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Tid-bits
12/22 - The live celebration alone, after Howard Stern's final day on FM radio, surpassed the number of viewers of any other live entertainment webcast. Howard debuts on SIRIUS January 9, 2006. The webcast of the last show itself produced significant results in online retail. Best Buy, Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Crutchfield "each reported sales far above their average business, and, in some cases, sales above their 'best' selling days of the year".
Looking to play video games on your mobile phone? One game awarded the title of best in the mobile category was ported from the Sony PlayStation to the mobile platform. Ratchet & Clank "completed their successful evolution from home entertainment systems to mobile handsets".
And for the Verizon Wireless crowd there is now Sega's Sonic The Hedgehog. "Customers need a Get It Now-enabled phone and Verizon Wireless digital service".
A Federal Express truck carrying goods from a semiconductor company was hijacked, in the Philippines. The truck was en route to customers. The parts have "a market value of approximately US $565,000".
A podcast on massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) is available on IBM's website. The players are doing more than play games: they are forging communities that interact. "The technologies that allow this interaction to happen could represent the future of the Internet".
Your high definition TV (HDTV) might just have a chip in it from computer graphics manufacturer ATI. ATI has shipped more than 10 million such chips. The processors are found in consumer electronics devices, "including HD TVs and set-top boxes".
Technology from Sun now powers the Federal Aviationi Administration's (FAA) Telecommunications Infrastructure as an integrated system. Harris Corporation spearheaded the deployment. "Roughly 30,000 telecommunications services will transition to over 5,000 FAA and non-FAA facilities".
There has been a big merger and acquisition in the hard drive industry. Seagate shall acquire Maxtor. Mergers can result in revenue attrition. To offset the anticipated attrition in revenue, Seagate estimates that it can save $300 million annually in operating expenses by merging the two companies. The companies shall form a larger company, and with size comes economies of scale. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2006—about the same time frame as Windows Vista and Intel's next generation architecture. The plan is to produce more products "at more competitive prices".
STMicroelectronics is working on chips for the digital home that stream audio and video over wireless home networks among all sorts of devices. Technologies include transcoding, encoding, decoding (you guessed it), 802.11n wireless, and more. Transcoding adapts digital video streams without fully decoding or re-encoding the bitstream. "The consumer electronics industry is converging on a scenario in which heterogenous devices in the home will connect seamlessly".
IBM offers comprehensive storage solutions to consolidate technological infrastructures. For example, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and IBM are implementing a tiered storage environment. The first tier consists of three storage servers, and a second tier of two storage servers for midrange applications. IBM works with "customers to help them create an on demand environment".
Broadening its product line of memory products enabled Micron to weather a 15% decline in the average selling prices (ASPs) of PC DRAM. In addition to computer memory, Micron makes CMOS image sensors for consumer electronics devices, specialty DRAM, and NAND flash memory. Specialty DRAM includes synchronous and pseudo-static DRAM. "Despite PC DRAM price pressure in the quarter, the Company’s gross margin remained stable".
Red Hat continues to do well. Its "growth places Red Hat among the fastest growing mid-cap technology companies in the world".