Sony and Panasonic are reportedly in early talks to jointly develop and/or produce OLED TV sets, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The talks are still in the preliminary stages, and there is a chance that discussions might not reach a conclusion or that other potential partners might join the alliance,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“OLED is considered a promising technology for next-generation television sets because it doesn’t require a backlight, making it thinner than existing liquid-crystal or plasma displays,” explains WSJ. “In the future, the technology is expected to enable curved or flexible screens.”
While OLED technology is making its way into the smaller screens of smartphones and tablets, it remains an expensive proposition for TV manufacturing.
“An alliance between Sony and Panasonic, the first of its kind between the two companies, would mark a watershed moment in the Japanese consumer-electronics industry as companies face difficult market conditions and shifting industry dynamics,” suggests the article.
Both Samsung and LG are planning to launch 55-inch OLED models this year, expected to be priced in the $8,000 range.
Netflix claims that approximately one-third of its new subscribers are actually former customers who are now returning to the service, after leaving last year in the wake of the price increases.
According to David Wells, Netflix’s chief financial officer, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Technology Media and Telecom conference: “…we’ve said before that the brand hit will take years to recover from and I think that’s still true, with the bulk of the recovery coming in the full year and I think we still feel that way.”
The company is approaching the first anniversary of its price increases, which were initially met with public and media criticism.
“In addition, Wells said Netflix is merchandising better and aiming to burn off ‘the negative PR swirl around the brand,'” reports CNET. “Wells added that he expects the public relations hit will ‘dissipate over time.'”
“Netflix compares the address and credit card data to match up new customers with former subscribers,” explains the post. “Netflix keeps old customer data for about a year.”
Wi-Fi technology is about to experience several significant upgrades.
“Technology upgrades we’ll see within the next year or so will make Wi-Fi much smarter and more efficient in how it distributes signals,” reports Ars Technica. “It’ll be so fast, and integrated into so many devices, that you may finally get to dump a lot of those cables cluttering your living room.”
The 802.11ac standard, which may be certified as early as December, will use the 5MHz band to enable 1.3 gigabits per second bandwidth. Moreover, it will include beamforming technology that focuses the signal to increase the range while also reducing the interference problem.
Coming later in 2013, the 802.11ad standard will operate at 5-7 gigabits per second over 60GHz. At this speed, one will be able to stream uncompressed movies.
Finally, the Wi-Fi Alliance industry group is also adding a Passpoint program to make it easier to connect to hotspots; Voice-Enterprise certification for enhanced voice quality; better power management features; and a standard that allows Wi-Fi to network with appliances, CE devices and automobiles.
The U.S. Copyright Office is deliberating whether to allow Americans to jailbreak their mobile phones as an exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
An exception was granted in 2010 for mobile phones and must be reauthorized every three years by both the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress. The exception must be balanced against the potential harm that increased piracy might occur.
“Jailbreaking and rooting are techniques used to get past manufacturer-installed roadblocks that prevent users from having full control over their devices,” explains Wired. “Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office entertains requests to create temporary loopholes in the law that makes it unlawful to circumvent encryption technologies in items that you buy.”
For the moment, regulators appear to agree that jailbreaking phones may be necessary to allow users to run the apps they desire. Still, Apple has argued in the past that this may ruin its business model.
Advocates are also looking at expanding the ability to jailbreak tablets and game consoles. Regulators are more skeptical about the need to do so on consoles. Moreover, they appear to be concerned that doing so on tablets “might jeopardize” copyrighted content, especially on e-readers.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “A Few Good Men,” “The West Wing”) is set to write the screenplay adaptation of the best-selling Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson.
“Sony reportedly paid $1 million for the rights to the biography, picking it up in October. The book was Amazon’s best-selling title of 2011 and, according to Publisher’s Weekly, 2.2 million copies were sold last year,” details The Hollywood Reporter.
The biopic about Apple’s co-founder will be produced by Scott Rudin, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady.
It has long been rumored that Sorkin would take on the project. Sony had expressed interest in signing him since as early as November.
This is not the only Steve Jobs film in the works. Inferno Entertainment is selling “Jobs,” a $5 million indie starring Ashton Kutcher.
A number of companies are marketing waterproofing technologies designed to protect consumer electronic devices, “an endeavor that may revolutionize the mobile market,” suggests Mobiledia.
P2i, HzO, and Liquipel are companies competing to bring their water-repellent technologies to portable devices such as phones and laptops.
P2i waterproofs by spraying devices with chemicals, placing them in a vacuum chamber, and then pulsing electronic currents through the chamber. This bonds the waterproofing chemical “to every atom on the phone’s surface.”
HzO coats a phone’s internal components and claims to protect submerged phones for longer than the P2i process. “Our coating is thicker, building layers on top of each other and providing a protection that can endure underwater for extended periods of time,” claims HzO president Paul Clayson.
California-based start-up Liquipel (which ETCentric reported on during CES), waterproofs phones at a cost of $60 per device. “Liquipel is reportedly negotiating a contract with Fujitsu to coat its upcoming tablets and phones, as the company aims to expand its mail-in business,” reports Mobiledia.
As of now, external cases dominate the market, but off-the-shelf waterproofing techniques could have numerous applications and could make other products obsolete.
Since free blog hosting platform Tumblr integrated with the Facebook Open Graph feature in April, its referral traffic from the social network has grown by more than 2.5 times.
“This statistic makes one thing clear: the social giant really does drive some serious traffic for nearly everyone that’s integrated with its Open Graph so far, even though these integrations are often quite annoying for users,” reports The Next Web.
According to Facebook’s Developer Blog, this is what Tumblr does well: “Tumblr associates a photo with each post published to timeline and news feed, creating more attractive stories for friends; Tumblr uses the message property for personal messages on the Post, Reblog and Reply actions to show more relevant content to friends; Tumblr provides clear messaging about what activity is posted to timeline and simple controls to help users determine what is shared on Facebook.”
The posts suggests that success stories such as the Tumblr integration may help Facebook’s IPO launch.
Comcast announced it will abandon its controversial 250GB data cap on home Internet connections. Instead, the company will utilize something it calls a “more flexible data usage management approach.”
“That basically means that the company will eventually switch to a tiered plan arrangement with overage fees just like wireless providers, with base plans starting at 300GB per month,” reports The Verge.
The current 250GB cap will be suspended everywhere while Comcast tries out “two different types of tiered plan packages in various test markets over the next few months,” explains the post.
The first will give users at every speed a 300GB allotment with “additional capacity available in blocks.” The second plan starts most performance tiers with 300GB, but increases the GB availability for faster service levels.
“It’s all definitely a bit more transparent than much-hated cap-and-throttle system, but we’ll have to see how Comcast decides to price these new plans and additional blocks of data — heavy users could end up with exorbitant bills,” suggests The Verge.
Wired reports that we’ll finally see some flexible displays produced this year, but warns we should curb our enthusiasm since production will be limited, early displays will not be as “bendy” as the technology aspires to be, and “they won’t appear in Apple hardware as some news outlets have recently speculated.”
Samsung, for example, has announced it will mass produce flexible OLED displays and has already been receiving orders. Samsung’s display is thin but rugged, and is basically unbreakable since it uses a plastic called polyamide rather than glass.
The article suggests we should expect to see gently curved screens in the future and bendable phones or tablets enabled by the technology. “But that’s probably not on the horizon — especially Apple’s horizon — anytime soon,” comments Wired.
“It’s completely impossible to see any Apple product with flexible AMOLED this year,” suggests Jennifer Colegrove, NPD DisplaySearch’s vice president of emerging display technology. “However, I do believe Apple display engineers are constantly looking into new technology to put into their products, and OLED is one of the technologies they are looking at.”
Apple is more concerned about functionality than making something curvy for the sake of being interesting. Colgrove doesn’t anticipate a flexible display in Apple products until at least the 2013-2014 time frame, “with truly bendy iDevices appearing in 2015 at the earliest,” indicates the article.
Disney Interactive Labs has introduced a new video portal that features clips, trailers and curated YouTube content for viewing online or via mobile devices.
“The new Disney Video site, located at video.disney.com, combines the best of Disney past and present, with a whole lot of content that might not be found anywhere else,” reports TechCrunch.
Last year Disney and YouTube made a deal to cross-promote content, and the YouTube section of the new Disney site is one offshoot of this deal. Disney will host some YouTube content on the new portal while YouTube will receive some Disney original kids programming.
The portal is organized by sections: “In the movies section, Disney Video features trailers, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with stars of upcoming and recent feature films like ‘Frankenweenie’ and ‘The Avengers.’ Its shows page puts the spotlight on popular clips from the Disney Channel and related cable networks. Collections organizes its video library into themes, like Disney Fairies, for instance, or content available from Disney Theme Parks,” explains the post.
Disney’s video content is formatted to work both on Web browsers (via Flash) and on mobile devices including iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The company hopes this will help increase traffic as younger consumers continue to use more mobile devices.
“Time Warner Cable is on a roll with this whole TV Everywhere thing,” reports TechCrunch. “Just a day after adding Viacom channels to its live streaming iPad app, the cable provider has announced support for HBO GO on the Xbox, Roku streaming boxes, and Samsung connected TVs.”
Time Warner took a long time to get to this point, being one of the last holdouts to hook up with HBO GO, “but it’s catching up fast,” says TechCrunch.
Supporting HBO GO on game consoles and connected TVs means that Time Warner is joining the ranks of Verizon, AT&T and Dish Network in offering access to the service.
The move is good news for TWC’s HBO subscribers, who are no longer restricted to HBO’s broadcast schedule or cable VOD services to access content. “For everyone else who loves HBO but doesn’t want to pay $100 for cable, though, they’re stuck waiting and hoping that maybe, some day, HBO GO will be available a la carte,” adds the post.
Apple still doesn’t pay for product placement in entertainment media, yet its products appeared in more than 40 percent of last year’s top movies.
According to Brandchannel, that percentage represents almost twice the penetration of Dell, Chevrolet, and Ford — the brands most commonly used in Hollywood content.
“Apple has spent decades strengthening its subtle but powerful grip over Hollywood, and unlike many companies, says it never pays for its products to appear on television or in movies,” reports Businessweek. “The company’s gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen.”
Dominance in this arena comes at a transitional period for traditional marketing as consumers increasingly skip ads via their DVRs and are influenced more by social media.
Apple has proven successful in media content where devices are treated as objects of devotion or a certain hipness factor is required. “Producers and executives may make plot changes or write entire episodes merely because they love a brand or in exchange for freebies,” explains the article.
“Apple won’t pay to have their products featured, but they are more than willing to hand out an endless amount of computers, iPads, and iPhones,” says producer Gavin Polone. “It’s kind of a graft situation.”
Despite availability of pirated versions online, “The Avengers” had a record-breaking opening weekend at the U.S. box office.
About a week before the premiere, a camcorder version of the film appeared online. According to TorrentFreak, the pirated version was downloaded half a million times, and while that may be a high number for a “cam” movie, “it failed to exceed the download numbers of several other movies that were available in higher quality.”
The film, produced by Marvel and distributed by Disney, earned $200 million its opening weekend. With 20 percent of illegal downloads occurring in the U.S., TorrentFreak argues that if those same 100,000 Americans opted for a theater experience, the resulting box office revenue would only have been 0.5 percent higher (and there’s no way to determine whether or not the pirated version kept any of those viewers out of theaters).
“We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater,” comments TorrentFreak. “The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.”
“If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances,” adds the article.
TorrentFreak agrees that higher quality pirated copies may directly compete with international theatrical releases, DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales, but suggests that “in no way are camcorded copies killing the U.S. movie industry.”
Facebook launches its long-awaited initial public offering today, expected to be the biggest IPO for a U.S. tech firm.
Today’s offering will also mark history’s second largest for any industry: Visa’s 2008 IPO was $17.9 billion at $44 a share.
“While Facebook announced on Thursday that its initial public offering of common stock would be priced at $38 a share, raising $16 billion and valuing the company at $104 billion, the shares available for purchase by the public will likely be priced higher,” reports ABC News. “That’s causing many analysts to caution individual investors not to rush into making any risky investments.”
Some analysts suggest that there are long-term risks in a Facebook investment. Despite its immense user base, the social network will still have to find ways of matching revenue with stock valuation.
There are concerns that going public could potentially ruin Facebook by alienating its user base with changes to its advertising model, especially in the mobile space.
Analysts have also issued warnings to individual investors that institutions and “prestige clients” have already invested in what is viewed as sort of an elite lottery system.
“The elite have a chance to deliberate and evaluate the assets, and then the general public comes in later for the feeding frenzy,” said stock analyst Max Wolff, adding that chasing shares in the open market can be an expensive proposition.
Web-based productivity suite Zoho launched a new drag-and-drop website builder to help customers build professional sites without using HTML or CSS.
The new Zoho Sites allows users to create websites which are optimized for mobile devices.
Zoho Sites also includes support for app integration, including “Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Maps, YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa” according to TechCrunch. These integrations can also be dragged and dropped.
The service is available in both free and paid versions. The free service includes “two websites with two forms each, one blog, unlimited pages” — while the paid Professional Edition is available for $39 a year and includes “six websites, each with 10 forms, a blog, and unlimited pages.”
Sony and Panasonic are reportedly in early talks to jointly develop and/or produce OLED TV sets, according to people familiar with the matter.
