Citi Investment Research (formerly Smith Barney) looked at the near future of advertising and predicted yesterday that US advertising budgets will shrink by almost 2% by the end of this year, and as much as 4% next year.
Analysts from Citigroup said that decreased consumer spending, as well as budgetary and credit constraints placed upon businesses, will lead to an overall advertiser pullback in all media that could last until the fourth quarter of 2010.
The ad hoc volunteer election-monitoring effort undertaken on Twitter last week had problems with imprecise methodology and random trolls, so much so that one researcher calls the compiled data "a mess."
A three-page paper from Bob Conrad, a Nevada-based PR person, blogger and doctoral student, looks at last Tuesday's Twitter Vote Report -- a volunteer effort to give voters a place to describe what was happening at the polls on election day. The project allowed observers to send reports in via Twitter, text or phone, with special apps available for the iPhone and Android.
Download Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Emulator Images for Visual Studio 2008 from FileForum now.
What will customers with Windows Mobile phones be doing with your application, and how will they perceive your Web site, with the upcoming 6.1.4 release? The latest round of emulator images can answer those questions.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - ISP and consumer VoiP specialist Ooma will soon start selling its phone system in Best Buy stores and other retail outlets, while also bringing out a new model named Telo which adds cordless phones to the "free calling" mix.
Under Ooma's current plan, a consumer pays $249.99 for an Ooma phone system, and all calling inside the US is then "free for life," according to Matthew Podboy, who heads up affiliated company Voce Communications.
On Monday, November 17, One Laptop Per Child's 2008 holiday "Give One, Get One" XO program will begin. This year, ordering and shipping are organized by Amazon.com.
In September Amazon announced it would be handling the second annual One Laptop Per Child "Give one, get one" holiday program where customers buy an OLPC XO to donate to a developing country and get their own in return.
With Europe, North America, and Japan facing some of the worst economic conditions in decades, manufacturers are looking to China and Southeast Asia for shelter. Now, a connectivity provider says it has a plan.
With PC manufacturers looking to emerging markets around the world to help them through a slumping global economic situation, we've learned this morning that they're about to find themselves with unexpected company: Qualcomm, which licenses connectivity technologies such as CDMA and HSDPA for phone and handset manufacturers, announced this morning it has come up with a reference design for what it's calling an "alternative PC," that it has already licensed to one Southeast Asian manufacturer, Inventec.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - At a pre-CES press event in New York City last night, Samsung previewed two new flat screen technologies, one suited to both ultra large TVs and 100-foot-wide billboards and the other to outdoor viewing in broad daylight.
At CES in January, Samsung plans to show new innovations in flat screen technologies, including one type of panel geared to LCD displays of up to 100 feet -- as opposed to today's limit of about 100 inches -- and another variety of panel touted as "the brightest in the world to be mass produced."
Sony Ericsson today announced the "Black Friday" US launch date of its new Xperia X1 Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, which is good news for consumers who had been led to believe the manufacturer would skip America first.
When Sony Ericsson announced availability of the X1 in September, the company gave it a fourth quarter 2008 launch date for a number of markets, but omitted the United States.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - The CEA, producers of the long running CES show in Las Vegas, also plans to host two conferences in New York City next year: Greener Gadgets and the second edition of Digital Downtown.
From June 10 to June 12, 2009, the industry group will reprise Digital Downtown, a show that made its first appearance last year, said CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro, speaking to journalists at a pre-CES event in Manhattan yesterday.
Starbucks' wretched earnings report this week may unnerve fans of coffee and out-of-office Wi-Fi, but now there's evidence that keeping customers hooked for free is smart business practice that could get them over this little depression.
Take Seattle. Seattle knows coffee. Seattle knows Starbucks -- they've got hundreds, not to mention corporate HQ sitting just south of downtown. And Seattle knows no limits on its Wi-Fi craving.
A wealth of new handsets, netbooks, and high-volume CE devices could be enabled in the coming year by a key innovation IBM announced yesterday: a service in which it builds low-power composite design chips using ready-made IP libraries.
With the handset and small device space being opened up by new platforms such as Android, mobile Linux, and the royalty-free Symbian, opportunities are arising for more vendors -- some of them major players, some of them newer ones -- to come to market with fairly high-performance hardware. But up until recently, the possibility of making a high-performance handset was out of reach for many vendors, including the smaller ones that can't yet even afford completely custom design.
Regional telco-and-wireless provider Centennial Communications could, if things come together as AT&T hopes, be absorbed into the body of the larger company by next July.
Though based in New Jersey, Centennial Communications serves mainly rural populations in the South and certain of the the Lake States (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan), where it offers GSM access; and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, where it offers CDMA. It claims about 1.1 million wireless subscribers, about 660,000 of those in the continental US.
NEW YORK, NY -- At a press event this evening, officials promised that, despite the gloomy economy, CES 2009 will continue to mix business with pleasure, with events ranging from a new green computing area to a live performance by Diana Ross.
Recent research by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) shows that 64% of the public is now interested in recyclable products, 62% want energy efficiency, and 47% are on the lookout for recycled materials.
Google today announced an enhancement to Gmail that allows voice and video chat to take place directly within the client.
In Gmail chat, the tag under the conversation window normally titled "options," is replaced by the "video and more" tag. Clicking on this expands a menu that can allow voice or video chats to take place alongside email and text chats at any time.
From the two furthest-flung television markets in America come updates on their respective transitions to DTV. One is being expedited for environmental reasons, and the other will remain on schedule with monthly shutdown tests.
Today, it was announced that Hawaii's mandatory transition to digital broadcast will be completed a month ahead of the scheduled February 17 deadline to accommodate the nesting season of the Hawaiian Petrel, an endangered sea bird.