Recently in Consumer Category

With Matsushita, Sharp and Sony forecasting a Y1.3 trillion ($17 billion) combined loss for the year, you have to ask: Are the Consumer Kings on the way out?

It always struck me that WiFi was the route to home networking, then Marvell tells wireline is the way forward - at least until Marvell's managed to put wireless on the same IC as its wireline transceiver which will take a couple of years.

Last week was a bad one. The US reeled from its sovereign debt deal; Europe reeled from its attempts at sovereign debt deals. Those CEOs reporting alluded to macroeconomic uncertainties as they made their Q3 forecasts.

Akio Morita would have understood it all right. If you bring out Japan's first transistor radio, if you bring out the world's first consumer-affordable video tape recorder, if you bring out the first CCD-based video camera , if you bring out the first portable music-player - then you have a massively successful business.

It's good to meet a CEO who's open to new business models, who looks to new uses for his technology, supports new technology developments and seeks new ways of taking his technology to market. James Lewis, founder of Oxford Semiconductors, now CEO of NXT, is like that.

I have to say, when it comes to portables, the opinion of Sanjay Jha, ex-COO of Qualcomm and current CEO of Motorola, is good enough for me.

Thanks to CoolBrands for this one - its list of the ten most coveted brands in Britain. This year, the iPhone knocked Aston Martin off  CoolBrands' top spot in 2008, and Apple had three out of the top five brand names. Here is the top ten list.

The 'stay-at-home' economy is boosting the sales of high-tech consumer goods, according to a report from Mintel, which says the UK will spend £50 billion on high-tech goods this year, for the first time.

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The one thing which Welsh-Not-So-Wizard Howard Stringer has failed to restore to Sony, despite all his cost-cutting, is a return to that luminous quality of innovative charm which infused so many Sony products.

Could another search engine catch on? One assumes it would have to be significantly better than Google if it is to do so, and so the question one has to ask is: Is Bing much better than Google?

The MEMS sector seems to be the Mr Wimpy of the semiconductor industry. It is content to be led by its customers, whereas real semiconductor companies get out there and show potential customers the amazing thing which their products can do.

Americans are going through a fundamental shift in behaviour - they are moving from being the biggest spenders on the planet to becoming a nation of savers, with fundamental consequences for the economy.

I must say seeing this on YouTube reminded me of a couple of pigeons I watched while sitting in that magnificent Thames-side boozer, The Cutty Sark in Greenwich. It's worth turning up the sound.

STMicroelectronics' acquisition, Genesis Microchip, is expected to result in a unified, high margin, digital chip-set next year.

Should engineers run chip companies? A few years ago it was a no-brainer. The decisions taken relied so much on making a sound technical judgment that you had to have an engineer calling the shots.

Today XMOS announces the sampling of its first chip, a four core chip, with each core delivering 400MIPS, selling for $10 in volume.

The news that one third of all XBox360s is a dud, raises the question: Could it be that the US revival in consumer electronics will fizzle out because of shitty manufacturing?

“The next cycle is actual innovation”, says Sony’s Welsh Wizard, Sir Howard Stringer, who said this week that the company’s financial woes have been fixed, the turnaround plan will be completed by Q208, and that its new products are bringing back what he calls: “The Wow factor”.