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“Since we have a direct relationship with our players, they help shape the product strategy,”

said president of the Sims label, Nancy Smith. He was referring to the deal struck with the Swedish furniture maker Ikea, in response to suggestions in forums of online players for more modern furniture. The Ikea pack will give the luxury of moving into their families’ virtual homes items like the Leksvik coffee table as well as the Ektorp sofa.

The Sims label has sold over 100 million copies. This virtual family designed by online players is now getting brand-conscious. The deal is another case of how the traditional lines between marketing material and paid-for content are fast blurring in the media world. Firms that sell services and products are increasingly keen on placing their wares inside TV shows and other media rather than just relying on stand-alone commercials. Media firms, such as Electronic Arts, meanwhile, are looking to strike sponsorship deals to help recoup the increasing cost of developing games.

Virtualisation has moved well beyond applications themselves to software, which can make those applications run quicker over a network. Certeon, the WAN (wide-area network) acceleration vendor, has introduced aCelera. It is an application acceleration platform, which comes without hardware. It is designed to be run on servers virtualised with VMware as well as with Microsoft’s new, upcoming Hyper-V technology.

Like most other application accelerators, aCelera tends to shorten response times for applications, which are required to run over networks, namely between branch and central offices. aCelera does so without any dedicated appliance.

The software is so designed that it can run on a ‘standard x86’ hardware (in one or more virtual machines). Hence it can share resources with the overall computing infrastructure of an enterprise. This permits scaling up application acceleration as and when needed and also avoids needing users to purchase a specialised device for each end of a WAN connection, according to Gareth Taube, vice president (marketing), Certeon.

The Sims - a virtual family designed by players – is now becoming brand-conscious. Starting this June, those who choose to play The Sims 2, the existing version of this game, will be able to purchase a ‘stuff pack’ (online or on a disc), which lets them deck up their simulated family homes with help of Ikea furniture. A similar deal was made last year with the Swedish clothing retailer H&M that let players get a disc full of H&M’s branded clothing for their chosen Sims avatars.

While most other ‘stuff packs’ include generic accouterments, for instance, one called ‘Glamour Life’, allows players to pick from label-free furnishings, evening gowns — the Ikea pack will allow them to move items, such as the Leksvik coffee table and the Ektorp sofa into their families’ virtual homes.

Counted among the world’s largest video game companies, Electronic Arts stated it struck the deal with the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea, in response to suggestions in online players’ forums for more realistic, modern furniture.

Microsoft’s next operating system (OS) to be unveiled will carry multi-touch features. These will serve as an alternative to the mouse. The successor, it is hoped, will have a better reception as compared to the Vista OS. Scheduled for release next year the new fingertip interface allows users to shrink and enlarge photos, trace routes on maps, play the piano or paint pictures.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates stated:

The way you interact with the system will dramatically change.

He was giving a speech at the All Things Digital conference. The Microsoft Chairman said in San Diego that Windows 7 would incorporate exciting new forms of interaction and communication. He added:

Today almost all the interaction is (through) keyboard-mouse. But over years to come, the role of speech, vision, ink and all of those things will be huge.

Chief executive Steve Ballmer gave a glimpse of the multi touch screen, the next version of Windows, with a limited demo at the conference. Even though Vista suffered from a lukewarm welcome from many firms and users and a poor public image, Mr Ballmer stated the firm has shipped close to 150 million copies of the programme.

The huge fan base for some virtual video games is proving to be a potentially rich and attractive target audience for marketers. In one such recent blockbuster game release, Grand Theft Auto IV sold over six million copies in the first week itself. Take-Two Interactive has published the Grand Theft Auto series. Incidentally, Electronic Arts has been trying to take over Take-Two Interactive, though the former has persistently been rebuffed.

Apart from sponsorship agreements, such as the Ikea-Sims deal, many game companies are trying to leverage advertising space and time in their games by selling it often on billboards or other related elements of the virtual backdrop. In online game versions, it is possible to sell ad space across networks of games, as it is on TV, for a specific time period.

But analysts state that advertisers have been rather skittish about such ads so far, partly owing to their limited reach. Some networks, for example, work only with games that are played on a single system, such as Sony’s PlayStation or Microsoft’s Xbox.