Mannerisms

The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) sees all sorts of surprising ways in which people are making a lot of money in the US electronics industry, and much of it is far from being high-tech.

What's the next thing the electronics industry will make disposable? There's a body of thought about which says it's going to be the laptop.

The reason why people are turning away from high-end phones to low-end is now obvious, and it will continue.

Technophobia is rampant as the electronics industry produces more and more products which ordinary people find impossible to use.

XMOS Semiconductor has come up with a new type of chip called SDS (software defined silicon) to give back to the designers of consumer electronics goods the freedom they used to enjoy to innovate.

It looks as if Sneakernet is the answer to the inter-connected home. The huge problem of how you connect your PC to your TV has been solved by a SanDisk USB flash drive which has a cradle which connects into the standard video ports on the TV.

Toronto is going to give the world high speed, high-definition, video transmission over low cost cabling, according to Franz Fink, the CEO of Toronto-based fabless semiconductor company, Gennum.

It’s a software world, according to the professor of computer science at Bristol University.

As we lurch into Christmas, what electronics products are opening the wallets of the British consumer? According to digital analytics company, comScore, based on on-line searches, these are the top ten most popular electronics products in the UK this Christmas.

“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”.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?