Posts Tagged ‘Sony Corp’
Sony Says to Launch E-Reader in Japan, Take on Apple
Sony Corp said on Thursday it would launch an e-reader in Japan by year-end, taking on rival Apple Inc just a day before its iPad hits shelves in the country. Sony said it also plans to launch an e-book content distribution service in Japan by year-end as it aims at a chunk of the promising electronic book market.
The debut of the iPad, a portable computing and entertainment system that also functions as an e-reader, is expected to boost Japan’s still-small e-book market.
Sony said it will set up a planning company on July 1 for the content distribution service and will hold 25 percent of the firm. KDDI Corp, Toppan Printing Co, and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper will also hold 25 percent each. The new service will offer comics, magazines, newspapers, as well as books online, Sony said.
Sony sells its e-reader Reader in the United States to vie with Amazon.com’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Apple’s iPad, but it does not currently sell the device at home. Sony attempted to create an e-reader market in the past when it launched reading devices only to pull them from shelves after a few lacklustre years due to a lack of content.
If you would like to know more, please call Mitul Bhavsar on +91-9825095314 or visit www.designwebgraphic.com for any outsource website designing requirement.
Sony to launch challengers to iPad, iPhone
Sources have told the Wall Street Journal that Sony is planning on making a challenger to Apple’s iPad that will have all the capabilities of a netbook, a Sony Reader and a PSP, the company’s handheld gaming device.
At a Sony news conference in Tokyo, Sony’s CFO Nobuyuki Oneda didn’t provide any details but expressed the company’s desire to compete against Apple’s newest gadget, due in stores next month.
“That is a market we are also very interested in. We are confident we have the skills to create a [great] product,” said Oneda. “Time-wise, we are a little behind the iPad but it’s a space we would like to be an active player in.”
The WSJ also reported Sony is making a new smartphone – containing Sony Ericsson mobile technology and capable of playing PSP games – to compete against the iPhone. Both devices are expected to work with Sony Online Services, an online store due to launch in March and sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile products.
The iPad challenger and the new smartphone are expected to launch sometime in 2010, but no details about specs, price or design have been released.
Sony has tried to get into the phone/gaming gadget arena in the past. A patent was filed in 2006 for a device that looked like a PSP on one side and a smartphone on the other, but such a device has never hit the market.
Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones in the last three months of 2009. The company announced Friday that the iPad will be available April 3.
Sony halts OLED TV sales in Japan
Weak demand has forced Sony to put an end to its OLED TV in Japan.
The company is canceling production and sales of the 11-inch XEL-1–which sells for $2,500–in its native country, though Sony said it plans to continue spending on production and R&D in other countries.
Unveiled three years ago, the world’s first OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TV received praise for its vibrant colors and sharp display. TVs with OLED screens are also ultrathin and more energy efficient than LED or plasma sets. But the XEL-1′s small screen and high price virtually guaranteed that the product would never win a huge market share among average consumers.
OLED displays have taken off in cell phones and other mobile devices where the screen sizes are small. But OLED TVs have been difficult and expensive to produce, especially in larger sizes. Though Sony kept promising it would introduce a 27-inch OLED TV, that product never materialized. A Wall Street Journal story from August also noted that Sony’s poor financial performance at the time would likely signal an end to the production of future OLED TVs.
Other manufacturers, such as Samsung and LG, have demoed their own OLED TVs at trade shows. But, like Sony, these companies have bumped into the challenge of mass producing such sets. So none of the announced products has actually hit the market.
Sony’s exit from the technology could be the nail in the coffin for OLED TV, at least for now, as companies look to other less costly innovations such as 3D TVs and LED backlit LCDs.
Twitter Starts Generating Revenues from Online Advertising
Microblogging service Twitter introduced a new advertising program on Tuesday, in a first step to prove that its popularity among web users can translate into a self-sustaining business.
Known as “Promoted Tweets,” the ad program represents a much-anticipated move to address concerns about the revenue generating potential at Twitter and marks a key milestone on the road to an initial public offering, analysts said.
“Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a post on the company’s blog on Tuesday.
Twitter, which lets users send short, 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of “followers,” is among the new breed of popular Internet social networking services, along with Facebook and LinkedIn.
The company struck deals to provide its stream of Tweets to Google Inc and Microsoft Corp for inclusion in their Web search results last year, but Tuesday’s ad service represents the first fruits of an effort to build a business model around a recurring revenue stream.
Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a handful of advertisers including Starbucks Corp, Best Buy Co, Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures and Virgin America. Under the program, a Twitter message, such as a promotional offer by Starbucks, will appear at the top of search results on Twitter for keywords that companies specifically purchase from Twitter.
As Twitter broadens the program to include more advertisers, spokesman Sean Garret said, keywords on Twitter’s search engine will be opened to competitive bidding by advertisers, similar to the way that Google’s lucrative paid search advertising program operates.
Twitter also said on its blog Tuesday that the company planned to eventually serve Promoted Tweets ads beyond its search feature, offering the ads directly within users’ message streams.
Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst, said Twitter needs to roll out the ad program more aggressively to advertisers if it hopes to turn its service into a money-making tool that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
“A handful of advertisers is not going to get them where they want to go,” said Bernoff. “Scale is where the success is.”
Twitter does not release information about its number of users, but comScore said the site had 22.3 million unique visitors in March in the United States, up roughly 140 percent year-over-year.
The ad program represents Twitter’s latest move to evolve from a hot start-up into a financially focused enterprise. The company has filled out its management team with executives with experience at Google and Walt Disney Co’s Pixar Animation Studios over the past year.
Twitter’s Garrett said that Twitter has no plans for an initial public offering, though as one of the Internet’s most popular Web companies, analysts believe Twitter could eventually make for an attractive IPO candidate.
Cowen and Company analyst Jim Friedland said Twitter needed to first show investors that the new ad model can deliver sustainable revenue.
“Even if this ad opportunity is incredibly successful, it’s still going to be a while before they have the track record to go public,” said Friedland. He pointed to Google, which unveiled its AdWords program several years before floating shares to the public in 2004.
Twitter is backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In September, the company raised USD 100 million in a funding round that valued the company at USD 1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.