Epson touts "all-in-one" LCD touchscreens

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Epson looks to be doing its part for the further slimming down of touchscreen-based devices, with it now touting a couple of new "all-in-one" displays that boast an integrated cover and touch panel. According to DigiTimes, two different models will be available, including 3.1-inch and 7-inch variations, each of which boast a WVGA resolution, and Epson's trademark "Photo Fine Vistarich" technology, which promises to make the screens viewable even at extreme angles. No word as to when they might actually make their way into some commercially-available products, however, but Epson will apparently be doing its best to woo potential partners at the FPD International conference in Yokohama, Japan this week.

 

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Nokia and Reuters develop an N95-based "Mobile Journalism Toolkit"

awesome

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

The rise of the cameraphone has certainly changed the face of journalism, and old-guard wire service Reuters isn't about to get passed by -- the company has entered into a long-term partnership with Nokia to develop new mobile reporting technologies, and the two companies have recently completed trials of an N95-based "Mobile Journalism Tookit" that takes moblogging to a whole new level. Reporters were given a hardware bundle that consisted of an N95, a Nokia SU-8W portable keyboard, a Sony condenser mic with special N95 adapter, a tripod, and two Power Monkey power stations, including the solar-capable Explorer, all of which linked into a custom mobile CMS that allows stories to be posted almost instantly. Reuters also partnered with Comvu for GPS-linked video streaming, and the N95 also provides a host of other metadata about each piece of content as it's filed. Although the trial is now over, both Reuters and Nokia plan on using the kits to teach journalism students and to promote the cause of citizen journalism. Let's hope that means they start teaching people how to take non-blurry cameraphone spy shots, eh?

Read -- Mobile Journalism Toolkit press release
Read -- Posts from the Reuters mobile journalism trial
Read -- Toolkit contents

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McIntyre: Apple (AAPL) is Not Google (GOOG)

from Silicon Alley Insider by Henry Blodget

Douglas McIntyre is the CEO of 24/7 Wall St, a New York-based financial media company.  He argues here that the market's wild enthusiasm about Apple's stock and PC market share gains is misplaced.

With Apple's most impressive quarter behind it and with a forecast of a $9.2 billion quarter ahead, it would appear that Jobs & Co. cannot be stopped. They will continue to rule the portable and digital music industries. Their assault on the handset business s a smashing success. The Mac is finally getting the kind of adoption that its advocates were certain it would.

Price targets for Apple are now above $200 matching the kind of optimism that $800 price targets hold for Google.

Over the last year, Google's shares are only up 40%. Apple's are up well over 100%. Apple's price to sales is about 7x while Google's is 15x. Many would argue that is because Apple is a hardware company and can never have Google's margins.

But, the analysis is more complex than that. Google is really only in one market, which is search. It plays around in other businesses but they don't create any revenue. Google is first in search, by a wide margin.

Apple is in three businesses. In the iPod/iTune segment, it stands as No.1 and no other company is likely to catch it there. In the handset business, the iPhone may be a success, but, even if its sells 10 million units next year, it is up against companies like Nokia (NOK) which sells closer to 400 million units in a good twelve month period.

Apple's problem is even worse in the PC market. Worldwide, its share may be close to 6% and better than that in the US. But, Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) sales are moving up twice as fast as the overall PC market, even though it is the No.1 company in the industry, Acer's growth rate is four times the industry average.

In other words, the idea that the Mac is growing faster than all other PC brands is something of a myth.

Apple is not Google because it is so far behind the competition in two of its three markets. The market sees that risk, and it means the level of concern about AAPL's share price will only grow.

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Samsung: Samsung's Unleashes World's Densest Flash Memory

from Gizmodo by Haroon Malik

Samsung has just rolled out a 30nm 64Gb NAND flash memory chip, which happens to be the world's densest. By packing together the maximum of 16 of the multi level cells, a memory card containing 128GB of storage space can conceivably be created.

Samsung has managed this feat by developing a new process they are calling self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT). SaDPT involves a more efficient pattern transfer than used in Samsung's (older) charge trap flash (CTF) procedure, and if we get any more technical we may implode spontaneously. Both procedures are cost effective and we can expect to see higher capacity flash based drives at a reasonable price. Although a 128GB memory card at a realistic price point is optimistic, the general price of flash memory should fall as a consequence of the new development. The devices are planned to begin mass production in 2009 and an estimated market value, in a three year period, is projected to be as high as $20 billion for the new class of memory chips. [Via Press Release]

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Research Note: Open Pricing and Revolutionizing Value Creation

from BGSL by umair

I've been going on for a while about how open pricing is the most revolutionary innovation to hit the economy for a long time; how it will absolutely eviscerate massconomy business models; etc.

Read this - especially the numbers.

And if you're a decision-maker in any consumer industry, spend a few hours today thinking about this and talking about it with your colleagues.

Forget about all the noise - there's a lot of it, but it's largely strategically irrelevant (ie, it's trivial that NBC's Hulu move is a wash, because it vaporizes its own marginal benefits).

Focus on this for a while - because it's a really big deal.

I cannot stress enough the potential of open pricing as an innovation that the tiniest, poorest, most unexpected radical innovators can use to warp and reshape the fabric of entire industries.

That doesn't just mean the music industry - the economics driving open pricing are the same across many, many consumer markets.

I know, I know - it sounds wack if you're a beancounter. But it's not a "marketing stunt", although most journos still think it is.

That's because the economics are unstoppable, inexorable, as inevitable as the tide.

If you don't learn to leverage it - make no mistake, radical innovators will utilize it to drive you deeply and perhaps fatally into a value chasm.

If you ignore it, you are being driven squarely into strategy decay in realtime.

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