Lenovo recalled 78,000 ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptops due to an unfastened screw that can damage the battery, causing overheating and a fire hazard, said the Consumer Product Safety Commission Tuesday. The recall covers type 20HQ, 20HR, 20K3 or 20K4 14-inch laptops with December 2016-October 2017 manufacture dates, CPSC said. Consumers can check the Lenovo website to see if their laptop was recalled. No reports of overheating have been reported in the U.S., it said.

Sales in Sony’s core Home Entertainment & Sound sector jumped 22 percent in Q3 ended Dec. 31 to $3.9 billion ($1 = 109 yen), Sony reported Friday, the day it announced the promotion of Chief Financial Officer Kenichiro Yoshida to replace Kazuo Hirai as president-CEO, effective April 1 (see this issue's personals section of this publication). Operating profit in the sector climbed 78 percent to $423.9 million, prompting Sony to raise its fiscal-year operating income forecast for the sector by 4 percent from its October projection. If the new forecast holds, Sony will have recorded a 37 percent rise in its Home Entertainment & Sound operating profit from last fiscal year, the company said. Sony credited “improvement in the product mix of televisions reflecting a shift to high value-added models, primarily 4K televisions,” for the significantly higher revenue and profit performance in the sector, all when Sony’s TV unit sales are showing no remarkable increases. Sony shipped 4.2 million TVs in the holiday quarter, a slight uptick from the 4.1 million sets it shipped in the same quarter a year earlier, the company said. It left unchanged the October forecast in which it said it expects to ship 12.5 million TVs this fiscal year, which would be only a 3 percent increase from the 12.1 million sets it shipped a year earlier.

Sonos’ closing of its New York flagship store for Sunday to show support for net neutrality on a day the music industry gathered in town for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards was an “opportunity to be bold and make an action-oriented statement that aligns so strongly with our values,” a spokeswoman said Monday. The FCC voted to repeal net neutrality rules in December (see 1712140039). Music “drives everything we do but unfortunately, music faces mounting threats in today’s world,” said the representative. “Too many artists encounter barriers when it comes to free expression and access to information. Communities lack space and resources to ensure all musicians can be heard.” She referenced Sonos’ Listen Better initiative, launched in the fall, committing $1.5 million in grants over three years to fund grassroots organizations working to promote the future of music. A sign on the closed Sonos storefront said: “If we let net neutrality get stripped away, powerful gatekeepers could stifle creativity and hold back tomorrow’s talent.”

Wedbush Securities predicted for Amazon an “upside driven by very strong holiday demand,” a full quarter of Whole Foods contribution and continued growth in third-party seller services, subscriptions and Amazon Web Services. In a Monday research note before Thursday's Q4 earnings release, the analysis modeled Amazon’s Q4 revenue at $59.27 billion vs. consensus of $59.83 billion and Amazon’s guidance of $56 billion-$60.5 billion. Wedbush expects Amazon’s spending on content for streaming services to grow from an estimated $4.5 billion in 2017 to $6 billion this year, “implying operating margin contraction,” said analyst Michael Pachter.

Tech companies have improved takedowns of online hate speech but need better communication with users about removal policies, said the European Commission Friday in its third code of conduct evaluation since the effort started in 2016 (see 1605310051). Google+ and Facebook’s Instagram told the EU they're joining the code of conduct, which includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, plus nongovernmental organizations and privacy groups. Companies within 24 hours removed about 70 percent of illegal hate speech reported to them, but “challenges still remain, in particular the lack of systematic feedback to users,” EU said. The takedown rate was 59 percent in May and 28 percent in the first monitoring round. All companies participating in the code of conduct “fully meet the target” of reviewing notifications within 24 hours, EU said. The commission said it will continue to monitor code implementation and hopes to expand the number of participating online platforms. Google confirmed its commitment. Facebook didn't comment.

Panasonic is recalling about 755 55-inch LCD TVs and their swivel stands because of a tip-over hazard, said the Consumer Product Safety Commission in a Friday notice. The mounting screws that connect the swivel stand to the TV can come loose and cause the set to fall off the stand, posing serious “entrapment hazards that can result in injuries or death to children,” said the notice, noting no injuries have been reported. Those using the swivel stand should immediately detach it, place the TV in a safe place away from children and contact Panasonic for a free repair kit, it said. Panasonic sold the TVs and swivel stands for about $1,825 each to hotels, government buildings and schools between July 2012 and March 2014, said the notice. Panasonic’s share of the North American consumer TV business in recent years has fallen to nearly zero (see 1602050053).

Samsung Electronics America began commercial washing machine production at its 151,000-square-foot Newberry County, South Carolina, manufacturing plant, the company said Friday. The company plans to produce 1 million washers at the $380 million facility this year, it said. Samsung hired over 540 employees, with 90 percent based in Newberry County and surrounding communities, and expects the plant to employ 1,000 by 2020, most from that same area, said the company.

News will remain “highly popular” on Facebook despite an algorithm change announced Thursday that will shift focus away from public content, professional pages and publishers, said News Media Alliance President David Chavern in a Friday statement. The company is making the change based on “feedback from our community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.” The change highlights Facebook’s power “to decide (and alter) the kinds of information that people are exposed to,” said Chavern, who has said the social media service should move to a subscription model. Barclays said the move could hurt revenue in the short term, but the company should be in a position to drive pricing over the long term.

Channel Master plans the CES debut of its SMARTenna+, which it describes as the world’s first over-the-air smart, processor-enabled indoor TV antenna available to consumers. It uses “active-steering” technology from components manufacturer Ethertronics, and has built-in amplification and noise-filtering, so it automatically can find the “optimal antenna settings for the available channels, with the option for fine-tuning via a push-button control,” said Channel Master. That combination of features increases viewer “convenience and flexibility while maximizing the number of channels received across all VHF and UHF channels,” it said. The SMARTenna+ has a built-in tuner, which scans the available channels on the “initial plug-in of the antenna,” said Joe Bingochea, executive vice president-product development. It can receive from seven different positions, he said. “It will scan all those seven different positions, and will determine which one of those positions can receive the most channels.” The scan takes about two minutes, he said. Improved Channel Master algorithms reduced the scan time by more than 75 percent, he said.

Google agreed to extend the commitments it made to the FTC in 2012 to resolve a years-long antitrust investigation, including continuing to allow third-party search engines to access its AdWords application programming interface. The agreement, which the FTC announced in early 2013, expired Wednesday (see 1301040038). The extension came amid increasing criticism and scrutiny in the U.S. and the EU of major tech sector firms' practices. “We believe that these policies provide continued flexibility for developers and websites, and we will continue them as policies after the commitments expire,” said Google Senior Competition Counsel Michael Lawrence in a letter published Wednesday. The voluntary extension also means Google agreed to continue to abide by a pledge to stop “scraping” its rivals' content. Yelp Vice President-Public Policy Luther Lowe tweeted that the company provided “hard evidence to the FTC” in September “that Google was violating its 2012 promises 500k times per hour.” Google didn't immediately comment. "As soon as we learned of Yelp's claim we took immediate steps to look at and address any issue, as we would have had they come to us directly," a Google spokesman said. "We continue to stand by our commitments to the FTC."