Sony Profits Drop 5 Pct on PS3 Cost

Sony Profits Drop 5 Pct on PS3 Cost: "Sony's quarterly profit dipped 5 percent as huge costs for launching its PlayStation 3 video game console offset a recovery in its electronics business.
But in an optimistic sign, the Japanese manufacturer raised its full-year earnings forecast Tuesday, saying that booming Christmas sales in digital cameras and flat-panel TVs outpaced earlier targets.
Group net profit at Sony Corp. (SNE) for the three months through December slipped to 159.9 billion yen ($1.3 billion) from 168.9 billion yen the same period a year earlier.
The electronics and entertainment company behind the Walkman portable player and 'Spider-Man' movies said quarterly sales jumped 9.8 percent to 2.61 trillion yen ($21.4 billion).
Sony embarked on a turnaround effort under its first foreigner chief executive, Welsh-born American Howard Stringer, who took the helm in 2005. It has dropped unprofitable businesses, sold off assets, reduced jobs and closed plants.
For the last several years, Sony's biggest problem was long in its core electronics business, where it fell behind Apple Inc. (AAPL) and its iPod portable music player and Samsung Electronics Co.'s flat-panel TV business.
Sony was dealt another blow last year when it announced a massive global recall of about 10 million lithium-ion batteries used in not only its own laptops but also Apple, Dell Inc. (DELL), Lenovo and others."

YouTube to Share Revenue With Users

"Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that the wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.
Hurley, who along with the site's co-founders sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November, said one of the major innovations the site is working on is a way to allow users to be paid for content.
'We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,' Hurley said at the World Economic Forum. 'So in the coming months, we are going to be opening that up.'
Hurley gave no details of how much users would be paid, or what mechanism would be used."

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "Light-skinned immigrants in the United States make more money on average than those with darker complexions, and the chief reason appears to be discrimination, a researcher says.
Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.
'On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education,' Hersch said.
The study also found that taller immigrants earn more than shorter ones, with an extra inch of height associated with a 1 percent increase in income.

Other researchers said the findings are consistent with other studies on color and point to a skin-tone prejudice that goes beyond race.
Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, such as English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings.
That means that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned immigrant would make more money on average."

My Way News - PS3 to Make European Debut on March 23

My Way News - PS3 to Make European Debut on March 23: "Sony's new PlayStation 3 video game machines will go on sale in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia on March 23, company officials said Friday.
The 60 gigabyte model of PS3 will be priced at 599 euros, 425 British pounds, 999.95 Australian dollars, and 1199.95 New Zealand dollars, according to Sony Computer Entertainment spokesman Nanako Kato.
Initially, only the 60GB model will be available in these markets, with the lower-end 20GB version to follow later this year depending on demand, the company said in a statement dated Thursday.
The much-anticipated debut of the high-end version of the PlayStation comes as Sony, locked in a tight race with Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) for the market for next-generation video consoles, has been plagued with production problems.
Sony said it shipped 2 million PS3 machines worldwide by mid-January, falling about two weeks behind its initial shipment targets in Japan. The machine's launch in Europe was delayed until this year.
Sony is also targeting shipping 6 million PS3 machines by March 31. "

My Way Finance

My Way Finance: "The long-delayed launch of the Windows Vista computer operating system hurt fiscal second-quarter profits at Microsoft Corp., which reported a 28 percent drop in earnings Thursday despite revenue growth that exceeded forecasts.
In the last three months of the year, earnings fell to $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share, from $3.65 billion, or 34 cents per share, during the same period last year.
Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker to post 23 cents per share.
Revenue rose to $12.5 billion, a 6 percent gain from $11.8 billion in the year-ago quarter. Analysts were expecting just shy of $12.1 billion.
'Overall, it was a strong quarter,' said Robert Breza, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Microsoft shares fell 64 cents, or 2.1 percent, to close Thursday at $30.45 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, ending an uneven day in which the stock also hit a 52-week high of $31.48. In extended trading after the earnings release, the stock was trading at $31.
Although Windows Vista and Office 2007, the latest editions of Microsoft's flagship products, do not hit the consumer market until Tuesday, they have been available for businesses since Nov. 30, two-thirds of the way through the company's second quarter.
Even so, Microsoft's 'client' division, responsible for Windows, posted a 25 percent drop in sales to $2.59 billion. And the business division, which includes Office, saw a 5 percent drop to $3.51 billion."

My Way News - Nintendo's Wii to Provide AP News

My Way News - Nintendo's Wii to Provide AP News: "Rabid video gamers could get some help keeping in touch with the outside world this weekend as Nintendo Co. launches an online news service through its popular Wii console.
The Wii News Channel, scheduled to debut Saturday, will primarily feature top news stories and photographs from The Associated Press.
Consoles with a broadband Internet connection and the Opera Web browser will be able to access the free news channel, which will offer AP news in multiple languages. Japanese-language news will come from a separate agency.
There were no immediate plans to sell advertising space, said Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo's U.S. headquarters in Redmond.
News will be displayed through an interactive map, which users can navigate with the Wii's wireless controller, Kaplan said.
'The beauty of it is it zooms in and out of areas of the world,' she said. 'So if you really want to focus on regional news or national news versus international, you just blow up the map of the U.S.'
The AP has a two-year contract to provide news and photos to Nintendo and would like to provide multimedia in the future, said Jane Seagrave, vice president of new media markets for the New York-based news cooperative.
'It's a very innovative new application of what we're doing generally, which is to try to get our content to new audiences on new platforms,' Seagrave said.
The AP will supply news for the Wii in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Swiss-German, Seagrave said. The Japanese news company Goo will supply Nintendo's Japanese-language news, Kaplan said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed."

My Way News - Wii Helps Nintendo Year-End Profits Soar

My Way News - Wii Helps Nintendo Year-End Profits Soar: "Booming year-end sales of the wand-wielding Wii game console sent profit at Nintendo soaring 43 percent for the nine months ended December, the Japanese manufacturer of Pokemon and Super Mario games said Thursday.
Nintendo Co., which also makes GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS handheld machines, recorded group net profit of 131.9 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up dramatically from 92.2 billion yen the same period a year earlier.
The company did not break down quarterly numbers.
Sales soared 73 percent to 712.6 billion yen ($5.9 billion) during the April-December period from 412.3 billion yen the previous year, the Kyoto-based company said in a release.
Nintendo's Wii is embroiled in a head-to-head battle in next-generation home game consoles against sector leader Sony Corp. (SNE)'s PlayStation 3, which has been plagued with production problems.
Wii, inspired by the English word 'we,' has benefited from its fun image built around the wandlike remote controller that players wave around like a tennis racket, fishing rod, drumstick or gun, depending on the game.
Nintendo said it sold 3.19 million Wii machines worldwide, 1.25 million in the Americas, and 1.14 million in Japan.
The company said it had met its target of 4 million units shipped by the end of 2006 as that number had been manufactured and were still getting distributed, according to spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa."

A shotgun marriage for Blu-ray and HD DVD? | CNET News.com

A shotgun marriage for Blu-ray and HD DVD? CNET News.com: "The key number in the battle between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps is 250,000.
That is the number of players for both formats that the Computer Electronics Association has said likely shipped in 2006, the first year of global sales. Earlier, the organization had anticipated 750,000 players would ship for the year.
Consumer fears about buying the wrong piece of equipment--combined with high prices and other factors--have crimped sales of the next-generation movie players and prompted the beginning of a thaw in the standards battle. Earlier this week, for instance, South Korea's LG Electronics formally announced it would release a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD player after months of flip-flopping on the issue. It plans to provide details on Sunday, the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Component manufacturers such as NEC and others have begun to prepare parts that could be used in combination players. Hitachi, which has announced a Blu-ray camcorder, said in October that it wants to look at the issue again.
Meanwhile, Time Warner has said it will promote an alternative format, called Total HD, that can be used in either Blu-Ray or HD DVD players. "

My Way News - Google Stock Boom Boosts Calif. Coffers

My Way News - Google Stock Boom Boosts Calif. Coffers: "Someday, this era may simply be known as The Google Years. California, whose budget revenue slides up and down like a yo-yo with changes in capital gains and stock options, is once again counting on outsized income tax filings from a handful of tech executives to help balance its budget.
For this wave, California can largely thank Google Inc. (GOOG)
After cashing in more than 9 million shares valued at $3.7 billion last year, 16 Google insiders will owe the Golden State as much as $380 million in taxes - enough to cover the salaries of more than 3,000 state workers.
Taxes paid by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page account for nearly half the amount. There is virtually no way for them or other California billionaires to escape a 9.3 percent state capital gains tax or a recent voter-approved 1 percent tax on the wealthy to underwrite the state's mental health programs.
'On behalf of a grateful state, I'll be happy to wash their windows or mow their lawn,' said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for California's Department of Finance.
In the often slippery world of state finance, the wildly successful Google has had an unusually tangible effect on California's budget. It has become the face of an extraordinary two-year resurgence in state capital gains and stock-options revenue, much of which can be traced back to the tech sector.
Mega-sized tax filings from Google executives began flowing into state coffers in earnest in 2006, two years after the company went public. The receipts helped fuel a multibillion dollar tax windfall last spring that allowed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to pour money into roads, classrooms and other popular programs, pleasing political enemies and helping smooth his path to re-election.
Schwarzenegger's good fortune, it turns out, did"