Dear valued PlayStation®3 customers,

On November 6th, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) terminated the services available through Life with PlayStation® application which enable users to enjoy content on the internet centering on two themes, “place” and “time.”

Life with PlayStation has also helped Stanford University's Folding@home, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and studying the causes of a variety of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancers.*

More than 15 million PS3® users has participated in the program in total and more than 100 million computation hours have been donated to the Folding@Home project to date. As a result of discussions with Stanford University, SCEI decided the termination considering that the PS3® system has made a significant contribution to the project.

“The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs.” said Vijay Pande, Folding@home research lead, Stanford University. “We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer's Disease. The next steps, now underway at Stanford, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It's too early to report on our preliminary results there, but I'm very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate).”

We would like to thank all the PS3® users for their support to “Life with PlayStation”.

*Dedicated application for the project became available in March 2007 and was integrated to Life with PlayStation in September 2008