One in four gamers play at work (Reuters)

A survey of 2,842 office workers conducted on a video game Web site found one in four people, or 24 percent, said they played video games during their working day.

Game play increased up the corporate ladder with more than one third, or 35 percent, of chief executives and other senior executives who took part in the survey admitting to playing games at work. They made up 8 percent of the survey.

But while 61 percent of those who play games at work said they did so during lunch or other official breaks, the survey by market researcher Information Solutions Group found one in seven, or 14 percent, admitted playing during business meetings or conference calls.

Two thirds of those said they did so at least once a month.

But the players claim it is not just for fun.

Eight out of 10 said playing a quick game helped them handle stress while about five in 10 said it helped strengthen their memory.

Carly Drum, managing director of executive recruitment firm Drum Associates, said it was not surprising that today's business professionals were casual video games users.

"We're seeing employees who are much more technologically savvy and familiar with all forms of new media from social networking to blogging and beyond," Drum said in a statement.

The study was based on an online survey conducted in June among visitors to the Web site of Seattle-based game provider .

Nokia bets on mobile social communities (Reuters)

The world's top cell phone maker, Nokia, announced in July the deal to buy Twango — a service which allows users to share photos, video or audio files — as it bets on a take-off of cell phone versions of hugely popular social networking sites.

"We are going to integrate it with our S60 platform," Stephen Johnston, senior business development manager at Nokia, said in a speech to a trade fair in Helsinki.

When asked about social networking and the role of communities in Nokia's future, he said: "It's really going to be the underlying layer, across everything."

Nokia hopes mobile social networking sites — which allow increasing swathes of the world's population to keep in touch with friends online — will eventually encourage people to use the Internet on their cell phones with as much enthusiasm as they do on computers.

"Its seems that for many, virtual communities are the closest ones," Jorma Ollila, Nokia's chairman, said at the fair.

Last week, Nokia unveiled a new music store and gaming service, and said it would wrap them with a navigation offering into an Internet service platform under the new brand "Ovi," a Finnish word for "door."

"In the future the services will certainly expand. It is open, so it offers opportunity also for other service developers," Ollila said.

Nokia's S60 software platform is used extensively in Nokia's line-up of mid- to high-end phones, but also in advanced handsets of LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.

Its closest rival is Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

MARKET SURGE AHEAD

Revenues from running networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo on cell phones are expected to rise sharply in coming years as so-called "user-generated content," once a niche concept, starts to win mass appeal.

Juniper Research expects annual revenues from wireless social networking to increase to 2.86 billion euros in 2012, compared with just 190 million euros this year.

"It is very early days. Mass social networking is a very recent phenomenon. People haven't yet worked out how to monetize it in the fixed world," said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper.

Holden said smaller players or new companies have a window of opportunity of 18 to 24 months to build communities.

"In a couple of years this market place will be crowded by your MySpaces and Facebooks. The opportunity is there because people carry a phone around all the time," Holden said.

Vodafone, the world's largest cell phone company by revenue, in February clinched a deal with media group Myspace owner News Corp that allows customers to post profiles, videos and blogs on a cell phone version of MySpace.

But smaller companies like Munich-based Gofresh, which runs the mobile social networking site with 550,000 users, expects forays by Internet sites into the mobile space to fail.

"Can online companies move to mobile? We have learned — definitely not. There is no PC company which would be leading in the mobile space," said Antonio Vince Staybl, one of the co-heads of Gofresh. "People always look for new stuff and the new stuff is mobile."

(Additional reporting by Kirstin Ridley in London)

Oracle buys Bridgestream for employee role mapping (InfoWorld)

The acquisition follows Oracle's announcement to , a provider of network intelligence and network data integrity software, two days earlier.

Terms of the Bridgestream purchase were not disclosed.

With Bridgestream's expertise in the area of ERM (enterprise role management) software, Oracle aims to help companies meet compliance regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which have created a need to control access to sensitive systems and monitor access privileges.

Bridgestream software is designed to help companies map who does what within an organization, tracking changes in personnel, responsibilities, and job functions. It ensures that employees are granted the right access to systems to do their jobs.

One of the features of the company's SmartRoles role-management application is its single point of control, allowing businesses to define and manage roles, role memberships and associated access privileges from one place.

The addition of Bridgestream will help Oracle strengthen its suite of Identity Management products, which serve as the security backbone of its Fusion middleware, Oracle said.

Intel Ships Quad-Core Tigerton (PC World)

The Xeon 7300 chips, called Tigerton, are the first quad-core processors from Intel designed to be used in servers with four or more processors, a relatively small but lucrative segment of the server market. Previously, the Xeon processor for this segment of the market had two cores, despite the availability of quad-core Xeon chips for single-processor and two-way servers.

The new chips offer significantly better performance compared to their predecessors, Intel's Xeon 5300 chips, said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group.

"Across the spectrum of different applications, we're seeing really, really good performance," Gupta said.

Benchmarks run by Intel showed significant gains for many enterprise applications, including SAP AG's ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, Gupta said. The 7300 series chips can handle roughly 82 percent more ERP users and 92 percent more database transactions than the 5300 chips, he said.

The 7300 is part of the Caneland chip package, which also includes Intel's 7300 chipset, known as Clarksboro. The new chipset has four 1,066MHz interconnects that are linked to an individual processor, helping reduce latency between the processors and main memory.

Caneland is the last release expected from Intel before AMD announces the availability of its Barcelona server chips on Sept. 10. Barcelona is widely expected to offer significant performance increases over AMD's existing dual-core server chips, and should mean tighter competition with Intel in the server space.

Intel will initially offer six versions of Tigerton. At the top of the range is the X7350, a 2.93GHz chip designed with 8M bytes of shared on-chip cache and a thermal design power (TDP) of 130 watts. TDP is the highest sustainable level of power for applications that Intel expects to be run on the chip, and the number describes how much heat a system must be able to dissipate from the chip.

Intel is also offering several Xeon 7300 chips with a TDP of 80 watts. The E7340 runs at 2.4GHz and offers 8M bytes of shared on-chip cache. The E7330 also runs at 2.4GHz, but has 6M bytes of cache. The E7320 and E7310 both have 4M bytes of shared cache and run at clock speeds of 2.13GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively.

Intel will also release a 50-watt version that runs at 1.86GHz. The L7345 has 8M bytes of shared on-chip cache and is designed for blade servers and high-density rack servers.

Two dual-core versions of the Tigerton chip, the E7220 and E7210, will also be available, running at speeds of 2.93GHz and 2.4GHz with a TDP of 80 watts. Both chips have a shared on-chip cache of 8M bytes and are designed for high-performance computing applications.

Tigerton's improved performance doesn't come cheap. The processors are priced from US$856 to $2,301 per chip in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard measure of processor pricing.

The 7300 will also be the last server chip announced by Intel, before its upcoming Penryn chips are made available later this year. Made using a 45-nanometer process that will allow more cache to be put on each chip, the first Penryn server chips are expected to be released in November.

Those chips are intended for use in single-processor and two-way servers. The Penryn server chip for multiple-processor servers is called Dunnington and will not be available until late 2008, Gupta said.

The Web is awash in anti-MP3 audiophiles.