The holidays are here!

I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season.

It’s been an amazing year with all the exciting developments in the digital home world—like the updates and improvements to the Sony BIVL and AT&T Homezone and the way Yahoo! Digital Home service brings these experiences into our living rooms. I can only image that next year will be even better.

I look forward to sharing more with you in 2008. Happy holidays!

- The Digital Home Guru

While I was watching TV this weekend, I noticed some great new features on my Sony Bravia Internet Video Link (BIVL).

First of all, it’s got new sports highlights streamed directly from Yahoo! Sports, which I love because I’m a sports fanatic. Now I can catch all the plays I missed and watch them over again on my big screen whenever I want.

I also really like the short videos that feature quirky people from all over the Web (People of the Web)—like the girl who broadcasts her life 24/7 and the guy who spent $1,000 on a pizza.

Since the holidays are here, I’m on the lookout for cool gifts for my nephews and fun things to do with them. With the Sony BIVL, I can easily get ideas and video reviews of the hottest new toys. I can also watch exclusive trailers for movies like “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” so I can plan out what we can see over the holidays.

I love that I can do all this in the comfort of my living room with nothing more than my remote control! Can’t wait to see what they’ll think of next.

- The Digital Home Guru

Yahoo! Widgets recently announced an upgrade of its desktop platform to version 4.5. What does that mean? A ton of cool new features and widgets for us to use!

One of the major changes is that Yahoo! Widgets now supports Flash and HTML, in addition to JavaScript. This means that Web widgets can now easily turn into desktop widgets, like my favorite Video Search widget from PageFlakes. (I use it to search for videos across different sites.) With these new upgrades, Yahoo! is working with the Web’s best distribution platforms, including Netvibes, Clearspring, and MuseStore.

With more than 4,300 widgets available now and many more to come, Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 also provides some great search, rate, review, and tag features. So it’s really easy to find what I want. One desktop widget I’m really loving these days is the Streaming TV Widget that I use to watch TV shows right on my media player.

There’s definitely a lot going on here. Keep an eye out for cool new widgets in the coming weeks, like the All-Star Ballot Widget from the NBA and the RockYou Slide Show Widget!

- The Digital Home Guru