Tim Conneally

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that 131-year old photography and imaging technology company Eastman Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after more than four straight years of unprofitability.

Last September, Eastman Kodak began restructuring under law firm Jones Day, and in November sold off its Image Sensor Solutions business to private equity firm Platinum Equity for an undisclosed sum.

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Just six months after debuting its tiny 3" x 3" x 1" Roku 2 streaming set top box, over-the-top video company Roku on Wednesday announced it had gone even smaller, and put its entire streaming set top box into a package the size of a USB stick which connects to a TV's HDMI port and communicates using the new Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) interface standard.

The Roku Streaming Stick, as it is called, will require no separate power supply, and will be controlled by the television's own remote control. Televisions that support MHL will be able to integrate Roku's streaming TV platform simply by plugging in the stick. With the stick docked, it will be just like having the Roku set-top box: it adds the Roku interface (and the 400+ channels it offers), Wi-Fi connectivity, and local storage to the TV it is used on.

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I usually come into the Consumer Electronics Show every year expecting a few things, being disappointed by the lack of a few things, and being surprised by a few things I didn't expect. Here's the list of what I'm hoping to see this year.

As these things happen or fail to happen at CES 2012, I'll chalk them up as victories or defeats, and you'll hopefully get an overall feeling for the amount of heartburn I'll have when I head back here to the East Coast at the end of the week.

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One month after Canadian smartphone pioneer Research in Motion took a $485 million charge against its unsold inventory of PlayBook tablets, the company has cut the price of all its PlayBook models to just $299.

This means the version with 16GB of storage costs the same as the one with 64GB, a pricing decision likely made to force the sale of the highest-capacity models first.

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Last Friday, Microsoft published its year-end Internet Explorer statistics based on Net Applications usage tallies, and concluded that Internet Explorer 9 would have claim a 25 percent share of the Windows 7 browser market. This trend was illustrated by IE8 users upgrading to the new browser.

However, the final statistics from StatCounter and NetApplications for the month of December show that not all IE8 users are upgrading, and Internet Explorer (all versions) continues to drop as Google's Chrome browser continues to rise in large jumps across the world.

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Microsoft's Internet Explorer team announced on Friday that IE9 has passed both Firefox and Chrome in market share, and will soon be the number one browser among Windows 7 users according to data from Net Applications.

Though data from the month of December is not yet complete, the Internet Explorer team expects IE9 to close out the year with a quarter of the browser market as users upgrade from Internet Explorer 8.

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Care2.com, a site dedicated to environmental awareness, petitioning, and charitible donation with more than 17 million members has been hacked, according to a message from the company Friday morning.

The message to users on Friday was from Care2's Founder & President Randy Paynter. It said:

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Leading PC chipmaker Intel announced this week that its third generation Atom mobile processor, formerly code-named "Cedar Trail" is now available, and that systems using the platform will be available in early 2012.

Though Intel is concentrating on "ultrabooks" (i.e. thin and light notebooks with at least a 10" screen) as the latest growth platform for PCs, the company is not letting netbooks disappear just yet; and these Atom chips are smaller and less power consumptive.

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Leading online retailer Amazon.com has never been forthcoming with exact sales figures for its Kindle e-reader platform. Instead, the company uses ambiguities like "the current generation Kindle is selling twice as many units as the previous generation," or that the current generation is the fastest-selling model yet.

For the first time, Amazon has given a more concrete idea about how many Kindles are selling. In a roundup of its 2011 holiday season sales, the company said it was selling "well over" one million Kindle devices per week in the month of December, and that the best-selling, most gifted, and most wish-listed product across all of Amazon's product listings is the low-cost Kindle Fire tablet.

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This week, an estimated 8,000 employees at LG Display's Nanjing, China production facility went on strike due to inequality in year-end bonus compensation. The protesters, all Chinese employees, complained that their bonuses were one-sixth the size of those received by South Korean workers.

The strike began on Monday with an employee walk out. According to China Labor Watch, employees in LG Display's number four facility walked out, and were then followed by employees in all four facilities, bringing production to a halt on a number of lines.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday approved the first database of all the unused wireless frequencies known as "white spaces" in the United States and has given the green light to the first hardware that will use them.

White space, or the wireless spectrum that was freed from the transition from analog to digital television, would be available to use without requiring a wireless license, similar to the way wi-fi works today. The problem, of course, is that the wireless frequencies that fall in this white space varies from market to market. This is why the database was required.

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Open-source software engineering group Linaro has pushed out a build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich for low-cost development boards from Samsung and ST-Ericsson. The build supports hardware acceleration for Systems on a Chip utililzing ARM's Mali-400 graphics processor.

Linaro is a year-old nonprofit group that focuses on optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture; and besides ARM, its due-paying members include Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments. It creates ARM hardware-optimized middleware upon which developers and OEMs can build their own Android or Ubuntu distributions.

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Apple's iPad leads the tablet market. It's a fact supported by extensive market research, and you'd have to split hairs to try to refute it.

However, the tablet market has matured and segmented over the last two years, and data continues to roll in showing that Amazon has effectively capitalized on that segmentation with the Kindle Fire.

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Microsoft on Monday quietly released an iPad-specific version of Office OneNote, the note-taking application in Microsoft's Office suite.

At CES last year, Microsoft's OneNote team admitted that few people were using OneNote even though it had been part of Office for the better part of a decade. As an application class that lent itself nicely to mobile use (evinced by Evernote) its utility on a PC was less than obvious.

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Microsoft has released the complete version of Silverlight 5, the company's latest version of its rich Web application framework. This update was first revealed nearly one year ago at Microsoft's Firestarter developer event.

Microsoft pushed out the final release on Friday, just about four months after the first release candidate, and included with it the ninth version of the Silverlight Toolkit.

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