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.
Cell phones and laptops may seem like pretty minor offenders when it comes to energy guzzling. But as they become ubiquitous all over the planet, their growing power consumption is emerging as a major source of concern for those trying to conserve energy and stop global warming.
Consumers still aren’t buying gadgets.
The latest Commerce Department retail sales data, which showed a disappointing 0.4 percent fall overall in April from March, includes a 2.8 percent drop in sales at electronics and appliance stores, which is worse than any other individual category.
The hurricane is coming. You have 20 minutes to grab the objects in your house that are most important to you. What do you reach for first?
That’s a question asked by Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for The New York Times, at the very end of Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s brilliant documentary about industrial design. The film, which premiered here at South by Southwest to a packed house Saturday, is an examination of the objects that surround us — the gadgets, furniture, cars, appliances and everyday things that we collect, consume and, ultimately, throw away.
In my last article I described what it feels like to have your house struck by lightning. Luckily there were no injuries or structural damage (thanks for your kind words in the comments), but our gadgets and other electronics inside the house weren’t so lucky. This is their tale.
Innovation usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech-recognition systems, “it seemed almost impossible.” Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Phillips.
In its quest for what it calls “new metrics for the knowledge economy,” a nonprofit research group has come up with an index of global innovation confidence. The poll of 25,000 people in a dozen nations, published on Tuesday, found the United States squarely in the middle of the pack. America trailed the populations most enthusiastic about new technology, gadgets and services, a group that included the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil, Ireland and China. Still, the United States came out ahead of those dour Europeans–the least thrilled by technology were the Netherlands, Finland, Slovenia and Turkey.
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