With all the excitement around the Bungie spinoff, I missed this news last week out of the World Cyber Games in Seattle.

It turns out the big winner was Technology Access Foundation, the Seattle nonprofit that gives kids more opportunities to learn computing.

Samsung, a sponsor of the games, gave TAF 600 19-inch LCD monitors used in the games. It also gave the organization 47 42-inch and 50-inch plasma displays.

The "amazing additions" will replace the overworked CRT monitors at the TAF Academy and TechStart sites, Trish Millines Dziko, executive director, said in a newsletter today.

One of the biggest beneficiaries so far of Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) may be Tacoma's IdentityMine.

The Web and software development company built early demos of WPF and .Net 3.0 such as newsreaders and applications that Microsoft used to show off its platform.

Now IdentityMine has taken the big step from services to products by releasing a set of tools called Blendables for designers and developers. The company has been developing the kit with its user community for months. It released the kit on Oct. 3 and formally announced the launch today.

IdentityMine was an alpha and beta tester of Microsoft's XAML-based presentation technologies, said Kurt Brockett, director of product manager:

"We had all these tools laying aound that we had built ourself. Once it shipped, there was a natural market out there for components - it was just a matter of productizing our components."

The kit includes tools such as Zoombox, which "allows content to be panned in any direction or zoomed in or out using a multitude of user inputs" and ElementSnapshot that "enables greater designer creativity by alleviating performance degradation when exploiting advanced visual effects."

Blendables starts at $395 and the company is offering a downloadable 60-day trial.

IdentityMine has about 50 employees, mostly in Tacoma. It also has offices in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas and about 20 in Kochi, India.

(Updated with Brockett's comment and details about employees)

The main shortcoming of Amazon's S3 online storage service - a cornerstone of its hot Web services platform - was that it didn't guarantee uptime through a service level agreement (SLA).

Companies used to such agreements were wary of storing crucial files with Amazon, limiting its appeal. The company hopes that will change with a new SLA, retroactive to Oct. 1, that services evangelist Jeff Barr announced on the Amazon Web Services blog:

We know that many of our customers, including a multitude of teams within Amazon, are using S3 in mission-critical ways and need a formal commitment from us in order to make commitments to their own users and customers.

The company will "commit to 99.9% uptime" and customers can apply for a 25 percent credit on their monthly bill if uptime falls below 99 percent. They can apply for 10 percent credit if uptime is between 99 percent and 99.9 percent.

Barr's advice:

As is the norm with agreements like this, there's some fine print and you should definitely read it yourself to learn more.

I wonder if the service assurance, combined with the cost and ease of use, will attract bigger companies to the service.

(I'm also waiting to see if Amazon blends S3 with its MP3 store somehow, giving consumers the option to buy and store music in an S3 vault that's accessible anywhere - and now most anytime - with a Web connection. The company wouldn't say if that's in the works when I asked while reporting Monday's column.)