By all accounts, 2007 was a monster year for the videogame industry. Last week, the Entertainment Software Association announced that total sales hit $18.85 billion, with a near-even split of $9.5 billion spent on software and $9.35 billion spent on game consoles like the Nintendo Wii. Console games definitely won the war versus PC-based titles like "World of Warcraft," as PC sales accounted for just 9.5 percent of the total. Portable software sales were $2.0 billion while console video games raked in an impressive $6.6 billion. Approximately 267.8 million games were sold. Nintendo won the console wars, …

Google's Eric Schmidt thinks the arrival of a truly mobile Web will unleash a "huge revolution" in location-based advertising, the CEO told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Friday. "It's the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC (story and it is before us -- and it is very likely it will happen in the next year," Schmidt said. Mobile advertising, of course, is quite small, and many research groups predict it will remain so for the next few years. Forrester Research, for example, predicts that mobile spending will remain …

Facebook is extending its influence across the Web in a big way, by today allowing developers to create third-party programs outside of Facebook that tap into the company's social data pool. Apps developed using Facebook's API can now access the social network's features and its so-called "social graph" of user information from outside the site. Silicon Alley Insider's (link: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/another-brilliant-facebook-move-really-opens-platform-to-web.html) Henry Blodget says the "small but important step" underlines Facebook's goal of becoming more like an operating system that links Web programs together through the social graph. That said, Facebook still is not completely open, as …

Are you bullish or bearish about the tech sector during a recession? Conflicting reports from conflicted analysts abound, but industry watchers think it's downhill from here for tech. Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky says that big techs like Apple, Google and Amazon "are the most consumer dependent technology companies in the history of technology. Uunlike prior recessions, consumer spending is going to heavily damage those companies. That's why you're seeing so much nervousness about Google and so much nervousness about Apple. It's not a good place to be." What happens in a recession? Mergers and acquisitions activity will …

During its earnings call tomorrow, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang will announce substantial layoffs totaling anywhere between several hundred to more than 2,500. Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, who supports the decision, runs five different scenarios at a cost of $125K per employee to assess the financial impact of these layoffs. Blodget assumes that the appropriate number of cuts is 1,000, which would return operating profit to its level one year ago, reducing overhead by more than $125 million. If the cuts are more aggressive than that, and a source tells him that it will be, then 1,500 …