Analyst: LG Should Enjoy Its 'Prada' Premium While It Lasts
In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, James McQuivey, professor of mass communication at Boston University and a former Forrester Research vice president, expressed skepticism that premium branding such as the Prada brand being attached to LG's top-of-the-line wireless phone, can be used as a profit driver for the company in the long term.
Earlier in the day, Prof. McQuivey released a statement to reporters admitting that fashion-conscious consumers will be interested in investing in Prada and similar brands this year, perhaps because the phone will be cheaper than some of the handbags they'll end up being carried in. But as he later warned, "CE makers want it because it's the last good way for manufacturers to charge consumers a premium."
AMD: Setbacks in Intel Case Not Significant
In a response to our story on Intel's antitrust battle heating up in Europe, AMD spokesperson Michael Silverman offered BetaNews his company's opinion on whether the hopes for its judicial case in the US against Intel were dashed with District Judge Joseph Farnan's partial dismissal decision last September.
Specifically, Silverman took issue with our having stated that Judge Farnan threw out much of AMD's case. "I've got to take issue with that one," Silverman began.
Google on the Future of Online Video
In an extremely revealing interview published this morning by The Hollywood Reporter, Google's vice president for content partnerships, David Eun, conceded to reporter Andrew Wallenstein that his company is just as mystified as the rest of the world with regard to the evolution of online media.
Despite his company having agreed to spend over one and three quarter billion dollars to acquire YouTube, Eun notes that analysts have not been able to come to a consensus over the size and breadth of the online video marketplace.
LG's 'Prada' Re-branding Enables Apple iPhone Comparisons
In a clever exercise of timely re-branding, LG unveiled a new front-end for its touch-screen KE850 handset, which already won a design award in December. Now, a special edition of the device that will bear the "Prada" brand solo is being touted as LG's "answer" to the Apple iPhone, even though the LG phone may actually have been among a few to force Apple's hand.
Though there may be a price to pay for being characterized as the first "me-too" device in its class, the Prada Phone makes over the steel-blue "desktop" background originally planned for the KE850, according to pictures, with a charcoal grey screen whose buttons are touch-sensitive.
Intel Prepares to Fight Two-front Antitrust Battle
With members of the European Commission asking EU Commissioner for Competitiveness Neelie Kroes to begin formal antitrust charges against Intel, the company finds itself preparing to cooperate on the investigative front while, at the same time, maintaining a hard line on the judicial front.
The judicial case brought against Intel last year by AMD now centers on whether Intel, by allegedly making exclusivity deals with German resellers, drove down demand for AMD processors so much that the Texas-based CPU company was forced to cancel plans to build fabrication facilities in the US that could serve both US and European customers. Much of AMD's case was thrown out, but a federal district court judge is now interested in hearing AMD at least attempt to substantiate the remainder of its case.
Microsoft Software to Power Nortel Telecom Servers
It may have been one of the longest skits ever to be delivered from the legendary studios of Saturday Night Live -- NBC Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza -- before actually coming to the punch line. But eventually Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, along with the president/CEO of telecom server provider Nortel, Mike Zafirovski, announced the next phase of their collaboration, which began officially in June of last year.
Their mission is to integrate Windows, Office, Exchange, and Visual Studio -- all four pillars of Microsoft -- into the next round of Nortel server hardware on Intel platforms. The smaller Nortel Communications Server 1000 will be integrated with the new Unified Messaging edition of Exchange Server, for delivery in the second quarter of this year; more high-end models with multimedia conferencing capabilities on-board will be delivered in the fourth quarter.
Toshiba Unsure Whether 51 GB HD DVD Works in Existing Players
A spokesperson for Toshiba of America told BetaNews late yesterday that the company is still researching whether a new, three-layer HD DVD disc format it may propose -- the existence of which was carefully leaked at last week's CES -- will work in the first generation on HD DVD players, including its own.
"Since the disc is not standardized yet," the spokesperson told BetaNews, "we are researching whether it is applicable to the current HD DVD players."
Intel's 2007: Lower Revenues, Cost Cuts
Intel has spent the better part of its history in restructuring - in fact, long-time employees have learned to live with it as part of the evolutionary course of business. But now, CEO Paul Otellini and company have a new challenge ahead of them in fiscal 2007: completing this latest round of restructuring so Intel can, at last, redefine "normalcy."
The company plans to do this while, at the same time, rolling out the first of its 45 nm processor parts - the replacements to the revolutionary Core 2 Duo CPUs it introduced to the world just last July.
Seagate to Release First 15k RPM 2.5-inch HDDs
This afternoon, Seagate Technology made an unexpected announcement coming so soon after the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas – a tag-along with CES. The company’s second wave of Savvio hard drives in the 2.5" form factor will be revved up from 10,000 to 15,000 revolutions per minute.
But as an indication that such revolutionary speed, literally speaking, may not yet be cool enough for notebooks where the company’s Momentus product line revs up to 7200 rpm, the 15K series is being billed for use in RAID storage batteries for the enterprise. There, Seagate says the new Savvios will run cooler than a typical datacenter installation, drawing 40% less power per drive while consuming about a third of the rack space.
Sony: One Million PS3s Shipped - Not Yet Sold - in Japan
This afternoon, Sony confirmed to BetaNews that the company has shipped its one millionth PlayStation 3 console to Japanese retailers. The statement from the Japanese division of the company (SCEI) is much more straightforward than a similar one made last week by the American division (SCEA), though both are trying to make up for what some analysts perceive as a massive sales gap for PS3s on both continents.
This morning's statement from SCEI is careful to use the term "shipments" to refer to units that have left the factory floor. A New York Times report last week cites data from the Enterbrain division of Japanese research firm Famitsu Marketing as estimating only 534,336 were sold to Japanese consumers in the period between November 11 and January 7.
Why PCI Express 2.0 Could Drive Down OEM Costs
Yesterday, with a minimum of fanfare, the member organizations of the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) ratified its 2.0 draft for the PCI Express bus standard. On the surface, it seems the vote marks a victory for speed, with the interconnection rate on the bus doubling to 5 billion transfers per second. But just that fact alone could trigger a generational shift in motherboards, the end result of which could be tremendously reduced costs, and more rapid "mainstreaming" of current top-of-the-line features.
Understanding why this could be so takes you on a virtual road trip through the global information economy.
'The Burning Crusade' Attacks at Midnight
At a wisp past the stroke of twelve tonight, in boroughs scattered like seeds throughout the realm where humans and beasts alike share free parking, shopkeepers and merchants will unlock their gates and conduct business under the moonlight. "The Burning Crusade" will at last begin, and players of the ingenious and massively successful role-playing game will have their first chance to finally, after years of torment, upgrade their "60" characters to "70s."
All right, so I'm a little rusty with my gothic literary motifs. In any event, at three Fry's Electronics locations in Sunnyvale, Fountain Valley, and Anaheim, and at the GameStop location in Universal City, developers of the most anticipated expansion package in the history of multi-player games will be on hand late tonight to sign the first copies of "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade."
Can AOL Video Make User-Generated Content Viable?
During BetaNews' CES coverage this week, we examined the integration of AOL Video accessibility into Sony's high-end Bravia video components, particularly through the Bravia Internet Video Link. AOL Video has scrambled in a very short period of time to embrace the burgeoning world of user-generated content, which recently earned its own media industry abbreviation: UGC.
In our segment on Bravia, I asked our Senior CES Analyst, Sharon Fisher, how long such an interface between Bravia and AOL Video could last, particularly in light of the fact that the service was working to make a living for itself from distributing what I called "people's low-definition, amateur backyard animal videos." Later, in providing an example, I used the metaphor "possums chasing squirrels," which I admit to having used several times before, sometimes in ordinary conversation.
Sony Says 687,300 PS3s Sold Meets 1M Goal
In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Sony Computer Entertainment of America said that NPD Group estimates of 687,300 PlayStation 3 consoles sold in the US - a figure which Sony did not deny - effectively meets the company's most recently stated sales goal of one million units in North America.
"As we announced on January 8, 2007, we met our previously stated goal of 1M units in North America by December 31, 2006," the spokesperson told BetaNews. The spokesperson goes on to point out that NPD Group's numbers fail to take into account units sold in Canada (which Sony estimates at 90,000), units sold in the final week of the year (whose sales figures Sony estimates to be 170,000) [CORRECTION: By "last week," we've now ascertained that Sony meant "the last week of the year 2006," not "this past week"], plus an estimated "units at retail that are in transit or on their way to from the warehouse to the store" (approximately 100,000 units).
No Longer Cingular, The Transition Begins to AT&T
Proving that Apple will indeed have to change at least one name on its iPhone advertising in the immediate future, Cingular announced today what many analysts had expected: The company waited until after CES to begin changing its division name to AT&T.
In a press release this morning, the newly merged entity stated that, in coming weeks, television advertising will feature Cingular's "Jack" logo doing such gracious things as writing the AT&T globe logo in the sky, and directing a troupe of harvesting tools as they cut the globe logo into a wheat field, next to Cingular's subsidiary "five bars" logo. AT&T's new slogan for now, for its wireless division, will be "Raising It Higher" - the "it," in this case, referring to "The Bar," which was prominent in former Cingular ads.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.