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Archive for May 15th, 2009

Sony Reels From $1.03B Loss Amid Falling Sales

In a sign of the times for the consumer electronics industry, Sony on Thursday posted its first annual loss in 14 years. It predicted a bleak year ahead.Sony’s loss was 98.9 billion yen (US$1.03 billion) for its fiscal year just ended, and it expects a net loss of 120 billion yen (US$1.25 billion) for its fiscal year ending in March 2010. Despite the dismal report, Sony beat analyst’s expectations, thanks to a one-time gain from Japanese tax-law changes.

Sony blamed the economic downturn and a strong yen for its poor earnings and plans to close three factories in Japan to slash production costs. But analysts suggested the problem might be something more.

“Like Apple products, Sony products often carry a bit of a cache and are considered premium products,” said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret. “The key difference is that Apple has managed to portray itself as a premium product that carries value. Sony hasn’t gone to the trouble to establish the value behind the premium offerings.”

Click here to read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.

May 15th, 2009

Amazon Launches Blog Subscriptions for Kindle

After optimizing the Kindle bookstore for the iPhone and acquiring the popular iPhone e-book reader Stanza, Amazon is now turning the page on its next Kindle innovation: Blog subscriptions.

Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a beta program to pay bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts. Although Kindle comes equipped with a simple browser that allows consumers to pull up their blogs of choice, Amazon has decided to remove a step from the process and push blog content to the device’s home screen. Subscriptions run 99 cents to $2 a month.

Amazon pays registered bloggers 30 percent of the subscription fee and keeps 70 percent for internal costs. Bloggers don’t have to pay any fees to join the program, but Amazon sets the price of the content based on what it deems a fair value for customers. The new program opens the door for bloggers to gain new readers and cash.

Click here to read the rest of my story on CIOToday.

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