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Today in Tech: News around the Web

A round-up of the companies, deals, and trends that made headlines.

Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We've assembled the day's most newsworthy bits below.

Marcus don't play iOS games

Sony's smart-aleck front man has been trash-talking Apple's game players since June

Steve Jobs claims Apple (AAPL) makes the world's No. 1 portable game player, but Marcus Rivers isn't buying it for a second.

"That ain't built for big-boy games," says Sony's (SNE) trash-talking front man for its portable PSP game player. "That's built for texting your grandma and calling your girl."

Rivers, played by actor Bobb'e J. Thompson, is the classic know-it-all MORE

Why does Steve Jobs play fast and loose with iPod touch sales numbers?

Take, for example, his claim that it is the No. 1 portable game player in the world

Apple (AAPL) may in fact be selling more hand-held game devices than Sony and Nintendo combined, as Steve Jobs claimed on Wednesday, but journalists trying to fact-check that statement can be forgiven their skepticism.

Part of the problem is that the statement, on the face of it, is absurd. As of January, Nintendo had sold MORE

Is casual gaming destroying the traditional gaming market?

Trip Hawkins sees a videogame business at war with itself. It's Farmville vs. Halo and the winner could shape the next generation of game play.

It was only a few years ago that the videogame industry was tagged as "the new Hollywood," a billion-dollar market that operated with binary simplicity: A game's opening weekend – like a theatrical release – would determine whether the tens of millions a developer had MORE

Is innovation dead?

Management gurus preach the virtues of 'continuous innovation' but a new kind of reinvention may be taking hold.

By Cédric Laguerre, Senior Analyst, lecturer at SKEMA Business School and Eric Viardot, strategy professor, SKEMA Business School

It has become an unassailable tenet of business: Companies must Always Be Innovating. Indeed, some proponents of so-called continuous innovation talk as if failing to reinvent your company every few weeks is tantamount to MORE

Apple challenges Sony and Nintendo

How does Apple plan to sell large quantities of iPods this holiday season in a depressed market already saturated with MP3 players?

By repositioning them as high-end game machines.

That's the message coming through loud and clear from Cupertino, not only in those ubiquitous TV ads proclaiming the iPod touch "the funnest iPod ever," but in a series of public pronouncements from executives usually content to let Apple's products speak for themselves.

Apple MORE

Nintendo Wii officially recession-proof

The Wii Fit game is one of Nintendo's biggest sellers with 697,000 sold in the U.S. in November. Courtesy of Nintendo

By Yi-Wyn Yen

Nintendo seems to have bucked the recession. The Japanese video game manufacturer has doubled November sales of the Wii in the U.S. from a year ago, according to NPD's latest release on gaming sales.

The demand for the Wii remains strong since the game console's debut two years ago. The company MORE

No slowdown for Wii and DS, says Nintendo prez

Ubisoft's Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party will be one of 130 new games for the Wii this holiday. Courtesy of Nintendo

By Yi-Wyn Yen

How hot is the Nintendo Wii? Even with the U.S. economy in meltdown, Nintendo may still struggle to meet demand for the third straight holiday season.

Nintendo is aggressively ramping up shipments of its popular video game consoles to avoid the shortage it faced last December. The company will MORE

Nintendo's big bet on small games

Spore, the highly-anticipated PC game, will come to the Nintendo DS. Image: Electronic Art

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LOS ANGELES - Turns out the next big thing from Nintendo will be new games for its miniature console, the DS.

Despite all the speculation of what's in store for the major video game consoles - the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360 (MSFT), and Sony PlayStation 3 (SNE) -  Nintendo (NTDOY) is paying a lot of MORE

Xbox's mass-market makeover

A new interface and customized avatars gives the Xbox a Wii-like feel. Image: Microsoft

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LOS ANGELES - Microsoft's Xbox 360 is getting an image makeover. To appeal to the "casual" gaming audience, Microsoft executives on Monday said they are aggressively marketing the hardcore gamer console as a multipurpose entertainment machine to watch movies, TV shows, and listen to music.

The approach appears to be the latest tactic to compete with MORE