About the best thing to be said for Sony’s grotesque financial results is that they came in smaller than expected. The company’s 98.9 billion yen ($1 billion) loss for the fiscal year ended March–its first net loss in 14 years–wasn’t nearly as bad as the 150.0 billion yen ($1.57 billion) figure it had predicted in January or even close to the 173.8 billion yen ($1.8 billion) analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been forecasting.
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Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp. hasn’t posted a quarterly loss since it began reporting earnings in 1953. Well, there’s a first time for everything. And with the widening gyre of the recession as backdrop, the company now expects to report one.
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“We have big plans for the digital television business,” Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai said at a Canon exhibition in 2005. And with a new technology called surface-conduction electron-emitter display, and plans to use it to transform the lowly TV into a “multifunction information device,” Canon seemed well poised to execute them. At the time, anyway.
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Good thing Apple CEO Steve Jobs views Apple TV as the company’s hobby, because if it were a business it’d be in big trouble.
Launched amid great fanfare earlier this year, the device has since faded into obscurity. Apple hasn’t yet released sales figures for the streaming set-top box, but research outfit Forrester believes them to [...]
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Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns Monday.
To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears below.
- As inevitable as death and taxes: YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video site, will begin placing ads in its videos, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reports. The animated advertising will appear no earlier than 15 seconds into a video, overlaid on the bottom fifth of the screen. Citing viewer revulsion, a YouTube product manager told NewTeeVee the site will not use the dreaded preroll or postroll.
- Apple, leveraging its deal-brokering with AT&T stateside, has signed up European partners for iPhone sales and service. A report in the Financial Times notes that three telecoms–T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France and O2 in the United Kingdom–will fork over 10% of the revenues made from iPhone calls and data transfers.
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