consumers

As of the end of October, Samsung no longer sells its consumer gadgets in Japan, according to the Associated Press.

The Korean electronics giant had actually pulled its products out of Japanese retail outlets a year ago, but as of the end of last month, it ended its Web presence also.

"We judged direct sales to individual consumers are less profitable than business-to-business sales," Lee Eun-hee, a Samsung spokeswoman, told the AP. Samsung will still sell flat panel monitors, LCD panels, and memory chips directly to businesses.

While Samsung is the largest provider of flat-panel televisions in North … Read more

Despite intense competition, price cuts and a shaky economy, it's going to be another good year for the electronics industry, predicts Sony's Stan Glasgow.

Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics, said that orders from retailers are strong once again this year. Consumers are snapping up high-definition TVs, but also digital cameras and video cameras. Sony's gaining ground in notebooks too: shipments are up by double digits, he said. Sony lost seven days of production out of its San Diego area factory because of the fires in the region (some right near the factory); the company, however, has already … Read more

It's happening again.

If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.

Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until … Read more

After attempts to "crowdsource" the purchase of a soccer club, it was obviously just a matter of time until the concept of crowdsourcing--the act of outsourcing a job or task to a group of people--would be applied to the actual game.

The Israeli team Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom, a shared project of the online backgammon room Play65 and the Israeli social network for sports fans Web2sport, prides itself on being the first Web 2.0 soccer club in the world.

The club has begun experimenting with a wisdom-of-the-fans approach that allows the team's supporters to monitor … Read more

Peace and happiness are all well and good, but apparently not as enticing as a new Vaio.

In a just -released survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, computers topped respondents' holiday wish lists of top-five gifts--followed by peace and happiness, big-screen televisions, clothes and money.

Notably, the big-screen TV moved up in the 2007 survey to No. 3 from 11th in 2006. The teen wish list remained unchanged: clothes, MP3 players, video games, computers and cell phones (with international human rights way down the lineup, just under skateboards).

In its "14th Annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns" study, the … Read more

David Armano from Critical Mass will moderate a panel on "Always in Beta: How Big Business Can Benefit from 'Little' Innovation" at the Forrester Consumer Forum (October 10 to 13). Here's a quick synopsis: "Innovation isn't limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement--powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be 'always in beta'--learning and evolving along the way."

The fact that the Forrester Consumer Forum dedicates a panel to … Read more

Now here's an innovation: "music on demand," in the truest sense of the meaning. Radiohead, the juggernauts of intelligentsia rock, announced that they will give away their new album "In Rainbows" as a download for whatever price consumers are willing to pay. The band is free to sell the new album directly from the official website because it is no longer tied to a record label. So far, the album is only available to pre-order, but it can be downloaded when released on October 10.

It's not the first time that an artist or … Read more

Back in the 1980s there was an expectation that when you bought a product, it would work. For example, CDs, pop one in a player and it would play. There wasn't a case of, say, a Version 2.0 CD player that refused to play a Region 9 disc. As far as I can recall, 100% of properly manufactured discs played on properly functioning machines. You pressed "play," and you heard music--no menus, no error messages, no ifs, ands, or buts.

But CD, the first truly successful consumer digital audio format, was introduced before computers sabotaged the … Read more

Nickelodeon parent Viacom is as ever-optimistic as SpongeBob himself. The company is releasing a new line of higher-end consumer electronics branded with ubiquitous characters such as Dora and SpongeBob.

This isn't Nick's first foray into electronics, but apparently it's the first time the company isn't slapping the images onto schlock, according to an article in The New York Times.

One of the least expensive items in the new lineup is $29 SpongeBob alarm clock. I must say, it could be awfully satisfying to thump SpongeBob on the head in order to catch a few more minutes … Read more