the PA246Q professional monitor and LED projector will all be showcased at Computex 2010 at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC).

Since its launch, the Designo MS and LS LED monitors have received numerous accolades that include the Japanese Good Design Award, and the iF China Award. These monitors' award-winning lines are matched by the true-to-life Full HD visuals showcased on their mercury-free LED-backlit panels. These monitors deliver the industry's contrast ratio benchmark of 10,000,000:1 thanks to ASUS Smart Contrast Ratio (ASCR) Technology. Together with a 2ms (gray-to-gray) response time and ASUS Splendid Video Intelligence Technology, which optimizes color fidelity with five pre-set modes (gaming, theater, night view, scenery and standard), the Designo Series displays provide sharp and crisp visuals for almost every situation.

NVIDIA today announced that a range of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions are certified by Adobe for Adobe Creative Suite 5 software, and truly unleash the real-time video editing and effects processing capabilities of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

This breakthrough version of Adobe Premiere Pro leverages the parallel processing architecture of NVIDIA GPUs and their hundreds of cores to allow film and video professionals to work unconstrained. Users can now create compelling, multi-layer projects with a virtually limitless number of HD or higher resolution video clips, then apply sophisticated visual effects and color correction, while still being able to view the output instantly.

By utilizing NVIDIA Quadro solutions, productivity is enhanced many times over by eliminating the wait for preview renders any time a change is made, and by being able to view projects at full resolution without skipping frames.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading PC and Mac technology company, announced today the OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro, the largest capacity, fastest bus powered portable storage solution on the market. The Mercury On-The-Go Pro is a high-performance, 500GB 7200RPM pocket-sized portable storage solution for Mac or PC users featuring FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and/or USB 2.0 interfaces for data transfer speeds up to 100MB/s. With its 500GB of storage capacity, the Mercury On-The-Go Pro can hold up to 500,000 JPEG photos, 250 DVD movies, 38 hours of digital video, or 175,000 MP3 songs.

The Mercury On-The-Go Pro 500GB 7200RPM line features three models, including a "Triple Interface" model for FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.0; a "Combo Interface" model for FireWire 400 and USB 2.0; and a USB 2.0 model priced starting at $189.99.

Intel announced that its researchers have crossed an important milestone in the ongoing Tera-Scale project the company flagged-off last year. The company has just developed an ultra low voltage special-purpose video encoding accelerator. Built on the 65 nm CMOS, the device could accelerate video compression, and encoding at speeds in excess of 10-times that of what general-purpose execution manages while consuming as low as 220mV. The company however, did not go into specifics on products based on the technology.

ASUS today proved that TV quality and CPU bandwidth do not have to be trade-offs with the launch of its new ASUS My Cinema-EHD3-100/NAQ/FM/AV/MCE RC PCI-express Dual TV card. Designed for users seeking to watch and record both digital (ATSC/QAM) and analog (NTSC) TV channels simultaneously without taking a CPU hit, the ASUS My Cinema-EHD3-100/NAQ/FM/AV/MCE RC is embedded with a MPEG2 hardware encoder that dramatically reduces CPU loading while guaranteeing high quality video. With the ASUS My Cinema-EHD3-100/NAQ/FM/AV/MCE RC PCI-express Dual TV card, any PC can easily be turned into a smart multimedia center.

NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor), the ultimate tool for NVIDIA video cards tweaking, was updated today towards version 5.0. Using NiBiTor graphics card enthusiasts can change the boot up message text & color, GPU/shader & memory clocks, hidden features like SBA (Side Band Addressing) and much more. All this is to gain some extra performance or just to customize your card the way you want it. This new version is built upon the logic of the previous version, with some minor fixes. It adds support for a couple more new NVIDIA video cards (the full list is below) and a voltage IC Option in the program.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) 5.0

The company slogan change, from "Smarter Choice" to "The future is fusion" marked a major shift in core-Strategy for AMD. The company now focuses on delivering solutions, more so than mere products, with a solution comprising of several products working together to let the PC serve a purpose. One such solution is the AMD Maui entertainment platform. Maui platform makes AMD hardware work with AMD's own Live! Media Center software to deliver a complete home-theater PC solution.

On the hardware front, Maui includes a qualifying AMD Athlon X2 or Phenom series processor, a motherboard based on the AMD 7-series chipset with integrated graphics. Video is handled by the 7-series IGP, while audio is handled by a special audio component-riser card that has pre-amp circuitry onboard, which enables users to connect speakers in the 5.1 channel configuration directly to the motherboard. Future models would bring in 7.1 channel support. The first motherboard to use this design, is the MSI Media Live DIVA 5.1 780M.

Today, at the NVISION 2008 conference, NVIDIA Corporation in conjunction with Pegasys Inc., makers of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress multi-format video encoding software, showcased a technology demonstration to optimize video processing with the massively parallel architecture of the GPU.

Using NVIDIA CUDA technology (a C-like programming language programming for the GPU), Pegasys is taking advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of an NVIDIA GeForce GPU to create a GPU-enabled beta version of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress software. The software is used to dramatically increase video decode and processing speed by as much as 446% on a GeForce GPU.

Whilst Microsoft is in the middle of what The Inquirer calls a "hostile takeover" of Yahoo, Yahoo decided to buy a company of their own. Maven Networks recently accepted a $160 million offer to be bought out by Yahoo. It is very likely that this move was to increase the value of Yahoo. It should be noted that Yahoo was in talks with Maven long before the whole Microsoft-buying-Yahoo debacle. As part of the acquisition, Yahoo gets some fine deals with CBS Sports, Gannett, News Corp, Hearst and Sony Pictures. Yahoo will not lay off any of Maven's 70 employees, despite laying off nearly 1,000 of their own. Another large benefit to Yahoo acquiring Maven will be the sudden boost of places where Yahoo can shove their advertisements, further increasing revenue. Whether or not this is enough to fend off the "hostile takeover", we'll have to wait and see.