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Hello Kitty, that marketing phenomenon from Sanrio, turned 30 years old on November ^1st 2004.

In honor of her birthday, THQ Wireless has announced two new Hello Kitty games for mobile devices – Hello Kitty Jump Rope and Hello Kitty Park Adventure.

Wireless Gaming Review has a review of Hello Kitty Park Adventure, also called London Adventure at this link. Some comments from WGR include:

Most of the game’s puzzles involve traversing ponds by using a combination of lily pads and floating baskets, which Hello Kitty can move into place. Monkeys will push any blue baskets that get in their ways, but they aren’t strong enough to push red baskets. Hello Kitty is truly the mightiest among anthropomorphic cultural icons. In later levels, new complexities are thrown into the mix, like teleportation booths.

Hello Kitty is an amazing cultural and commercial success, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue each year. Sanrio, the parent company, has licensing agreements with about 1,000 companies worldwide and the cat-with-no-mouth now appears on 22,000 different products and sold in about 40 countries.

Here is a map of the Sanrio locations in the US:

In their 2004 book entitled “Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon”, authors Ken Belson and Brian Bremner, claim that in the late 1990s, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered Sanrio $5.6 billion for the rights to Hello Kitty.

She’s everywhere…

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For those who like mysteries, a pointer to a Dec 21^st article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Gravity May Lose Its Pull“.

The article discusses the so-called “Pioneer Anomaly“, which refers to the fact that nobody knows why the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which has travelled 7.98 billion miles since it was launched on March 2^nd, 1972, is now 248,000 miles off-course, and is slowing down at a rate of about 8,000 miles a year.

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While opinions differ about which is the best gaming notebook, PC Magazine believes it to be the Voodoo ENVY m:790.

The m:790 is a high-end notebook. The price depends on the configuration and starts at about $3,800. That buys you a SYSmark 2004 score of 185 and a 3DMark03 score of 2730.

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NVIDIA, the graphics processor maker, today announced NVIDIA? PureVideo? technology, a combination of hardware, such as the nVidia GeForce 6800 GT graphics card shown below, and software intended to improve the video capabilities of desktop and notebook computers.

The programmable video processing engine found on the 6 Series supports the tweaking of video playback in such areas as progressive scan de-interlacing, video scaling, 3:2 pull-down correction, video noise reduction and color temperature correction. Trusted Reviews has a good article on PureVideo as well as some before/after images, including the following pair, showing how noise and jaggies have been improved:

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Here’s something different: PC Magazine in an article by Jim Louderback, entitled “Ten to Avoid—The Worst Products of the Year “, nominates ten products for a putative ‘Gadget Hall of Shame’. Four of those items are listed below:

• Concord 5062AF Digital Camera
• iPAQ rz1715 PDA
• Samsung D415 Mobile Phone
• VoodooPC Envy m:380 Notebook

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The Guardian has just published a list of their top 10 gadgets of the year. The number 1 gizmo of 2004 in their estimation is the Sky+ 160 digital satellite receiver & hard disk video recorder. The unit has a capacity of 160GB and sells for about €580.

The Guardian has also published their list of the 100 most useful sites. Here’s a random sampling:

• Art – http://us.imdb.com
• Community – http://craigslist.org
• Gaming – http://ign.com
• News – http://news.bbc.co.uk
• Phones – www.mobileburn.com
• Reference – www.martindalecenter.com
• Search – www.google.com

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Eleksen, a company known for conductive fabric sensing and switching applications, will demo a fabric keyboard and joystick in a few months.

The firm’s keyboard is aimed at mobile phones, PDAs and laptops and will have Bluetooth connectivity, while the joystick is targeted at games players on the same devices.

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We were able to use a Samsung SGH-D500 mobile phone for a while yesterday although its not supposed to be available here in N.A. This sleek, glossy-black Triband Megapixel high-end Slider makes a nice first impression.

Specs are here. Highlights include:

1^st Samsung mobile phone with Bluetooth

~$800

Vivid 176×220 pixel screen

1.3 Megapixel camera + flash with mirror for self-portraits

Small at 93.5×45.7 ×23.5mm and light-weight at 99g

USB, 80MB memory!, SyncML

Elegant lacquered enamel finish. A nice touch is when the battery is charging..it actually shows you how full the battery is getting.

On the downside, we had some trouble syncing the calendar & contacts. Also, and this is a personal first: I got a “Syntax Error” when using the calculator ….. no doubt related to the Samsung proprietary operating system.

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We don’t usually pass along health advice, but this one seemed too intriguing to ignore. The 18 December edition of the British Medical Journal in this article, states that the Polymeal eating plan can reduce heart disease by 76 percent. The components of the Polymeal ranked by importance are:

1. Wine (150 ml/day)
2. Garlic (2.7 g/day)
3. Fruit and vegetables (400 g/day)
4. Dark chocolate (100 g/day)
5. Fish (114 g four times/week)
6. Almonds (68 g/day)

Alternatively, there’s always this link.

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