As Sony Corp. scrambles to reassert its technological relevance, Chief Executive Howard Stringer is betting on a strategy for the electronics giant that focuses on adding online content to more of its gadgets.
Speaking at the first joint public appearance by Sony’s new management team since a shake-up in February, Mr. Stringer said the Japanese giant is “moving faster than we’ve ever moved” to meet parallel challenges.
Brizzly, the Web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today.
In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, the start-up is offering an on-the-fly translation tool for foreign tweets. And it has hired former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell.
Remember paying astronomical prices for college textbooks that, once class was over, had only one possible use: as paperweights?
To the relief of parents everywhere, shelling out $182 for Principles of Biochemistry may become a thing of the past. Several recently funded start-ups make it cheaper, or in some cases free, for students to obtain books.
China Mobile Ltd., the world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, is pinning its hopes on new third-generation services such as mobile television and mobile readers to drive growth amid increasing competition and falling voice revenue.
Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.
But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.
In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.
Dell’s fiscal third-quarter earnings fell 54 percent to $337 million, while revenue declined 15 percent to $12.9 billion.
The personal-computer maker saw revenue in its small and medium business unit slip 19 percent from the year-earlier period, while its consumer business was down 10 percent. In a statement, Michael Dell, its chief executive, said that the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 has been “very well received” by consumers and businesses, and that the company will see those results more in the fourth quarter.
Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.
Bank of America/Merrill Lynch chip analyst Sumit Dhanda this morning turned cautious on semiconductor stocks, downgrading a slew of stocks; his colleague Daniel Heyler made a comparable on the foundries, lower ratings on a number of stocks.
“We are downgrading our view on the sector given unfavorable indications from our cyclical framework,” he writes.
The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.
Norwest Venture Partners on Wednesday announced that it had closed a new venture-capital fund sized at $1.2 billion. That’s nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006, which closed at $650 million.
The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession.
California created the nation’s first energy-efficiency standard for television sets, arguing that it needed to act because federal energy officials have been slow to confront the issue.
Under the standard adopted Wednesday by the California Energy Commission, no TV with a screen size less than 58 inches may be sold in the state after 2011 unless it meets limits on energy consumption.
Two high-profile electronic-book readers seeking to challenge Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle could be scarce under the Christmas tree.
Sony Corp. Wednesday said orders for its new Daily Edition Reader–which the company said in August would arrive in time for the holidays–are now expected to ship Dec. 18 through Jan. 8. It added that the actual delivery date can’t be guaranteed.
Several Internet stocks are taking some heat this morning following the release yesterday of a Senate report on aggressive sales tactics on the Web–and in particular singling out for scorn a practice known as “post-transaction marketing.”
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