Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer makes fun of News Corp hacking scandal
On the same day that James Murdoch was fighting for his career at a parliamentary hearing on Thursday in London, Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer was making fun of the whole situation an ocean away.
At a fancy breakfast hosted by News Corp’s Wall Street Journal in New York (where Sirius XM’s CEO Mel Karmazin was in the house), Stringer was the guest of honor. WSJ editor Robert Thomson kicked off the Q&A session introducing Stringer, who later took the opportunity to show off one of Sony’s new products, a pair of binoculars that can be used to record video or pictures in 3D. That’s when Stringer seized the moment to turn the breakfast into an impromptu roast about News Corp’s woes. Wielding the binoculars, he said:
“These are 3D binoculars. I venture it got good reviews. The Wall Street Journal will equip all their reporters with this. And if you think hacking the Royal Family is fun with phones, this is the ideal device. If you stay at the Hotel InterContinental Hyde Park, you can actually gaze into Buckingham Palace with these. I am telling this to (Thomson), wherever you are. Did you leave already? This is for you. This is for you. Video recording or stills.”
When I caught Stringer on the sidelines after the event, he admitted his stand-up routine “was a bit dangerous.”
Maybe $400 heaters and $85,000 TVs will get consumers spending again
It was a confusing week to be a consumer electronics reporter. At the start, I was convinced that no one wants to spend on anything besides an iPad and by the end, I learned that there are people out there buying $85,000 TVs.
On Tuesday, Best Buy’s shares tanked on disappointing earnings. Our headline shouted “tech shoppers turn thrifty,” and explained how nobody will buy a new flat-screen TV once they have bought their first one.
But if U.S. consumers won’t shell out for new flat screens, maybe they will buy high-end fans and heaters. That’s what James Dyson told me on Wednesday at the launch of the inventor’s latest gadget– a heater that costs $400, the Dyson Hot.
Dyson’s privately held UK-based company has 2,700 employees and saw its profit soar 26 percent this year, on the strengh of items like its cordless vacuum cleaner and swanky “air multiplier” fans that lack blades and cost much more than the competition.
Dyson told Reuters that Best Buy, his company’s largest distrubutor in the U.S., would probably rebound when spending comes back. “People will always want to buy technology,” he said.
I realized that consumers this holiday may still want to splurge on items like the Dyson Hot, which have features that are hard to find in other brands. For example, the new heater makes it impossible to burn yourself on it, with ceramic stones inside the device providing the heat, and unlike other space heaters, there’s no burning smell wafting off the device.
The spell of the pricy $400 heater had barely worn off the next day when I strolled into Bang & Olufsen’s Soho showroom. The Bang & Olufsen showroom is to Best Buy what a modern art museum is to a run-down Radio Shack.
CES: Achieve new positions
If you’re going to Las Vegas, you might as well go to bed in public. And what better way to do that than on a mattress whose ability to achieve new positions is unrivaled? Leonard Cohen would be jealous.
Yes, it’s true. There will be a mattress on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center starting January 6 for the 2011 CES show.
Actually, it will be in the Vivon Life booth (South Hall, lower level #22057). It may be the first sleep mattress ever to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show and we think it will get people to turn their heads and take notice.
Vivon is the new premium mattress company that brings technology and comfort together. The big breakthrough idea is that we have patent-pending technologies that bring all the moving parts inside the mattress; we call these Positional Mattresses (they change positions – and we don’t want to be called “adjustable beds”!). It’s the perfect mattress for people who embrace technology and love using their iPad, smartphone, eBook readers, or Wii games in bed. That’s why it just makes sense for a tech-driven mattress to be at CES this year.
At CES, we are announcing a new line of Vivon Prestige Powered by Brookstone Massage mattresses. Here again, we’ve figured out a way to make all the moving parts go inside the mattress itself. It’s nothing short of amazing and I hope you can stop by our booth in the South Hall (Booth #22057) to see it and feel it. Brookstone has been a trusted leader in massage for 40 years and we couldn’t be more pleased to partner with them.
Massage? Mattress? Vegas? Positions? Partner? Adjustable beds? All of the above, please.
Why won’t Amazon say how many Kindles it’s sold?
Something about returning from the Christmas holidays makes people want to show off what they received – a new sweater donned, a new gadget subtly pulled out at meetings, a few extra pounds padding the belly.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t like this tradition. He will hint at the generous present that consumers gave to Amazon in the form of surprisingly strong sales, but he won’t offer details.
Bezos wants you to know that his Kindle – the e-book reader that has done a remarkably good job surviving in the age of the iPad – was Amazon’s “bestselling product of all time.” How many Kindles did Amazon sell? We don’t know because Amazon isn’t saying.
What Amazon does say is that the third generation of the Kindle surpassed even the number of Harry Potter 7 books it sold. Which is kind of disingenuous because Kindles are sold primarily through Amazon, while Harry Potter books are available in nearly every bookstore. But it does offer a hint: Some 5 million copies of Harry Potter have sold on Amazon since 2007, one analyst estimates.
Usually, analysts step in to offer sales figures that Amazon won’t. But in the case of the Kindle, they can’t seem to agree. One reckons Amazon has sold 5.4 million Kindles in 2010, while another pegs that number at 8 million.
Either number is impressive, so why doesn’t Amazon share it? Over on Quora, a former Amazon employee suggested it’s because the disclosure would help Amazon’s competitors. But nobody sells Kindle’s but Amazon, and few e-readers are even close to it in sales, unless you count the iPad.
But the iPad is a tablet, and the cheapest version of the iPad costs four times Kindle’s $139 price tag. Besides, Apple makes a point in bragging about how many iPads, iPod Touches and iPhones it sells each quarter, and it only seems to fuel sales.
We all know that the Kindle eBook Reader is a hot item right now. I see that it will continue to be. Amazon’s success is definitely of interest, but if they choose not to tell us how many, so be it. I love my Kindle 3G WiFi. I use it every day. http://www.kindle.co.cc
The world wants cheap but stylish phones. Can Android deliver both?
Cheap and stylish are more likely to be antonyms when describing mobile phones. But the global market will reward a smartphone that can deliver on both fronts, a goal that Android phones seem best suited to reaching.
That is one conclusion to be drawn from a survey from Nielsen on mobile phone usage by 15-24 year olds around the world. The survey had some interesting insights, such as Italy’s position as the market with the highest percentage of young people owning a smartphone (47%). The U.S. was the only major market surveyed where smartphone owners were more likely to be female (55%) than male (45%).
Only one in six smartphones owned by people in the age group surveyed were purchased by parents, so the results can help shed light on what features appeal the most to consumers under 25. For the most part, those features varied by country.
In India, practical features were seen as the most important factors in deciding which phone to buy, with 40% saying price was paramount and 12% choosing battery life. In the U.S, price was also important at 22%, while a QWERTY input was next at 14%.
In China, the biggest potential market for smartphones, only 22% chose price as the biggest factor. Just as many chose the form and shape of the phone, and 10% said style and design. That suggests a promising market for Apple’s iPhone and sleeker Android phones like the Samsung galaxy.
But Android phones, which use a free operating software designed by Google, also have an opportunity to appeal to consumers who want a low-cost phone. The versatility of the Android platform to appeal to cost-conscious and design-conscious consumers alike bode well for Android’s market share abroad.
Tablets could offer Research-in-Motion a second act
Could tablets offer Research-in-Motion a second act? The company, whose Blackberry phones were the hottest mobile devices of the decade until the iPhone and Android phones showed up, badly needs something to revive its growth.
Just last week, ComScore said that the Blackberry’s share of the U.S. smartphone market fell to 35.8% from 39.3% while the iPhone inched up a percentage point to 24.6% and Android grew by six and a half percentage points to 23.5%. Another survey by Nielsen showed that people planning to upgrade from feature phones to smartphones prefer Android and iPhones. Only 11% of those surveyed are most interested in buying a Blackberry.
Analysts are starting to worry that the trend will be repeated in overseas markets. On Wednesday, Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros. said he expects RIM’s stock price to erode because Android’s market share is growing as prices of Android phones come down. RIM’s stock is down 3% since Monday as investors mulled such concerns.
On Thursday, the blog Boy Genius Report showed a nine-minute video demoing the Blackberry Playbook, a new tablet from RIM. It’s still a work in progress, and the demo didn’t show how the device connects to the Internet, but it offered enough of a glimpse to suggest that the Playbook could be a strong contender in the growing market for tablets.
The Blackberry Playbook is powered by an operating system that uses technology from QNX, an Ottowa-based software company that RIM bought in April. The navigation is smooth, intuitive and in some ways superior to the iPad – allowing the user to scroll down to see all apps, or to flip sideways to see apps organized by category.
The Playbook’s multitask function makes it easier to jump between apps than the iPad does. Videos can continue to play in the background as they would on a laptop browser when another app, say email, is opened. Swiping along different borders of the tablet’s screen adds new navigation features, making it easier to call up a keyboard or minimize screens.
14.2 million units is impressive, 5.1M _new_ accounts is even more impressive, with all the talk about how android will kill’em all
took a look at the Q results and the R&D expenditure was about 40% higher than a year ago; some shorters try to make people think that RIM has somehow suddenly stopped innovating 
as if hTC or Samsung or Apple _can_ and RIM (being, ya know, canadian and a dinosaur for that) can not
just curious what products they’ll introduce next !
Forget-me-not: RIM’s half-ready PlayBook vies for attention
Research In Motion’s upcoming PlayBook tablet device made a live guest appearance on home turf today at a Toronto press conference on how these devices that fall between smartphones and laptops will change life as we know it.
When it comes to real-world uses for tablets, most examples understandably came from Apple’s iPad, the old man on the block at eight months old.
The iPad helps autistic children communicate and helps hospitals manage patients. Corporate software maker SAP has even built an iPad app for business intelligence. The list goes on.
Enter RIM’s vice president for special projects, David Neale, with a functioning but not polished PlayBook in hand.
The crowd, a few hundred tech-types, appeared genuinely excited, like they were thinking, “How could I get someone special to buy me one of these babies for Christmas?”
Unfortunately for them, that’s not going to happen.
Hi i am very eagerly waiting for playbook. I would like to see its apps list grow.
Visit:
http://playbookapps.ws/
When gamers hit Toys R Us and other tales of Black Friday
Sprinkled among the snaking lines of parents at a Toys R Us in New Jersey on Black Friday were diehard gamers. Many had no children to spoil. Nor were they particularly happy to be in the Toys R Us; but with gaming hardware fast selling out across the region, they followed the scent of the deal.
The Kinect moved especially fast, if early anecdotal evidence is any measure. Brisk sales of hardware like the PlayStation3, Xbox and Microsoft Kinect on the nation’s biggest annual shopping spree also bode well for software sales, says Mike Hickey, a Janco Partners analyst.
But which games were enticing fans to shell out on Black Friday?
“ We’re seeing strong sales of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft), Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft), Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard), Red Dead Redemption (Take-Two Interactive), Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda), Gran Turismo 5 (Polyphony Digital) and Donkey Kong (Nintendo),” Hickey said.
Many of the hottest video items weren’t even on sale. The Microsoft Kinect, which was not discounted at any retailer on Black Friday (in fact, the price got jacked up on many secondary sellers’ websites), was out of stock both in stores and online at WalMart, Target and Best Buy.
GameStop also weighed in on Friday morning, telling Reuters about the traffic at its 800 US stores which opened at midnight, which were helped in part by the interest in the Kinect. “Preliminary reports from our stores record a lot of excitement,” said GameStop’s president Tony Bartel,” and there were many customers lined up at 5 am when the rest of the stores opened.
NPD analyst Stephen Baker said video games were “one of the better categories this holiday,” but low-priced televisions and aggressively priced laptops were the biggest sellers on Black Friday.
Rupert Murdoch’s long crusade to make digital news pay
On the first day of one of my journalism classes, the teacher produced a large metal ring with a short rope fastened to it. The ring was made to be installed in a bull’s nose, he explained; and the rope – called a lead – let you guide him wherever you wanted. The point was clear, if somewhat condescending: Writing a good lead lets the journalist guide the reader around like cattle.
That illustration was a lot more powerful before the web, during an era when closed media like print newspapers and television limited interactivity and left consumers with no choice but to passively accept the news as presented. It doesn’t make sense on the web, where any reader can challenge news content or even become a publisher in a matter of minutes.
Rupert Murdoch still lives in a world of nose rings. The News Corp. CEO has had remarkable success in print and television, but he has stumbled again and again on the web, most notably with the great fizzle that was MySpace. Even today, the company is backing away from Project Alesia, its ambitious plan to create a digital newsstand, after other publishers showed little interest.
But as reports emerge on his latest digital venture – The Daily, a newspaper designed for tablets in general and the iPad in particular – it’s clear that Murdoch isn’t giving up on making digital news work on his terms – that is, in a tidily contained format that demands readers pay for it.
That model is working for the Wall Street Journal, more or less, because the publication is still regarded as a must read for many. But it’s not clear it will work for a publication built from scratch. Initial reactions lean toward skepticism, particularly the $50 annual subscription and the newspaper-like publishing schedule. One terse summary of the reaction: “Wonderful! Slower news — and at a higher price.”
The skeptics will be right, at least at first. After all, why should digital news follow a cable-TV revenue model, as News Corp. is predicting, when so many are canceling their cable subscriptions? But News Corp. appears to be ready for a long haul: 100 journalists have been hired for The Daily and $30 million is the reported budget for the project. There will always be a huge number of news consumers who are content to graze outside Murdoch’s walled gardens. But there may be just enough who are content to be led around by the nose to make The Daily a success.
As I read this editorial I was reminded of the book “Inside Project Red Stripe” by Andrew Carey — the story of how six of The Economist’s cleverest people tried to create the “next big thing” online and essentially failed, after investing six months in idea exploration. Clearly, the odds of a successful outcome are not in Mr. Murdoch’s favor.
David H. Deans
Digital Lifescapes
Cloud gaming service OnLive coming to the TV
OnLive, the closely-watched startup that is aiming to change the way people buy and play video games, officially launched last June. But the company says that was a mere warmup for the main event, which begins in a few weeks.
OnLive emerged from years of stealth development in 2009 with a somewhat audacious plan to offer so-called “cloud gaming”: instant, on-demand and lag-free access to video games stored remotely on servers in data centers.
The service started last June but was only accessible through a PC. But starting Thursday, OnLive began taking orders for its $99 “microconsole,” which connects easily to a TV and which will be delivered starting Dec. 2. Using the console, users can access a catalog of games that will grow to 50 by the end of the year, including big-name titles such as “Borderlands” and “NBA 2K11″
OnLive poses a threat to traditional home consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3, but only if it works as advertised and there are no stutters or hiccups in the game stream.
OnLive Chief Executive Steve Perlman said the carefully managed launch for PCs last June was to ensure that the company’s network could indeed handle the demand. But he said PC gaming only represents around 10 percent of the market, and that TVs are where the real action is. He won’t divulge OnLive’s user base, but said it has already hosted more than than 2 million game sessions.
“We’re up against quite a bit of skepticism, so we knew that if we made any misstep at all people would dismiss us out of hand,” Perlman said. “PC gaming was basically a test.”
The company is launching a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, just in time for the holidays. Perlman said his expectations for OnLive — whose investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications and The Belgacom Group — are “much higher” than last summer.
