IT Buoy

For the first time in two years, Microsoft’s Xbox won a monthly battle in the U.S. game console wars. Microsoft sold 422,000 Xboxs in February, while Nintendo only sold 398,000 Wiis, according to NPD Group. The last time Microsoft outsold Nintendo in the U.S. was in September 2007. Between then and now, Nintendo has sold 24 million Wiis, while Microsoft has sold just 13.2 million Xboxs. While February was a nice victory for Microsoft, it could be short lived. Edward Williams of BMO Capital says in a note for clients, “limited supply negatively affected the hardware unit sell through” for the Wii.

The South by Southwest Interactive festival starts today in Austin, and it looks as though the buzz is all about location-based services. A post from Twitter’s support page for the geotagging feature includes a tweet about someone heading to SXSW. Twitter, which got a lot of attention at SXSW three years ago, officially added an option to its site that allows users to share their location in their tweets. In a posting on its blog , the site said “a recent burst of interest in location sharing” prompted it to add the feature. Users can opt in to enable the sharing service and can decide whether to attach their location on a tweet-by-tweet basis. They also can choose whether to provide exact coordinates or just a neighborhood or town name. It’s an ideal feature to add in time for SXSW, which is spread over venues throughout a large area of Austin and also includes important music and film portions. But the real attention is focused on two services that have been in the location-sharing business longer than Twitter — Foursquare and Gowalla

Microsoft bigwig Bill Gates got hip-checked off the top perch as the richest man in the world by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (pictured here), on the annual Forbes list of the world’s Richie Riches. Slim came to the rescue of the New York Times (NYT) a year ago, forking over $250 million to help the cash-strapped media company. Often in the No. 1 spot, Gates actually got shoved off in 2008 by megainvestor Warren Buffett (now No. 3), with whom he is good friends. Gates returned to the top rank in 2009, and now Slim–a telecom-and-more tycoon–has surpassed Gates’s net worth of $53 billion slightly with a $53.5 billion kitty. Here are some of the other U.S. tech dudes–mostly based in Silicon Valley–on the list, in the Top 100: No.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to gain share in the search market , thanks to organic growth, lots of advertising, and clever tricks like stuffing MSN.com full of links to Bing search queries . Read the rest of this story

Yesterday, the monthly search market share numbers from comScore (SCOR) were released, showing Microsoft (MSFT) Bing up, Yahoo (YHOO) down and Google (GOOG) maintaining its dominance. In today’s release by Experian Hitwise , Bing is up again, from 9.37 percent to 9.7 percent, while Yahoo is flat at 14.57 percent, and Google gave up a scooch of share to fall to 70.95 percent from 71.49 percent. This time it appears to be the vertical searches–such as autos and health–helping Bing, which has been its strategy to differentiate itself from the Google juggernaut. Here is that table, which you can click on to make larger: