The European Commission decides Nokia’s DVB-H will be the preferred European mobile TV standard. Some EU states (UK, Germany, Netherlands) opposed setting DVB-H as the single standard: now EU countries will now be required to encourage the use of DVB-H. EC hopes this year's soccer European Championship and the Olympic Games will boost consumer take-up of mobile TV.
Whoops There Goes Our R&D
Place fewer, bigger bets. Or is it just fewer bets? Our IT industry R&D is not even growing by 1% a year.
HP calls it “laser focus;” IBM says “a realignment of research priorities;” and Sun just calls it “trimming.”
HPLabs shifts funding from 150 projects to 20-30 bigger projects. Prith Banerjee, director, says: “If you have limited resources, having a ‘let 1,000 flowers bloom’ approach doesn’t give enough resources to any one idea”.
But it worked well in the past. According to research, companies who boost R&D (as a percentage of their sales) over a 5-year period tend to be rewarded with higher profits and share prices in later years.
Solid State Drives Not So Solid?
Just as notebook makers increasingly adopt SSDs, an industry analyst says a major builder (Dell presumably) experiences a 20-30% return (performance issues piling on top of 10-20% failure rates.)
Intel is expected to enter the SSD market with 80GB-160GB. With SSD failures 10X higher than HDDs (10-12% vs. 0.5-2%), making reliable SSDs will be the key that could differentiate SSD vendors.
SSD’s high failure rates come at a price: $1000 extra for a notebook with SSD.
Patent Raid at CeBIT: 180 Officials to Fine 51 Companies
Police filled 68 boxes with cell phones, navigation devices, electronic picture frames and flat-screen devices in a patent raid on CeBIT exhibitors. The patent violations included devices with MP3, MP4 or digital video broadcast functions, as well as DVD players and blank CDs and DVDs
It took 180 police and custom officers to confront 24 exhibitors from mainland China, three from Hong Kong, 12 from Taiwan, 9 German, and one each were from Poland, Netherlands and Korea.
Go (in German) Polizei
802.11n Router: Prices Drop 6.7% in January.
Context SalesWatch Distribution (data for France, Germany &UK) says the Average Selling Price (ASP) of 802.11n routers reached 111 euro in January 2008 (down 6.7% from 119 (excl. VAT) in Dec. 2007).
Vendors with the most significant ASP drops in January: Linksys (94 euros), Belkin (91 euros), U.S. Robotics (110 euros), AVM (152 euros) and SMC (43 euros). Distributor pricing was mostly stable for other vendors such as Netgear, D-Link, and slightly upwards for Apple.
Go Context
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