PlayStation attempts fashion makeover, hires a Kardashian
“Where’s your ‘half tuck?” America’s Next Top Model star Jay Manuel asked Kourtney Kardashian in New York City’s Herald Square.
He was asking because Sony hired the pair to show off the style of a shirt that’s not fully tucked in, a look popularized by the video game hero Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series, an Indian Jones-like adventure shooter game.
Kourtney, who is Kim Kardashian’s older sister and one of the stars of “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” wore some kind of leopard jumper. But along with Manuel, she plucked random guys off the street to give them Nathan Drake makeovers.
Sony’s video game division has been going after the fashion set pretty hard during New York’s fashion week. First, on Saturday, it sponsored designer Alexander Wang’s runway show and after-party. Then on Monday, it hosted a video game event for press that promoted its new games with manicures, messages and hair feathers.
But is a fashion tie-in really the wisest way for Sony to sell copies of the Uncharted 3 game that will hit stores on Nov 1? The bulk of its sales will be to young males who do most of their shopping at GameStop.
“Uncharted is one of those video game franchises which appeals to gamers outside of our core fan base,” said Sony’s Jill Webber. “Even people who are into fashion, why can’t they love video games too?
Ben Lyons, the E Network’s movie expert, who was mulling around outside the Uncharted trailer, said the time has come for a movie based on the Uncharted franchise. Rumors have been swirling for years about that one is in the works.
Sony: Our tablets are coming… eventually
Sony teased out a few more details about its new Android tablets — codenamed S1 and S2 — and let reporters briefly handle prototypes.
AT&T will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the S2, a double-screened device that bears a close resemblance to Nintendo’s DS handheld gaming device. Sony showed off how users could turn it into a book.
Executives stressed that the tablets can connect to other Sony products, such as Blu-Ray players, TVs and PlayStation content, something Apple can’t offer. Like the Sony Ericsson Experia Play AKA, “the PlayStation phone,” the Adobe-Flash enabled tablets will come pre-loaded with the retro game“Crash Bandicoot”.
Sony once again vowed to take the No. 2 tablet spot behind Apple despite still not revealing when its new tablets would come out or how much they would cost. That news could be more than a month away but the tablets should be released this year, the company said.
Why would a customer choose a Sony tablet over an iPad? Phil Molyneux, Sony Electronics president and COO, said customers looking for a faster, smaller device that can fit in your pocket will turn to Sony’s dual-screen S2 tablet.
“You can’t do that with other devices unless you have bigger pockets,” he said.
Tech wrap: RIM’s Playbook recall
Research in Motion shares neared a two-year low after the BlackBerry maker said it has recalled about 1,000 of its Playbook tablets due to an operating system bug. Most of the devices affected remain in the distribution channel and haven’t yet been sold to customers, the Canadian company said in a statement posted on CrackBerry.com.
RIM said it will replace faulty tablets and prompted customers who had received one to contact the company for help. Engadget, the technology blog that first broke the news over the weekend, has compiled a spreadsheet of the 935 alleged serial numbers affected by the recall.
Sony began restoring access to its PlayStation Network games service over the weekend, nearly a month after it was shut down due to a massive security breach that exposed personal details of 100 million users. The Japanese electronics and entertainment company apologized to customers for the service disruption and said it had implemented a new early warning system that would help prevent similar attacks in the future. Sony will phase in service on a country by country basis with the aim of having the process completed by May 31.
AT&T plans to launch a wireless security service for consumers next year that will help combat a big spike in cyber attacks on mobile devices, said John Stankey, the company’s head of enterprise business, in an interview ahead of the Reuters Technology and Telecommunications Summit. Stankey said customers’ current reluctance to pay for such services will likely change as they become more aware of security threats that arise from using smartphones to download Web-based applications.
Barnes & Noble marked a milestone on Monday as it announced that 1 million applications had been downloaded from its Nook Color marketplace after its first week of business. Angry Birds topped the list as the most popular paid application, with Solitaire, Drawing Pad, Aces Jewel Hunt and Astraware rounding out the top five on the list.
Sony not out of the woods
Sony cranked up its video game networks over the weekend starting with the Americas after an unprecedented breach led to the theft of personal information from more than 100 million user accounts. But experts continued to criticize the Japanese electronics giant for failing to plug other potential holes in its vast global network.
Using little more than a web browser, a search engine and a basic understanding of security systems, one researcher found more than five entryways into Sony’s systems in the United States and elsewhere shortly after the story went to press. ”"Sony still has several external security issues that need to be addressed,” John Bumgarner, chief technology officer for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, tells Reuters’ Jim Finkle.
Bloomberg weighed in on Monday to lay out how hackers of Sony’s networks and others have Amazon.com’s cloud computing services to launch attacks, citing unnamed sources.
Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s No. 2, has played a prominent role in dealing with the crisis. Whether Sony recovers from the drubbing to its brand will decide if he takes his place as leader of the company.
We’ll have some tips for Hirai later this week at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York and Paris, where we plan to ask a broad range of tech chiefs how they would fix the one-time mighty electronics giant.
Tech wrap: Facebook smear campaign blows up
Facebook admitted to hiring PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant negative stories about Google, The Daily Beast reported. Burson urged journalists to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy and offered to help privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian write an op-ed on the matter for national newspapers. The plot backfired when Soghoian rejected Burson’s offer and posted online an email exchange between them.
Facebook adopted a warning service to help users avoid clicking on dubious Internet links. The new warning service by Finnish startup Web of Trust calculates the reputation of 31 million Web pages and updates the ratings twice an hour, based on feedback from some 20 million users.
The recent hacker attack at Sony and other corporate data breaches are attracting more class-action lawyers eager to score a payday, though huge monetary settlements may be elusive, writes Dan Levine. At least 25 lawsuits have been filed against Sony in U.S. federal courts over the theft of user data from the PlayStation game network, according to Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters legal database. The challenge for plaintiffs’ lawyers lies in establishing a loss of value or additional costs suffered because of a hack, Levine adds.
NTT DoCoMo and Twitter will jointly develop a location-based alerting service for smartphone users based on tweets, the Nikkei business daily said. The deal will be announced on Friday and the services are expected to be launched this winter. Twitter will remove data that could identify users, before using the stored tweets for the service, the business daily said.
AT&T promised to give Deutsche Telekom $6 billion in assets, services and cash as a break-up fee if U.S. regulators reject its proposed $39 billion buy of the German company’s T-Mobile USA, sources said.
Microsoft’s legal battle, once a distraction to its top executives when they could have been at their most creative, ended as court oversight of Microsoft expired with little or no fanfare, writes Diane Bartz. And now that it is schooled in antitrust law, Microsoft wants Google to be regulators’ next focus, Bartz adds.
Tech wrap: Google unveils Chromebook
Google took the wraps off two Chromebook laptop PCs after nearly two years of delays and touts of its Chrome operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Samsung and Acer laptops using Chrome OS will go on sale June 15, as the world’s No. 1 Internet search engine tries to entice people to do more on the Web. As with Android, Chrome software will be free, but is expected to spur people to use the Internet more often and search for more things, potentially boosting Google’s Internet ads business.
Despite recent indications that Google is priming Chrome for use in tablets, Google says that it is “fully focused on notebooks” for the foreseeable future, writes Mashable’s Ben Parr.
Facebook users’ personal information could have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past few years, Symantec said in its official blog. Third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages, the security software maker said. Facebook had taken steps to resolve the issue, the blog post said.
A security measure that Sony installed made the PlayStation website unavailable in Japan, the company said in a statement. A Bloomberg report had said the site was down because of a hacker attack.
Visa is working with several large U.S. and international banks to develop a digital wallet that people can use to pay for things online or with their phones. Its partners include US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial, BB&T, Toronto Dominion’s TD Bank and the U.S. arm of Barclays. The digital wallet will store the banks’ customers’ credit and debit card account information, both for Visa cards and other cards. People can use the wallet to pay for things online or in stores, Visa said.
Two Swedes were jailed for life in the Philippines for violating human trafficking laws by running a live Internet porn operation in a city that catered to foreigners. Law enforcement agencies say cybersex is a growing industry in many parts of the world, including in the Philippines, where there is perceived to be a low risk of arrest and high returns.
Tech wrap: Microsoft’s Skype deal roasted
Microsoft’s move to buy money-losing Internet phone service Skype for $8.5 billion was immediately skewered by critics and investors, who questioned the logic of the deal and suggested the software giant is paying far too much. The price is about double the expected value of Skype if it had gone ahead with its planned IPO.
“They really have to do some explaining as to how this company merited that price and how they’ll return the value to shareholders,” said Kim Caughey Forrest, at Fort Pitt Capital Group, which holds Microsoft shares.
The deal was a fresh reminder that Microsoft has no record of making acquisitions pay off. Its 2007 deal to buy online ad firm aQuantive for $6 billion was a flat-out failure, writes Bill Rigby.
Google launched “Music Beta by Google”, an online music locker service on that allows users to store and access their songs wherever they are, similar to one launched by Amazon.com in March. And like the Amazon Cloud Drive player, the Google music service is being introduced without any prior licensing deals with major music labels, following months of fruitless negotiations.
Sony said it would take at least “a few more days” to restore service to its online PlayStation Network, which was breached by hackers in one of the largest Internet break-ins of all time.
Lawmakers considering new privacy laws scolded Google and Apple for not doing enough to guard mobile device users’ location data, despite executives’ assertions that they do not abuse the information. “I have serious doubts about whether those rights are being respected in law or in practice,” Democratic Senator Al Franken said at a hearing of a new subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law.
Tech wrap: Sony CEO says sorry to gamers
Sony CEO Howard Stringer broke his silence on the biggest Internet security break-in ever, apologizing to users of the PlayStation Network and other online services. Stringer did not specify when services would resume.
One analyst said security concerns could weigh on sales of Sony’s gadgets and hurt growth prospects for its network services. “The network business itself still only makes a small direct contribution to earnings, but we see a potential drop in hardware sales as a concern,” analyst Kota Ezawa at Citigroup Global Markets Japan, wrote in a note ahead of the comments from Stringer.
But Peter Walshe at brands research agency Millward Brown said the main Sony brand should bounce back, although PlayStation specifically might suffer. “People may shout: ‘I’m never going to buy Sony again,’ but in our experience that doesn’t tend to happen.”
The attack on Sony, as well as a massive outage at Amazon.com’s cloud computing center, have caused some businesses to put the brakes on plans to move their operations into the cloud, writes Jim Finkle. Experts in digital security say that investors, businesses and consumers have put too much faith in the cloud, Finkle adds.
Intel’s latest manufacturing breakthrough sends a clear warning to rival ARM Holdings not to get too complacent with its overwhelming lead in the red-hot mobile arena, writes Noel Randewich. Intel’s new “Tri-Gate” technology flips flat chip design on its side — thereby making it “3D” — an approach considered but not yet implemented by Intel rivals like Samsung, GlobalFoundries, and Taiwan’s TSMC. However, ARM’s chips are the industry standard for Apple’s mobile gadgets and other devices running Google’s Android operating system, a trend Intel will find increasingly difficult to reverse as time goes on, Randewich adds.
The Wall Street Journal’s “SafeHouse”, its version of WikiLeaks, was criticized by security researchers who say the Journal has yet to learn a basic rule of digital whistleblowing: leaking sites aren’t meant to leak, writes Forbes’s Andy Greenberg. Within hours of launch of Safehouse on Thursday, the security community had pointed to flaws in the site’s protections for anonymous leakers and its policy for source protections that could give away the identities of would-be whistleblowers, adds Greenberg. A Journal spokesperson responded in a statement that SafeHouse is working to fix one of the flaws over the weekend, and had been updated to use only more secure types of encryption.
Tech wrap: Facebook, Google mull Skype tie-ups
Facebook and Google are separately considering a tie-up with Skype after the Web video conferencing service delayed its initial public offering, two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions told Reuters. A Skype deal could be valued at $3 billion to $4 billion, the first source said. The discussions are in early stages, and it is not clear which option the companies favor, the first two sources said.
The Internet vigilante group Anonymous denied responsibility for a cyber-attack on Sony’s networks that exposed the personal data of more than 100 million video gamers. “Let’s be clear, we are legion, but it wasn’t us. You are incompetent Sony,” the group Anonymous said on its blog on Thursday.
Sony said the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, the first PlayStation phone, is not affected by the massive data breach of PlayStation user accounts.
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Apple released a software update to fix a problem that enabled its mobile devices to collect and store customers’ location data, making good on a promise it made last week. The update, which is available through its iTunes stores and automatically pops up when an iPhone or iPad is synced, said it “contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache.”
Wal-Mart said that it would start selling Amazon’s Kindle at 3,100 of its U.S. stores this week, as Amazon continues to bring the electronic reader into more shops to attract potential buyers.
Tech wrap: Sony says Anonymous set stage for breach
Sony said that its video game network was breached at the same time it was defending itself against a major denial of service attack by the well-known Internet vigilante group Anonymous. The group attacked the two credit card companies with “denial of service” attacks in December that overwhelmed their servers for blocking payments to WikiLeaks. The company also said it waited two days after discovering data was stolen from its PlayStation game network before contacting law enforcement and didn’t meet with FBI officials until five days later. The theft prompted the Justice Department to open an investigation, officials said on Wednesday.
Intel took the wraps off next-generation technology that crams more transistors onto microchips, hoping it will help the chipmaker catch up in a red-hot tablet and smartphone market. Intel expects to start production of its first PC and server chips using new technology — code named Ivy Bridge — by the end of 2011 and said that it would also make new processors for mobile devices.
Shares of Renren, China’s largest social networking company, surged more than 50 percent in its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in the latest sign investors are eager to snap up stock in social media companies.
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China announced a new State Internet Information Office to unify the squabbling agencies that oversee the Chinese Internet, which Beijing views as both a potential gold mine and a political threat.
Google’s Android platform rose to a dominant position in the smartphone market in the first quarter, research firm Canalys said, increasing its lead over struggling Nokia. While Google’s software platform increased its market share to 35 percent from less than 10 percent just a year earlier, Nokia’s Symbian saw its market share dropping to 26 percent from 45 percent. Canalys said the market for more advanced cellphones grew 83 percent from a year ago in the January-to-March quarter to 101 million phones.
