Mozilla have announced the winners to their ‘Firefox Flicks’ competition to come up with a video advertising Firefox.

The grand prize winner, “Daredevil,” will be short-listed for the NY Festival of Advertising’s 2006 International Advertising Awards in May, and the finalists’ Firefox videos will be incorporated into Mozilla’s 2006 marketing activities. The contest and today’s announcement of the winners wrap up the initial launch of the Firefox Flicks campaign, which will continue throughout 2006.

The winner’s video takes an interesting approach, with a ‘daredevil’ girl into surfing talking about her love, with the text ‘my other browsers a surfboard. Get Firefox’ coming up at the end. It’s nicely done, but you can judge it for yourself:

In the past few weeks, Scoble’s been heavily promoting On10, a new website from Microsoft offering videos about technology. It seems a bit like Channel9 (the excellent, and very popular video website from MS aimed at techies and developers), except aimed at those with just a passing interest in technology, rather than an obsession.From the 0n10 website:

On10 is a place for people who want to use technology to change the world. Every weekday at 10:00 am (PST) we’ll update this site with a new video that highlights people, their passions and often the technology they are using. At the end of each week we compile these videos into a full length show with some extra surprises for you.In addition to the show, we’re launching a number of blogs for the enthusiast covering a wide range of topics. Our blogs will be written by Microsoft employees, members of the 10 community or a mixture of both.

Welcome to the beginning of 10, the next step starts with you!

One of the features of On10 is the ability to stick their videos on your blog, like Google Video and YouTube, so just for the sake of it, here’s a quite good video of Vista Scoble was talking about.

UPDATE: Video removed, it was causing ‘issues’. You can view it here. In the mean time, On10 needs to sort this out!

It’s a good way for MS to promote itself and improve its image with that all important target market of those people who are quite interested in technology but don’t know vast amounts about it, and all-to-often (or maybe not) see Microsoft as a nasty big evil monopoly. They should do more of this stuff, maybe sponsering tech shows in the mainstream media in exchange for a chance to put across their products, in the hope of slowly eroding the image.

In other MS news, their appeal against the EU Commission is over, and they await judgement. If they lose, there’s not much point worrying about image, because they’ve got the far bigger worry of millions of euros of fines per day, and compulsary sharing of information with competitors about their key architectures.

PC Pro are reporting that BT has picked up the UK-based online retailer Dabs.com. From a BT press release:

The move is part of BT’s strategy to strengthen its online sales and service
capabilities, particularly for small and medium-sized business and consumer products. To complement Dabs’ broad base of IT and technology products, BT will offer its full range of products and support services online – enhancing its position as a leading retailer of converged IT and communications products and services.

A spokesman has told PC Pro that BT will not rebrand Dabs.com, and it will remain a subsidiary. This move by BT shows that it is keen to move beyond its key business area of telecoms. This area of BT is under constant attack as Ofcom (the telecoms regulator in the UK) demands more and more ‘demonopolisation’ (not sure if that’s a word!) with the unbundling of broadband connections in telephone exchanges, and the advance of rival telephone providers, such as TalkTalk. BT needs to find more areas to make money if it wants to survive.

Full BT Press Release

No, there isn’t a typo in the title. Nintendo have officially renamed their next-generation video games console, to Wii. Pronounced like “we”, the new name has sparked some not-so-serious discussion about potential slogans (”Wii will wii will rock you”).

Nintendo are saying this name change means that the new console will be recognised and understood in any language.

The Nintendo Wii will be Nintendo’s way into the next generation console market, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 already released and Sony’s PlayStation 3 set for this November.

According to the BBC, EU vs Microsoft continues (read up here).

Microsoft are now trying to fight the EU ruling that they must release information about how Windows works so that its competitors can more easily interoperate.

MS lawyers are saying:

The Windows source code is copyright. It is valuable, the fruit of lots of effort

While Europe say:

Microsoft are trying to turn this into an intellectual property case when it’s not

The saga continues.

The BBC has a story that in the US, Germany and Japan, Microsoft are offering free telephone support to beta testers of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2.

It seems Microsoft want to shift the focus of testing the beta now from developers to normal people. The pressure of increasing uses of alternative browsers such as Firefox, which now has around 10% of the browser market, seems to be forcing Microsoft to stir up interest in their new browser.

The beta is freely available to all users of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, use the link above.

Apple have made a press release (and now you can see details on their website) that they are releasing a new version of their flagship notebook computer the MacBook Pro with a 17″ LCD screen.

It includes three USB ports (compared with 2 on the 15″ MacBook) and a Firewire 800 port in addition to the Firewire 400 port included as standard on the 15″ MacBook Pro. It also has an 8x speed DVD writer (which now supports dual layer burning).

The new MacBook Pro still uses a dual-core 2.16 GHz processor, but nevertheless is a very powerful and stylish notebook. It comes with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and iLife 06 and will set you back £1,999 ($2,799 in the US).

There are some new screenshots of the latest test version of Windows Vista (build 5365), now available for viewing here.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many new features, as now the focus on the development of Windows Vista is on making what is already there as stable as possible, ready for the release in early 2007.

Having said that, features like the Windows Sidebar and User Account Protection are looking a lot more complete, but why not see the screenshots for yourself?

Sony have slashed the price of their PlayStation 2 console in the USA to $130 (about £73), down around $20. This looks like another move showing that the PS3 console will hopefully be launching soon, after long waiting. The console is planned to be launched in November this year after many delays.

“While we continue to innovate and design groundbreaking new products, we remain dedicated to our long-term vision for the PlayStation 2 platform…”

Apparently, Sony haven’t officially given up on the PS2 just yet then.

Unfortunately, Sony have no plans to modify the current UK price of £104.99.