GameStop plans to close 200 of its stores around the globe next year. The world’s largest video game retailer says 3 percent of its outlets — primarily in Canada and Australia — are operating unprofitably.
The Texas-based company operates 6,650 stores worldwide. It recently reported that third quarter sales were down 8.9 percent from a year ago, to $1.77 billion. However, these figures are better than originally estimated and GameStop’s shares rose 4.25 percent to $24.48.
CEO J. Paul Raines notes the company is showing “strong resilience in the face of challenging category headwinds, and the new categories of digital and mobile are creating new profit pools that we are exploiting aggressively.”
“The retailer heads into the U.S. holidays weighed down by a two-year industry slump as players gravitate to mobile and online play from console-based games,” reports Bloomberg. “Raines said the company managed to expand margins in a ‘tough video game market’ by expanding into the re-sale of Apple iPads and other mobile devices and growing its digital download business.”
Investors are watching this month’s launch of Nintendo’s Wii U, the first major console release in six years, to see if it will have an impact on purchases of packaged games.
“GameStop hopes the start of a new console cycle with the Wii U launch and just-released high quality games like Microsoft Corp’s ‘Halo 4’ and Activision Blizzard’s ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II’ will boost hardware and software sales this holiday season,” notes Reuters in a related article.
Google announced a new upgrade to Google TV on Wednesday, which now offers advanced voice control, a new programming guide app and features from Google’s Knowledge Graph.
“The most important new feature of the update, which has internally been called Google TV 3.0, is voice control: Users can trigger channel changes, start apps and fire up the program guide with simple voice commands,” reports GigaOM.
The system is sensitive to context, bringing up Web content, shows or videos as commanded by users. The article also notes that the Google TV voice control is different from that of Microsoft’s Xbox and Samsung’s TV platform.
“The company decided to add the microphone to the remote control to allow users to use both,” explains the article, noting that the “old D-Pad still works great for simple navigation tasks, which can be overly complicated if you want to solve them through voice or gestures.”
The smarts behind Google’s Knowledge Graph also powers the recently launched Google Now app.
“Google Now and the thinking behind it has been a big inspiration for Google TV going forward, [Google TV product lead Rishi Chandra] added, explaining that the goal is to eventually display content in very much the same way that Google Now displays its information cards to its users.”
Google TV 3.0 includes a new programming guide called PrimeTime that gives access to live TV and streaming content, “but shines especially during live TV viewing, when shows on other channels are displayed through topical overlays,” notes the post. “Eventually, the same functionality will exist for YouTube and other on-demand content.”
MasterCard has developed an advanced payment card with LCD technology and keypad intended to increase security and help protect bank and credit accounts.
“The credit card company has partnered with Standard Chartered Bank Singapore in order to release an interactive payment card that looks similar to a pocket calculator,” reports Digital Trends. “Located at the top right corner of the card, a member of Standard Chartered Bank Singapore will find a liquid-crystal display that shows up to six digits. Along the bottom front of the card, the user will find a a ten-digit keypad.”
The next-generation, interactive display card features additional functionality with its touch-sensitive “clear,” “okay” and “on/off” buttons.
“This card has been designed for transactions that require a higher level of authorization,” explains the post. “When a new cardholder first acquires the card, they will be able to generate a one-time password as an authentication security measure for the future.”
“With the continued growth in online and now mobile initiated remote payments, consumers are naturally demanding increased security,” notes Matthew Driver, division president of MasterCard Worldwide in South East Asia. “The innovative features of the Display Card serve to address this need, whilst empowering consumers to do so much more with their payment cards.”
MasterCard is looking into additional uses for the LCD related to personal finances, such as displaying current balance, remaining available credit and recent transactions.
Visa launched a similar card in Europe late last year. The Visa CodeSure Matrix Display Card features an LCD, keypad and battery that can last up to three years.
Musician David Gilmour will become the first artist to release a music concert as a smartphone app.
DVD authoring group The Pavement has created a new technique to convert DVDs into apps and is hoping to reach a larger audience with the concert app, rather than the traditional DVD-only distribution.
Gilmour, formerly of Pink Floyd, released a compilation of songs on DVD recorded during Robert Wyatt’s 2001 and 2002 Meltdown Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The app will be a version of the successful DVD release.
“The critically acclaimed performance features Gilmour alone with just his voice and along with a vocal choir that’s accompanied by a group of acoustic instruments,” reports The Unofficial Apple Weblog. “Robert Wyatt, Bob Geldof and Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright also join in on some of the performances.”
The concert app will be available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch starting next week (an Android version is in the works). According to Gilmour’s website, the app will cost $8.99.
“The App works exactly like its source DVD — full of rich video and audio material with interactive motion, menu navigation options and bonus extras,” explains the site. “It is envisaged that this new process could open the door for many other classic musical performances to be made available as apps to be enjoyed on mobile devices, away from the restrictions of the home DVD player.”
Former Adobe executives Fang Chang and Nigel Pegg launched the free public beta version of Bookboard this week — an iPad app that offers streaming access to children’s ebooks.
The app already has a library of 300 titles from publishers Charlesbridge, Orca, Twin Sisters, Illumination Arts and Bubblegum Books.
The goal is to provide iPad content for kids and their parents that is more educational than YouTube or “Angry Birds.” The startup plans to eventually charge a monthly fee between $5 and $10.
“Bookboard titles are not enhanced with widgets, games, or other interactivity features (other than an ability to tap on text to enlarge it),” reports paidContent. “The company says that is intentional, to leave the focus on the reading experience.”
However, the company is expected to provide “more premium content and add-ons available in the future.”
Publishers will receive royalties based on page views. Other startups including Oyster and 24symbols are pushing to become the Netflix of ebooks, but have experienced challenges with the model, given resistance by publishers and conflicts with author contracts.
Chang told paidContent that “publishers are being a lot more savvy these days, making sure they obtain the digital rights for these books.” But the article points out that digital rights do not always cover streaming or subscription models.
LG announced last week the launch of its 21:9 UltraWide monitor, which the company claims is the world’s first monitor in that format.
The 29-inch EA93 UltraWide Monitor boasts a 21:9 aspect ratio and features 4-Screen Split with the ability to offer four customizable screen views.
“That could make this monitor a possible alternative for people who use a dual-screen setup,” notes Digital Trends. “In fact, it has a Dual Link-up option to connect the monitor to two external devices, which means you could have a similar setup to multiple monitors without any variation in color or image quality. It also features a DVI-D port and two HDMI connectors.”
With a maximum resolution of 2,560 x 1,080, the IPS (In Plane Switching) display should prove an excellent option for watching movies. LG is emphasizing the monitor is designed for work and personal use.
“LG has been making waves with its efforts to improve screen quality this year,” notes the post. “The company has gone very small with a 5-inch LCD screen with high definition and 440 ppi, and insanely big with a whopping 84-inch Ultra HD television.”
The EA93 will initially roll out in South Korea this month before availability in the U.S. The company has yet to announce a price point.
According to PCMag.com, Apple remains on top in the tablet competition with its fourth generation iPad.
“Apple’s latest iPad is the best large tablet you can buy, period,” notes the review. “The Apple iPad has it all: top performance, a stellar screen, a surprisingly good camera, speedy Wi-Fi, and a breathtaking library of spectacular apps.”
The review examines pricing, features, apps, performance, camera upgrades and comparisons to similar products. It suggests games and apps launch twice as fast as they do on the iPad 3 — and notes the significantly improved gaming performance.
The review also notes the device’s stellar Wi-Fi performance: “On PCMag‘s 5GHz 802.11n network, I got 37Mbps down on the iPad and 23Mbps down on the Nexus 10. Both speeds are fast, but it’s the iPad’s processor and software that seem to be making the difference here.”
The review claims the iPad is the best 10-inch tablet on the market, but also suggests the iPad mini is not the best 7-inch tablet currently offered.
“Unlike other 10-inch tablets on the market, it’s the full package, which makes it a very rare five-star product, and a slam dunk for our Editors’ Choice,” writes PCMag.com. “The fourth-generation Apple iPad is the only product I have ever personally rated five full stars because it represents the tablet state of the art.”
Shortly after Wikipedia launched its HTML5 video player, its for-profit counterpart has released a streaming multimedia player and announced new syndication deals.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikia as a “Web-hosting service for crowdsourced wikis, free for readers and editors, but funded by advertising to make money,” explains The Next Web.
Now, Wikia has launched a new Lightbox streaming media player for the site’s 50 million monthly global visitors and is offering access to nearly 100,000 videos and 14 million photos, thanks to new syndication deals with AnyClip, IDG, IGN, RealGravity and ScreenPlay.
Through the Lightbox, users can stream trailers, previews, clips and exclusive studio videos at up to 1080p HD. Additionally, fans will be able to curate this licensed content and insert it into wiki pages.
During its beta period, Wikia offered multimedia collections on wikis for “Mortal Kombat,” “Shrek,” “The Hunger Games” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
The Lightbox is now available to all 250,000+ Wikia communities. Video content is also shareable on Facebook, Twitter and via email.
“The new video library, and Lightbox player will amplify Wikia’s naturally strong community creation and curation activities by enabling the assembly and packaging of user created and premium photo and video content in one place,” says Wikia CEO Craig Palmer. “These efforts will make it easier to showcase the passionate pursuit of knowledge through collaborative storytelling.”
The way consumers interact with music today is not simply evolving from an analog to digital experience, but also involves shifts from downloads to streaming.
Web radio services, such as Pandora, have experienced more recent growth than on-demand players such as Spotify and Rhapsody, indicates a new study.
In the second quarter of 2012, U.S. audiences for Internet radio services increased by 27 percent over the previous year, according to findings from The NPD Group. Meanwhile, on-demand services including Rhapsody, Spotify, YouTube and others had an 18 percent increase in listeners.
NPD also reported that AM/FM radio is still the top choice in the U.S. for listening to music, followed by music streaming services and Web radio, which have displaced CDs.
“Since 2009, the percentage of Pandora users who also listen to AM/FM radio declined by 10 percentage points,” notes the report. “Listening to digital music files on portable music players also dropped 21 points.”
“NPD said that contributing to part of those declines was Pandora’s successful move into automobiles,” reports CNET. “The research company said that 34 percent of Pandora’s users are now listening to the service in their cars.”
Tone in various forms of electronic communication has often led to confusion between friends, colleagues and family members — especially when the intended tone is sarcasm.
“Now, as more people are sharing their opinions with casual acquaintances and strangers on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook — rather than in private text messages to people who know their senses of humor — the sarcasm disconnect is even greater,” notes the Wall Street Journal.
Data miners are increasingly met with this challenge. “Sarcasm is proving to be an obstacle for the academics and marketers who create computer programs to analyze massive pools of online chatters to gauge public opinions about products and politicians,” explains the article.
USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab has launched a Twitter Sentiment Analysis project that “unites linguists, sociologists and computer scientists to try to build a modern-day lexicon for computers to read and interpret huge chunks of data provided by the millions of people who share their opinions online,” reports WSJ.
The project has turned to politics to analyze data. For example, the lab’s computer has analyzed more than 40 million tweets involving candidates and hot-button issues. Additionally, more than 50,000 tweets have been manually analyzed to determine sentiment.
“Many of the ETC member companies are using sentiment analysis from companies like Crimson Hexagon to guide their marketing and social media efforts,” explains ETCentric contributor Phil Lelyveld. “This USC research program will improve the accuracy of the analytics that they use.”
As part of its strategy to “channelize” its popular video site, YouTube has so far helped fund about 160 “channels” that feature original content and, in some cases, celebrity talent.
“And just like the TV world, YouTube isn’t going to renew all of last season’s programs,” reports AllThingsD. “This week, Google’s video site will start offering new contracts to some of the channel programmers/creators it signed up in the last year. But not all of them: YouTube figures it will end up re-investing in up to 40 percent of its original channels by the time the renewal process is done.”
YouTube plans to address the renewals in batches, beginning with the first group of channels it launched in January.
New deals are expected to reflect the ones originally established last year, in which content creators received up to $5 million to produce content exclusively for the site. Channels that are not offered new deals will not be bounced from the site. YouTube hopes the producers will continue to provide content.
“Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s director of content strategy, says the site is most concerned about engagement — primarily the total ‘watch time’ a channel has generated — and cost — how efficient programmers have been with their programming budget,” explains the article.
Financial performance is not expected to be a deciding factor in the new deals, since the advertising model remains a work in progress.
“We’ve had some really great response from the advertiser community. As we continue to talk to advertisers and marketers, there’s a real sense that they’re looking at YouTube differently,” Byrne says. “But as we look at this initiative, we are taking the long view here. It’s not necessarily about immediate results.”
A federal judge in California ruled last week that broadcasters did not prove they had sustained enough damage from DISH Network’s ad-skipping Hopper DVR to warrant a preliminary injunction.
“U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles refused to grant Fox Broadcasting’s first attempt to block DISH Network’s advertising-skipping DVR services known as ‘AutoHop’ and ‘PrimeTime Anytime,'” explains The Hollywood Reporter.
However, Fox says it is “gratified the court found the copies DISH makes for its AutoHop service constitute copyright infringement and breach the parties’ contract.”
“The satellite company is asserting that AutoHop (aka the Hopper) is really just an improvement on existing recording devices that have been accepted by the industry and judicially blessed as ‘fair use’ going back to the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling on the Sony Betamax VCR and continuing through the Ninth Circuit’s 2008 ruling on Cablevision’s remote-storage DVR,” explains THR.
“Fox dismisses DISH’s contention that the technology is merely a ‘souped-up DVR’ and disputes that the freedom to time-shift is at stake here,” notes the article.
The court ruling is currently sealed from public view until both parties have the opportunity to remove any trade secrets. Fox said it intends to appeal the decision.
At least one patent battle in the smartphone wars is finally over. Apple and HTC reached a settlement over the weekend to dismiss all current lawsuits the companies have against each other.
Additionally, the companies have inked a 10-year cross-licensing deal that grants rights to current and future patents held by each party. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Apple sued HTC in 2010, claiming that the Taiwanese manufacturer infringed on patents related to the iPhone. HTC, in turn, accused Apple of infringing several of its mobile technology patents.
“The deal was the first settlement between Apple and a maker of devices that use Android, an operating system that has rapidly swallowed most of the smartphone market and threatened Apple’s position in the mobile business in the process,” reports The New York Times. “Other patent lawsuits continue around the globe, including far more significant ones between Apple and Samsung, by far the biggest maker of Android smartphones.”
While the deal may suggest that Apple CEO Tim Cook is eager to end the distraction and risks of patent fights, it may not necessarily be a sign that Apple will settle its fight with Samsung.
“The stakes in Apple’s dispute with Samsung are far higher than they were in its battle with HTC,” notes the article. “Samsung ranked No. 1 in smartphone market share during the third quarter of this year, shipping 56.3 million of the devices, while Apple was second with 26.9 million smartphones, according to estimates by IDC. HTC, in contrast, was fifth, shipping 7.3 million phones.”
Google is experimenting with a new social feature for Chrome that allows users to interact with others by creating and sharing instrument tracks.
“For those who want to play music with friends across the country — or down the street, for that matter — Google is testing a new interactive Web app that lets you rock out with others in real time,” reports Mashable.
The JAM with Chrome app operates via HTML5 and allows up to four people to interact online with 19 virtual instruments, including drums, keyboards and acoustic and electric guitars.
The app has two approaches: “easy mode,” featuring basic instrument functions and autoplay capabilities — and “pro mode,” which gives users full control over their virtual instruments.
“If you ever dreamed of playing in a band, now’s your chance to be a rock star,” explains Google in a blog post. “No matter what your level of talent — from daydreaming air guitarist to music pro — you can JAM together in real time over the Web.”
“Google has been upping its music profile over the past few months,” reports CNET in a related post. “It announced last month that it would soon be rolling out its scan-and-match feature for the company’s music service in Europe and in the U.S. shortly after. Scan-and-match is a feature that lets users store music on computer servers of a host service. The service can then stream songs over the Internet to the user’s choice of Web-connected music players.”
Following Netflix’s lead, Hulu has launched a dedicated kids section. Starting yesterday, the ad-free Hulu Kids feature is available to Hulu Plus subscribers via the service’s website and the PS3.
“Hulu Kids comes with shows from PBS, Nickelodeon and Lionsgate, and the content is sorted by age groups,” reports GigaOM. “The total number of shows listed on the section currently stands at 43. A spokesperson confirmed that Hulu is working on bringing Hulu Kids as a separate content section within the Hulu Plus app to additional devices.”
According to the Hulu blog announcement, current children’s programs include popular titles such as “Thomas & Friends,” “Robot and Monster,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Dinosaur Train,” “Arthur” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Netflix launched its own kids section online last summer with a new design meant to be more appealing to younger users. Hulu is simply relying on its recently launched Web UI.
“Making this kind of content exclusively available to Hulu Plus subscribers shows that Hulu is starting to put a much bigger emphasis on its paid offering, and slowly deemphasizing the free Hulu.com website in the process,” suggests GigaOM.
“The fact that these kids shows are available ad-free is good news for parents who don’t want their kids confronted with advertising, but it’s also a sign that Hulu is moving towards becoming a more direct competitor for Netflix, which has always been ad-free,” concludes the post.
