Google is “enjoying high consumer success” with YouTube, Android and Chrome, CEO Larry Page said Thursday on a quarterly earnings call, but for the second quarter in a row Google TV seems to have dropped off the company radar. Instead, Page highlighted Android and Google+, the company’s social media venture that has gained 10 million users in its first few weeks in operation. “One billion items have been shared and received” over Google+, Page said. “We want to create services that people use twice a day like a toothbrush,” he said, adding the company is only at “one percent of what we can accomplish.”
Google is “enjoying high consumer success” with YouTube, Android and Chrome, CEO Larry Page said Thursday on a quarterly earnings call, but for the second quarter in a row Google TV seems to have dropped off the company radar. Instead, Page highlighted Android and Google+, the company’s social media venture that has gained 10 million users in its first few weeks in operation. “One billion items have been shared and received” over Google+, Page said. “We want to create services that people use twice a day like a toothbrush,” he said, adding the company is only at “one percent of what we can accomplish.”
Black Friday came early at Target online Friday as the retailer held a one-day-only “Back in Black Friday” sale. “Yeah, it’s only July,” read the email notice to Target customers, “but huge Black Friday deals are back.” Within minutes after we received the email, a Philips TV advertised as “$250 off” was listed as sold out. A 19-inch Vizio LED-backlit LCD TV was quoted at $99.99, or 50 percent off, and a Kodak 14-megapixel M52, at $89.99, was selling at a 40 percent discount. Twenty percent was shaved from the price of an Xbox 360 4-gigabyte console with two controllers, bringing the bundle to $199. A Kodak’s waterproof mini video camera with a 2-gigabyte MicroSD Card was tagged $44.99. The retailer took $5 off the price of a 7-inch Digital Labs portable DVD Player, bringing it to $49.99. The sale ran from midnight to midnight. Retailers may have to hold more of these out-of-season Black Friday specials to spur spending if sentiment reported in a consumer confidence study by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan released Friday carries through the rest of the year. “While spending gains can be expected in the second half of 2011, the overall trend is more likely to vary between lackluster and zero than between lackluster and robust,” said Richard Curtin, Surveys of Consumers chief economist. Resurgent spending “is not on the horizon,” he said. Long-term, changes in consumer spending could be significant, he said. “The consumer no longer has the financial wherewithal to power the economy into overdrive,” he said. Continued economic stagnation “may ultimately dampen their spending desires in favor of a more permanent shift toward economic caution and risk aversion,” he said.
Google is “enjoying high consumer success” with YouTube, Android and Chrome, CEO Larry Page said late Thursday on a quarterly earnings call. But for the second quarter in a row Google TV seems to have dropped off the company radar. Instead, Page highlighted Android and Google+, the company’s social media venture that has gained 10 million users in its first few weeks in operation. On the mobile side, Google is logging 550,000 Android activations a day, said Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora. Total activations to date are 135 million, up from 100 million two months ago, Senior Vice President Susan Wojcicki said. More than 400 Android devices are available globally, she said, with 6 billion apps downloaded from Android Market to date, double that of “a few months ago,” she said. More than 250,000 apps are available at Android Market, she said. The company is expanding beyond entertainment for mobile devices, she said. “Phones are also becoming key to the shopping experience, making shopping mobile and local.” Wojcicki said the company launched a mobile app for Google Wallet and Google Offers, and both are currently in field trials.
A popular item on consumers’ holiday gift lists this year could be digital content subscriptions, if announcements made Thursday hit their marks. On the same day Spotify unveiled U.S. availability of its long-promised streaming music service (see separate report in this issue), the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) said it began its licensing program for UltraViolet. That starts the infrastructure installation process for a fall start of the UltraViolet ecosystem.
A popular item on consumers’ holiday gift lists this year could be digital content subscriptions, if announcements made Thursday hit their marks. On the same day Spotify unveiled U.S. availability of its long-promised streaming music service, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) said it began its licensing program for UltraViolet. That starts the infrastructure installation process for a fall start of the UltraViolet ecosystem.
Consumers who want to use the much-hyped Spotify streaming music service on non-PC devices such as cellphones, tablets and AV receivers will need to subscribe to the top-level subscription package, according to audio companies we polled Thursday. Already Sonos and Logitech are pushing Spotify’s premium $9.99-a-month service for owners of their wireless multi-room audio systems, which also stream Pandora, Rhapsody and Sirius XM, among others. The free, ad-supported and $4.99 PC-only versions of Spotify aren’t available on external devices including multi-room music systems, multi-room players or cellphones. A premium account is required for the service to be used on “external (non-PC) devices like our receivers,” said a spokesman for Onkyo. Subscribers to the premium plan can have the app on an unlimited number of devices, a spokeswoman for Spotify told us, but they can only stream on one device at a time. Users can play offline playlists on up to three devices, however, she said. Additional features of the top-shelf plan include higher sound quality and “exclusive competitions and offers,” she said. Although the top-tier plan is capable of streaming at 320 kbps, not all songs are available at that data rate, she said. Onkyo began uploading firmware updates via zip files Thursday that owners of its 2011 networked receivers could download to PC and install through USB ports on receivers, it said. Sonos called the Europe-based streaming music service “one of the most anticipated music services” ever to come to this country. To have Spotify on Sonos, consumers need a Sonos player, a Sonos controller app for Android, iPhone or iPad and the Spotify premium account, Sonos said. Denon, which also sells Internet-ready AV receivers and was one of the first to support Apple’s AirPlay, didn’t respond by our deadline about whether its receivers would have access to Spotify. Spotify said its library is at 15 million tracks “and counting.” Spotify is offering U.S. users six months of unlimited free streaming, a spokeswoman for the on-demand music service told us. Its formal launch in the U.S. Thursday capped two years of false starts and frustrated negotiations with major labels. Spotify bragged Thursday that 15 percent of its users in Europe were paying subscribers, either to its Unlimited desktop-streaming plan or Premium mobile-phone plan; it passed 1 million subscribers this spring. The ad-supported free version in the U.S. is invitation-only at this point, the spokeswoman said: Those with an invitation can listen with no limits for six months, after which the free offering will cap listening to 10 hours a month and five plays per track. “We're going to see how things go over the next few weeks as to how many invites will be distributed and how long the free service will be invite-only,” she said, calling invitations a “hot commodity.” Users can sign up on the invite list at Spotify.com. Those who purchase a subscription can get immediate access. When the invitation-only phase ends, users can get 20 hours of free streaming a month for six months, at which time the free service will revert back to 10 hours and five track plays, the same limits as its European service. Spotify makes it easy for users to share tracks with friends and, in a feature already drawing raves from U.S. users on Twitter, lets users listen to songs offline. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said on its blog that the U.S. service would launch with brand partners Coca-Cola, Sprite, Chevrolet, Motorola, Reebok, Sonos and News Corp.’s The Daily for iPad. Giles Cottle, Informa Telecoms & Media principal analyst, said Spotify could only succeed in the U.S. if it repeats its formula in Europe: “A clean, intuitive user interface, deep links with properties like Facebook and Last.fm (a Pandora deal is not out of the question) and high penetration across mobile handsets and other devices.” But Spotify has a steep hill to climb in the U.S., he said, with “limited brand awareness,” established on-demand competitors like Rhapsody and Napster, upstarts like Mog and Rdio and 100-million user Pandora. With no brand having broken a million paying users, Spotify will be considered a failure if it only manages to “poach a few users from its competitors,” Cottle said. And it may not draw the large user base it needs to placate major labels if it is “forced to cap its free offer too quickly,” he added.
A popular item on consumers’ holiday gift lists this year could be digital content subscriptions, if announcements made Thursday hit their marks. On the same day Spotify unveiled U.S. availability of its long-promised streaming music service, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) said it began its licensing program for UltraViolet. That starts the infrastructure installation process for a fall start of the UltraViolet ecosystem.
Energy savings and a “new level of convenience” for users are at the heart of tablet and smartphone features introduced recently by Lutron for its lighting and shade control products, the company told Consumer Electronics Daily.
Public, Education and Government (PEG) operators should focus on Internet TV, not 3D, as the cutting-edge technology for the near future, said Matt DeHaven, principal engineer for Columbia Telecommunications, during a technology briefing Monday sponsored by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors. “The real format of the future” for PEG operators is online multimedia content, whether SD, HD, 3D, or social media, DeHaven said. PEG operators have to think more about interactive media “as a way to reach folks out there” and less about the type of video format they're using to reach people, DeHaven said. Quality is important because cable companies will show “an increasing desire” to carry PEG channels in an HD format, he said. “They're not going to want to have anything on their system that doesn’t look good,” he said. HD will offer PEG operators better resolution for computer-generated text and graphics used in government and education programming, DeHaven said, as HD becomes “the baseline for the public.” DeHaven cited industry data forecasting that 50 percent of TVs will be Web-enabled by 2015. Most support content services such as Netflix, YouTube and Roku, other user-generated options are well-suited to PEG operators, he said. Free developer kits enable “anyone to develop an HD channel for free,” and cost-efficient Web streaming and on-demand client platforms are available, too, he said. He also cited “YouTube clones” that allow operators to make local versions of “YouTube-like forums” tailored to a community’s interests. “3D is starting to feel pretty inevitable,” DeHaven said, though “a year ago I might not have felt the same way.” But 3D is “still immature” as it relates to the markets and scale of operation of most PEG operators and requires “significant investment” in technology, skill sets and staffing, he said.