consumer electronics

Aereo making retransmission negotiations more entertaining

26 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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Oh, baby, you are so talented. And they are so dumb.

Time-Warner Cable is threatening to shoot its own business model as it wrestles with CBS over permission to carry local television stations in New York and other major markets. Thanks to a law passed by the U.S. congress in 1992 with massive amounts of campaign contributions cogent policy research from cable, satellite and, crucially, broadcasting lobbyists, cable systems have to get permission to carry a local TV station, which means agreeing to and paying a price.… More

Intel selling heavy metal thunder to a lightning fast market

25 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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The next industry standard.

After playing with an Atom-powered smart phone at CES this year and hearing execs talk up Android, I saw glimmers of hope that Intel was finally coming to grips with the mobile world. It seems I had it backwards: the mobile world is tightening its grip on Intel’s corporate throat.

Long the dominant player in PC and big server processors, Intel is all but shut out of smart phones and tablets, a billion unit market, and has no presence at all in the machine-to-machine space, which could be five or ten times that size in the next handful of years.… More

Tizen Foundation throws candy at mobile app devs


Game on.

A $4 million lolly scramble is underway to jump start the Tizen mobile operating system’s app store. The Tizen Foundation announced a developers’ competition with individual prizes that could go as high as $250,000, and released a new version of the software developer kit for the Linux-based and HTML5-centric OS.

Among other things, Tizen is Samsung’s coming replacement for bada, its in-house smart (or at least modestly bright) phone OS. While bada is a very functional, if lower end, platform, it’s suffered from a lack of developer love.… More

HTC won't help its shrinking share by shrinking a phone

19 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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It used to be bigger.

Combined, Samsung and Apple are selling about half the world’s smart phones, with 30% and 19% market share respectively in 2012 according to IDC. Much of Samsung’s growth from 19% in 2011 came out of HTC’s hide. Its share was cut in half over same period, dropping below 5% and putting it more or less in a tie with Nokia and Blackberry.

At least it was still in the top five then.… More

Air travellers might soon get a reading break

12 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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Something to read for the rest of us.

The Federal Aviation Administration might finally update fifty year old rules on electronic devices – tablets, computers, smart phones, ebook readers.

The current rules, some dating from the 1960s, are there purely out of momentum. Personal electronics pose zero danger to airplanes. There’s never been an incident where a passenger device has interfered with an airplane’s operation and no one has ever come up with a plausible theory about how one might, given modern technology.… More

Toys are serious fun

9 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Boys prefer helicopters?

What might be the most revolutionary technology poking its nose into the market right now is just a toy. NeuroSky makes a headset that controls devices by reading your brainwaves. Their first shot at a product was a tiara with cat ears that reacted to the wearer’s mood. A big hit with girls. A helicopter for the boys followed.

There’s a long and proud tradition of breakthrough technology getting its first consumer foothold in toy stores.… More

Android becomes the Windows of opportunity


It goes both ways. But maybe not much longer.

Microsoft continues to slide toward the back of the mass computing market pack. Three more signs it’s losing its grip on consumer-grade devices:

… More

Internet video won't flourish in a walled garden

1 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Source: Cisco VNI 2012-2017

By 2017 Internet protocol video traffic will triple worldwide, according to Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index (VNI). It’s an annual estimate of how Internet and Internet protocol traffic will grow over the coming five years.

IP video traffic totalled 24,000 petabytes a month during 2012 and is projected to grow to 76,000 petabytes a month in 2017.

The share of Internet protocol video delivered inside a walled garden will gradually decline, although like everything else it will continue to increase in absolute terms.… More

Better connectivity undermines PC sales

28 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Tablet sales will soar past stagnating personal computer results, according to forecasts released today by International Data Corporation. With mobile networks powering handheld productivity and growing commercial and industrial grade fiber networks enabling more and more work to be shifted onto servers, PCs are caught in a squeeze.

IDC expects 59% growth in tablet sales in 2013, reaching 229 million units, up from 145 million in 2012. That means more tablets will be sold this year than laptops (including netbooks, ultrabooks and the like).… More

Form defines function for wearable smart phone peripherals

10 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Good for a casual look.

The Fitbit Flex shipped this week. I previewed it at CES. It’s a jelly bean-sized device that snaps into a wristband and monitors your movement. The data is uploaded to a smart phone or computer, and you can mine some information about your health and fitness.

It’s a smart phone peripheral. If you’re tracking, say, sleep patterns, sensors inside of a phone would not be optimal. You might sleep with your phone next to you, but you won’t have it on you.… More