GigaOM » Sony

Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

Roughly half a dozen new mobile operating systems will come to market over the next 6 to 12 months. Many of these look to be more sophisticated than the older ones controlled by Apple and Google. This report will examine the most noteworthy of these new operating systems, Blackberry 10, Firefox, Tizen, and others. It will also document their competitive advantages and disadvantages and gauge what their chances of success — or even true disruption — might be.

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Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Mark Mulligan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:54:59 +0000

Content owners, whether they are publishers, retailers, or marketers, are always looking for new ways to deliver a unique experience to their customers. We call this content personalization. Key trends in this area are led by a collection of technologies that we call post-programming curation. These technologies use the best of behavioral tracking, collaborative filtering, audience targeting, and dynamic content presentation.

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Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:46:59 +0000

Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room.

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Drones on parade, and a few fun facts about 4K

Derrick Harris — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:38:18 +0000

So I stopped by the National Association of Broadcasters show today to talk big data with Gracenote Co-Founder and CTO Ty Roberts, after which he took me on a brief tour of the nearby show floor. If you’ve never been to NAB, it’s like a behind-the-scenes-version of CES, filled with the biggest, baddest, most-expensive television and movie-production equipment you’ve ever seen.

The big thing this year — 4K television. Here are a few factoids that Roberts, clearly having been educated by his peers in the Sony family, shared:

The storage footprint of 1 hour of 4K video is 512 gigabytes.
That’s a lot of data to move across IP, so 4k cameras just send everything straight to production storage systems over fiber-optic cable.
The picture is so detailed that it’s difficult for one person to shoot scenes and focus at the same time. The answer: new two-person camera setups where one guy shoots and the other stands next to him focusing the shot on a larger screen.

Oh, and there were drones, too:

The Schiebel Camcopter S-100.

This is the civilian version of the Schiebel Camcopter S-100. There’s a military version, too. Its sticker price of several hundred thousand dollars probably isn’t surprising.

For the more cost-conscious aerial cinematographer, Freefly Systems had its own booth:

The Freefly Cinestar helicopter

Or for those who prefer the ground:

A video rover, I guess.

This all kind of makes me wish I shot video for a living. If I had a flying, rotating video camera or an off-road setup, I’m sure I could find some way to use them.

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Flash analysis: smart watches

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:05:51 +0000

With the continued miniaturization of technology, the rise of flexible software frameworks, and the growing interest in technologies such as biomonitoring and location-based services, the smart watch is fast becoming technology’s next big thing. We asked GigaOM readers to weigh in on the future of the device. Here are the results.

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Sony brings Xperia ZL smartphone to US but it’s costly at $719

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:01:25 +0000

Hoping to grow its share of the of smartphone market, Sony is now taking pre-orders for its Xperia XL handset. Dubbed the “world’s most compact smartphone with a 5″ display,” the Xperia ZL ships on or around April 8. And on paper, it’s arguably the best smartphone Sony has created yet. But without a carrier partner in the U.S. to subsidize the cost, consumers will pay Sony outright for the phone, to the tune of $719.99.

What do you get for that kind of cash? In terms of hardware, the Xperia ZL rivals the flagship phones from any other handset maker these days. Sony’s Reality Display offers 5-inches of full high-definition resolution and uses the company’s Mobile BRAVIA Engine 2, bringing Sony’s television technology to the small screen. Even with the large display, Sony kept the phone dimensions relatively small at 5.18 x 2.7 x 0.39 inches.

The main camera is 13 megapixel camera with Exmor RS sensor and f/2.4 aperture. A range of photo modes, 1080p video support and HDR capture for both stills and videos are included.

Sony includes 2 GB of memory to run Google Android 4.1 — not Android 4.2, sadly — on Qualcomm’s 1.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset. Internal storage tops out at 16 GB, but can be expanded by up to another 32 GB through removable storage. At this price, the handset only supports HSPA+ networks on down. An Xperia ZL model with LTE support is available for $759.99.

While the phone may be worth the price, I wouldn’t expect Sony to sell too many units here. The U.S. is only now just flirting with full price phones as consumers have been addicted to hardware subsidies for years. T-Mobile is the first of the big four to be making any headway towards a BYOD model, and as the smallest of the four, won’t have big traction to help Sony move the Xperia ZL.

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J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore to launch on PlayStation Home

Laura Hazard Owen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:24:38 +0000

J. K. Rowling’s virtual Harry Potter community Pottermore is launching on Sony’s PlayStation Home, the company’s free social gaming platform. Users of Pottermore’s website will be able to link their Pottermore.com accounts to their PlayStation Network IDs.

Pottermore at Playstation Home will be available in April. According to an announcement on Pottermore’s blog, “you’ll be able to actually step inside Diagon Alley™ and board the Hogwarts™ Express as an Avatar, and once inside these 3D environments, experience the mayhem of book herding, test your knowledge with a Pottermore quiz, share and collect Trading Cards, and take part in an illicit Wizard’s Duel.”

“Pottermore reaches across multiple digital platforms, and our ongoing partnership with Sony has allowed us to forge this exciting connection with Playstation Home,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in a statement, “creating the most immersive experience possible within that space and giving users wonderful new ways to explore locations from the Harry Potter stories.”

Sony is a Pottermore partner, and last November the companies launched a Harry Potter-themed PS3 game, “Wonderbook: Book of Spells.”

Pottermore launched as a digital bookstore in March 2012 and opened up its interactive features the following month. The most recent available user stats are from October 12, when Redmayne said at the Publishers Launch Conference in Frankfurt that the site had 36 million unique users.

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Sony ends 20p price promotion in its UK Reader Store

Laura Hazard Owen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:30:46 +0000

Sony is at least temporarily ending the 20p price promotion in the U.K. Reader Store, The Bookseller reported Monday. The 20p promotion, which had been running since July 2012, sold selected ebooks for 20 pence (USD $0.30).

Amazon U.K. matched all of Sony’s prices, leading to a deeply discounted market for many ebooks and causing concern for publishers about the devaluation of their product (even though the retailers were paying them the full prices on the discounted ebooks).

The end of the 20p promotion is tied to Sony’s redesign of its U.K. digital bookstore. “Discounted 20p pricing is not currently offered on the newly relaunched UK Reader Store,” a Sony rep told The Bookseller. “However, pricing is always subject to revision. The duration of our 20p pricing is indicative of our commitment to provide great eBooks at exceptionally accessible prices, which is a philosophy we continue to hold.”

Many of the books included in the promotion shot up U.K. bestseller lists, but some publishers and others were concerned that the promotions would devalue ebooks by permanently lowering the prices that consumers were willing to pay. Those concerns may be lessened now, though Sony could always start its 20p promotion again — or Amazon could start one.

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Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:13:31 +0000

The console era is over — or so a growing number of game-industry executives would have us believe. While social and mobile gaming have taken a sizable share of the video games market, there is room for growth for hardware, particularly in streaming technology and the emergence of open-source platforms.

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Sony announces PlayStation 4, touts speed and social but media vision unclear

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:17:37 +0000

A lot has changed since Sony last announced an update to its video game console in 2006. Since that time, the era of discs and cartridges has receded and consumers have entered a world of cloud and mobile computing. Meanwhile, the PlayStation has lost ground to Nintendo and Xbox while Sony’s one-time dominance in electronics has long faded.

On Wednesday in New York, Sony announced the PlayStation 4, which comes with souped-up hardware that the company says will virtually eliminate the time video game players must wait for their games to load. The company also touted a new “share” button on its controller that will let players capture video clips, not just screenshots, of their game play to send to friends.

During a presentation heavy with video game demos, Sony also touted its Vita portable device as the vanguard of mobile play. An executive explained how a player, bumped by others from the living room big screen, can immediately continue his game on the handheld Vita — a tablet experience of sorts.

Reaction by video game fans on Twitter and live blogs at Wired and the Verge was underwhelming. This included disappointment that the new PlayStation 4 would not include backwards compatibility via streaming with earlier PlayStation games.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sony spent little time addressing the role of consoles like the PlayStation as an onramp to the larger world of media. In this context, the PlayStation is just one of a growing number of devices — including Roku, Boxee, Apple TV(i aapl) and (soon) Intel — that link consumers to movies, music and more.

A Sony executive did note that the PlayStation was the most popular device for accessing NetFlix. But the company didn’t devote time to expounding a larger media vision such as that of Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president who, at a recent media event, announced the company is producing its own interactive TV shows.

Sony did not announce a price or even display the console itself during the two-hour long event, but did announce in closing that the device will be available around “holiday 2013,” presumably in time for the November/December shopping season.

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