The format war is over, Sony now wants to expand the presence of Blu-ray. The Sony boss says it’s time to start building Blu-ray players in more product, including HDTVs. The story-between-the-lines is we’re probably about to see Blu-ray players at the bottom-end of the price spectrum.
Blu-ray players have already found their way into laptops, home computer systems and of course the PS3. Where else can Sony stuff a Blu-ray player? That’s the question Sony President Ryoji Chubachi asked spectators at a conference in Taipei.
Chubachi said Sony will begin production of a wide range of new product lines at a variety of price ranges. The company’s intention is to develop the global market share of Blu-ray by the end of 2008.
According to Chubachi, part of the company’s plan to extend the reach of its disc format will involve building a Blu-ray player/burner directly into HDTVs. That’s an interesting twist on the traditional TV/DVD combo.
Playback devices built directly into TVs doesn’t usually instill much confidence in the quality of either device. Most TVs with built-in DVD players or VCRs have been the bottom-end of their respective markets. But an HDTV with a Blu-ray burner sounds interesting.
Now that Sony is getting ready to bring Blu-ray into a wider range of consumer markets – it probably means that even cheaper Blu-ray players than we’re seeing today are just around the corner.
When reading blogs, it is hard to know if the posts or articles you read are reliable, or trustworthy. Techcrunch has a post on NewsCred, a site currently in private beta, which aims to clear up who is credible and who’s talking trash online.
Right now NewsCred behaves like a mix between a news aggregator and Digg. Users can pick from a number of major news sources to customize their main feeds, or they can sort sources by credibility. After clicking on a story, users can choose to either “Credit” or “Discredit” the author or the article itself. These ratings are averaged across all users to determine the trustworthiness of each article, author, and publication.
I am not in favor of a system like this. Newscred is not actually doing anything to clear this up, but leaves it to their audience, meaning that others will tell me if I am a credible author or not. Excuse me?? Yes, you have read it right. So why don’t we simply use digg and say that if you get a certain number of diggs, you are a trustworthy author?
Because that wouldn’t be fair. And so is NewsCred. Nice initiative, not realistic.
Usually I am not positive about most things concerning Microsoft. But even that company sometimes comes up with smart ideas. One of those is Fone+. This project is an initiative to use smartphones running windows as computers by using special docking stations that will allow for a screen, keyboard and rat(mouse) to be connected. The whole thing is meant for “poor” countries, like third world countries.
A smart idea. These smartphones are pretty powerful and would easily be usable as simple internet computers. Costs are low, so it should be possible without too much investment. A we’re talking about phones, internet and network connections should not be a problem either. I guess we can learn something from this.
