Sony’s case of iPad 3 launch envy
Sony, in a bout of bad timing, is hosting an event on March 7 in San Francisco for tech reporters at the same time as Apple’s reported iPad 3 unveiling and the Japanese conglomerate wants to make sure it won’t get ditched.
Sony, which some people consider to be the “Apple of the ’80s”, sent out a helpful e-mail on Tuesday informing invited members of the press of the scheduling conflict without mentioning the world’s most valuable tech company.
Another press event invitation went out today which conflicts with the Sony roundtable on March 7. Please confirm if you are still available to join the Sony event.
The Sony event is a breakfast with Sony Electronics president and chief operating officer Phil Molyneux. He helped spearhead Sony’s tablet launch last year, the “S” and the “P”, which are among the many tablets chasing the iPad.
Sony isn’t the first Japanese company to get overshadowed by an iPad launch. Last year, the iPad 2 was revealed at the same time Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was speaking across the street at the Game Developers Conference.
Cage, Witherspoon feature in box-office battle
Three new movies compete for filmgoers over the long President’s Day weekend in the United States. Nicolas Cage is expected to lead the pack of newcomers with Sony’s 3D action sequel “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.”
Box-office watchers project Friday-through-Monday sales in the United States and Canada could roar to $30 million for the follow-up to the original “Ghost Rider,” released over the same weekend in 2007.
Reese Witherspoon also battles for audiences with 20th Century Fox romantic comedy “This Means War.” Fox sees the story about two CIA agents (Tom Hardy and Chris Pine) trying to win over the same woman bringing in around $14 million over four days. Outside forecasters say it could go a few million higher. The movie pulled in about $1.7 million from Valentine’s Day showings.
The weekend’s other new film is Disney’s animated “The Secret World of Arrietty”, about a tiny family that lives under the floorboards of a country home. “Arrietty” is expected to debut with less than $10 million over four days, box-office forecasters said.
Holdovers from last weekend will also fight for top spots. They include love story “The Vow,” Denzel Washington action movie “Safe House” and family film “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.”
Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures
More vampires and werewolves at your local cineplex
Impatient Twilight fans rejoice: vampires and werewolves are staging another movie-theater invasion.
This time, it’s the fourth movie in the “Underworld” series starring Kate Beckinsale, which distributor Sony projects will ring up U.S. and Canadian ticket sales in the low-$20 million range from Friday through Sunday. The newest installment, “Underworld: Awakening”, sees humans trying to drive vampires and werewolves to extinction.
“Red Tails,” a George Lucas-produced story about Tuskegee Airmen starring Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr., also reaches theaters. Twentieth Century Fox is releasing the movie and hoping for opening-weekend sales of in the $8 million to $10 million range.
Also this weekend, Relativity Media debuts “Haywire,” a spy thriller starring mixed-martial arts fighter Gina Carano. The studio projects domestic sales reaching about $8 million for the weekend.
Elsewhere, a couple of movies that picked up Golden Globes on Sunday will move into more theaters. Silent film “The Artist” won three Globes including best musical or comedy, while “The Iron Lady” scored best actress for Meryl Streep in her role as Margaret Thatcher.
Familiar script: Home entertainment spending slips
Spending on home viewing of movies and television, on a downward spiral in recent years, fell again in 2011 as sales of DVDs and rentals at video stores dropped.
Total U.S. consumer dollars spent on home entertainment — including DVDs, video on demand and online streaming — declined 2.1 percent to $18 billion for the year, according to industry group DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group. Consumers continued to shift to lower-priced rentals from companies such as Netflix and Coinstar’s Redbox kiosks, eschewing outright ownership.
The DEG pointed to bright spots, including a 20 percent jump in sales of high-definition Blu-ray discs that topped $2 billion for the first time. “The industry’s performance clearly stabilized in 2011,” it said in a statement. (The top choices for the year? “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1,” followed by “Part 2″ at No. 2)
Meanwhile, Hollywood is trying to reinvigorate interest in movie ownership with a cloud-based digital locker called Ultraviolet that allows viewing anytime from Internet-connected devices. The consortium that runs Ultraviolet, in an announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said movie studios will offer hundreds of titles with the Ultraviolet option this year, up from a paltry, initial 19.
More than 750,000 households have registered with UltraViolet to create digital libraries since last fall’s launch, Mark Teitell, general manager of the Ultraviolet consortium, said in an interview. Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Tech wrap: Samsung savors smartphone supremacy
Samsung Electronics, the world’s top maker of memory chips and smartphones, reported a record quarterly profit, aided by one-off gains and best-ever sales of high-end phones. The South Korean firm posted 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in quarterly operating profit, beating a consensus forecast of 4.7 trillion won by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Samsung, which surged past Apple as the world’s top smartphone maker in the third quarter, only entered the smartphone market in earnest in 2010, but its handset division is now its biggest earnings generator.
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC recorded a worse-than-expected yearly profit decline in the fourth quarter, and the first decline in two years. The former investor darling shocked markets in November by slashing its fourth-quarter revenue guidance, sending its shares down 28 percent in two weeks and 15 percent to date. Investor concerns linger over whether HTC still has the innovative streak that catapulted it from an obscure contract maker to a top brand.
Sony will promote its consumer business chief Kazuo Hirai to the role of president as early as April, taking the title away from Howard Stringer, who is expected to remain chairman and CEO, the Nikkei newspaper reported. Such a move would give Hirai, 51, who made his name in Sony’s PlayStation video game division, more influence over the whole company and its wide range of technology and entertainment businesses, likely cementing expectations he would succeed the 69-year-old Stringer eventually.
Two weeks after disclosing that its website had been hacked, private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting warned subscribers that hackers were now circulating false emails offering the company’s services for free. Strategic Forecasting, also known as Stratfor, urged subscribers not to open attachments to the fraudulent emails, which offered subscribers the company’s premium content for free as compensation while it tried to secure its website. Stratfor CEO George Friedman said he deeply regretted any inconvenience caused by the latest incident and said the company was still working to reestablish its data systems and Web presence.
Israeli officials said they were concerned the country may be under cyber attack after a wave of credit card code thefts in the past week by a hacker who claims to be operating out of Saudi Arabia. Credit card company officials said 14,000 numbers had been posted on line Tuesday and another 11,000 Thursday. However, they said some of the codes had expired and that the active cards were all being cancelled.
Samsung takes the Sony media route with ex-AOL, ex-YouTube hire
Samsung, the South Korean consumer electronics giant, has spent most of the last two decades eating the lunch of rival Japanese electronics giant, Sony. While Sony has had struggled with all types of existential debates and attacks at home and abroad including, the global hacker attack of its online network, Samsung has gone from strength to strength in setting the electronics agenda with its cutting edge TVs, phones and tablets.
A lot of Samsung’s success could be put down to be its focus on the basics: making great mass market products and not getting distracted with creating or distributing content. By contrast, Sony not only owns the world’s second largest music company and a major Hollywood studio but also a video games business.
The problem is that Sony has never been able to figure out how to make all those things work in conjunction with its position as one of the world’s largest device makers. Most recently it has launched new online music and video services that it no doubt hopes will help sell more devices. It’s very early to tell if that will strategy will work.
Samsung is now going to try its hand at developing a media platform for content on its devices with the appointment of David Eun as executive vice president. Eun left AOL recently after one of its many restructurings. While there, he was president of AOL Media and Studios. Before that he was the guy charged with doing content deals at Google’s YouTube and before that he was at Time Warner and NBC.
As Samsung says:
He will play a key role in developing a global media strategy and driving new business opportunities to take advantage of Samsung`s growing number of digital televisions and displays, mobile phones, tablets and other connected devices.
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.”
Tech wrap: Net neutrality closer to reality
Democrats in the Senate blocked a Republican-backed resolution to disapprove of the FCC’s rules on net neutrality. The vote was 52-46 against the resolution. Adopted by a divided FCC last December, the rules forbid broadband providers from blocking legal content while leaving flexibility for providers to manage their networks. The rules still face a court challenge. Lawsuits by Verizon and others have been consolidated. Backers of net neutrality say big providers could otherwise use their gatekeeper role to discriminate against competitors. But Republicans said the rules were an unprecedented power grab by the FCC.
Sony CEO Howard Stringer vowed to stay on as head of the Japanese electronics conglomerate, dismissing reports the longtime helmsman will step down next year and adding that he remained keen on leading the once-dominant corporate powerhouse in its battle to reverse losses and fight rivals. Last week, Sony shocked investors by warning that the company would report a fourth consecutive year of losses and offered few details of its plan to halve losses in its television division, which itself is headed for its eighth consecutive annual loss.
Investigations into scandal-hit Olympus revealed an elaborate scheme for concealing losses on risky bets behind a facade of inflated bank deposits and securities holdings, The Nikkei reported. Sources say Olympus moved the impaired securities off its books — a trick known in Japanese as “tobashi” — to prevent the painful write-downs that would have followed the introduction of fair value accounting in fiscal 2000, Nikkei said. The third-party committee conducting the investigation said it will report its findings early next month. Olympus is waiting for these findings before it reports first-half earnings and issue second-quarter financial statements, the daily reported.
A first-grade teacher in New Jersey who described her students as “future criminals” on Facebook could be fired under a judge’s decision issued this week after parents complained her remarks were offensive. Administrative Law Judge Ellen Bass ruled that the Paterson teacher, Jennifer O’Brien, “demonstrated a complete lack of sensitivity to the world in which her students live” and recommended that she lose her tenured position. Paterson is a poor, urban New Jersey community with a high rate of violent crime, and school officials interpreted O’Brien’s comment as racially tinged, according to court documents.
Tech wrap: Sony suffers as TV picture dims
Sony warned of a fourth straight year of losses, with its television unit alone set to lose $2.2 billion on tumbling demand and a surging yen, sinking its U.S. shares and raising concerns about the viability of its high-profile TV business. Investors had expected Sony to reduce its profit forecast, but not flag a swing to massive losses.
The maker of Bravia TVs, Vaio computers and PlayStation game consoles cut its sales forecast for TVs, cameras and DVD players and said it may report a 90 billion yen ($1.1 billion) net loss for the current financial year, scrapping its earlier net profit estimate of 60 billion yen.Sony’s U.S. listed shares closed down nearly 6 percent.
A small Spanish tablet maker won a patent infringement battle with Apple in a rare victory against the tech giant in its global defense of markets for its iPads, a court document showed. Spain’s Nuevas Tecnologias y Energias Catala (NT-K) successfully appealed a 2010 injunction from a local court to ban the import of its tablet computer — manufactured in China — to Spain. NT-K, from the Valencia region of Spain, is demanding compensation from Apple for losses during the ban of its product and is suing the U.S. giant for alleged anticompetitive behavior.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be sent to Sweden from Britain to face questioning over alleged sex crimes, the British High Court ruled, rejecting his appeal against extradition. Assange now has two weeks to consider whether to make a final appeal to the Supreme Court. However, any recourse to Britain’s highest judicial body can only be made on a point of law considered by judges to be of general public interest, so permission to appeal must be obtained first from the High Court.
Google launched and then pulled a much-anticipated Gmail app for Apple iOS devices via Apple’s App Store. Initially launched to make access to Google’s email service faster and easier, the app was removed after it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t working, causing “users to see an error message when first opening the app,” Google said in a blog posting. No estimate was given for when the Gmail app would return to the App Store.
Yahoo unveiled a handful of products to try and bolster its mobile and social networking offerings, as the struggling Web company continues to evaluate its future. Among the new products unveiled were a multimedia newsstand for tablets dubbed Livestand, a weather application for Android mobile devices, and a new version of IntoNow, a social application related to television, for the iPad. Yahoo has long endured criticism for lacking a more comprehensive strategy for engaging Web users who are drifting away from PCs and spending more time on tablets and smartphones.
AOL’s third-quarter revenue dropped 6 percent because of its dwindling dial-up Internet access business though it beat analysts expectations and its stock rose more than 11 percent. “Investors have gotten used to disappointment from AOL especially in the forward outlook,” said Benchmark analyst Clayton Moran. “Mainly there are no negative surprises in this quarter… and the forward outlook seems to be more stable.” Prior to the rally, AOL shares were down more than 40 percent year to date.
Does Sony Ericsson fate provide Googorola clues?
While Google made no secret of the fact that it is buying Motorola Mobility for its patents, the remaining unanswered question is what it does with the handset business. Now that Sony is planning to take full ownership of its mobile joint venture with Ericsson, its behavior may provide some clues as to what “Googorola” should do.
The idea seems to be that Sony will make its smartphones work more closely with other devices such as game consoles, tablets, computers and TVs. Imagine watching a movie on the train home and then transferring it seamlessly to the big TV when you reach the living room? It’s a nice idea and coming closer to reality with the Sony Ericsson deal according to Evercore analyst Alkesh Shah
“I think there’s a major change happening in terms of how media and communications will be delivered to and from smartphones and to other devices in your home including your set-top boxes and TVs” said Shah.
If it follows Sony’s lead, it would make a lot of sense for Google to keep the mobile phone business and make Motorola phones work more tightly with Motorola set-top boxes, and of course tablets based on Google’s Android software, Shah said. “It may happen,” he said.
On the other hand Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton ‘s interpretation of the Sony news went in the opposite direction. The argument is that Google might want to sell Motorola’s handset business, which already depends on Android, in order to placate other Android phone hardware makers and convince them Motorola won’t get preferential treatment.
One potential buyer? Sony, reckons Thornton. Since Sony will have full control of the handset business for the first time, it might be in a good position to merge it with Motorola’s phone business, Thornton said.
“Having a JV acquire is very complex” he said. “If Sony really wants a presence in the Americas and in China (buying) Motorola makes sense rather than trying to do it organically. It comes down to what Google wants to do with the business.”
Nice story!