New Displays Bask In The Sunlight

At DisplaySearch’s USFPD conference, the sun-drenched beachfront of San Diego was an appropriate setting for my panel that included representatives from two companies working on energy-efficient displays that excel at outdoor readability.

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Walmart Rings Up Vudu

This week brought news that Walmart has purchased Vudu, a one-time on-demand video device company that transformed its business to servicing connected TVs and Blu-ray players. As the largest seller of packaged home video in the country and one of the largest sellers of consumer electronics, Walmart clearly has an interest in maintaining its position as more video is consumed digitally, but also in establishing ties to the televisions and Blu-ray players that are featuring the Vudu service.

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iPad Begins A New Chapter For e-Readers

One of the open questions surrounding the iPad that has quickly come to the fore in light of the recent Amazon-Macmillan brinksmanship is to what extent the device will jeopardize sales of e-readers. This is particularly true of the market-leading Kindle, upon the metaphorical shoulders of which Steve Jobs said Apple stood.

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Apple’s MID Life Crisis

At the iPad unveiling in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced a milestone for the company he co-founded in 1976. Apple has turned 50… billion dollars in annual revenue. And to kick off its next growth opportunity, its super sized iPod seeks to fill the gap between the smartphone and laptop, a gap that has become an abyss for many.
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Waiting To Exhale

Given all the outlandish rumors circulating around Apple’s forthcoming announcement on Wednesday, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the purported Apple tablet can become transparent and levitate. Indeed, it is otherwise difficult to explain how the device was able to hover above the CES show floor, invisible to everyone’s eyes but prominent in everyone’s imagination.
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Look! It’s The Hook Of The Nook

The uneasy relationship between digital delivery and physical stores has a steadily improving history. In 2004, as its Virgin Megastores were struggling, parent company Virgin funded Virgin Electronics, which quickly disappeared in 2005 in the shadow of the iPod. (My colleague Stephen Baker is quoted in this CNET-authored obituary.) Nintendo’s Wi-Fi connection took it to the next level, providing connectivity in retail stores for the Nintendo DS, but didn’t provide much differentiation for retailers. And while Apple provides free Wi-Fi in its stores, it instead partnered with Starbucks to offer a customized iTunes store home page that offered lists of recent songs for purchase playing in its coffee shops.

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Sizing Up TV Innovation

As flat-panel technologies made TVs thin enough to tempt Jenny Craig into becoming a CE retailer, consumers found that they could not only put them in places that had been impractical before (such as on walls), but also fit more TV into less space. This was further facilitated by the relatively light weight of large flat-panel TVs, which made them easier to transport home from the store or ship from an online retailer. Indeed, according to NPD’s recent 2009 TV Inventory Study, nearly one-in-five televisions that consumers own is 40″ or larger.

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Apple Hits The Bits

With such relatively minor updates as new color options for the button-less iPod shuffle, and stronger 3D performance for the iPod touch, Apple may have simply tuned the transmission of the iPod hardware lineup at its annual music update last week, but it was pedal to the metal when it came to greasing the wheels of digital commerce for media and applications. The changes included:

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Die Hard

Since 2005, Apple has held an event each September that has provided an update on the iPod ecosystem. Most of the rumors around the possibilities of such an event this year have been focused on an Apple tablet device. However, a secondary rumor has speculated that this year might mark the end of the line for the iPod classic, the most direct descendant of the original hard drive-based 5 GB iPod.
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E-Reader Companies Must Look Past The Book

To butcher the universal application of an old cliché regarding books and their covers, don’t judge an electronic book market’s profitability by its hardware. The industry has been obsessed with guessing the number of Kindles Amazon has sold, but that doesn’t tell the whole story of the device’s success. Since the Kindle is a $300 vending machine for Amazon, it can be a sustainable venture for the e-tailer even if it never cracks the mass market or achieves market share dominance.
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