Latest news

The Japanese chipmaker Elpida Memory has noted today that it has an "uncertain future" as it faces rising debt.

Elpida makes DRAM chips and is one of few companies in its industry.

The company has said survival is very much in doubt and bankruptcy is a likely option in April, which is the final deadline for the company to pay back most of its debt. The company has $1.2 billion in bonds and short term loans.

Elpida was hoping to secure funding by the end of the month, but it appears that situation is not going to happen. The last option is the Japanese government stepping in to give a bailout, which it has done in the past, but not all in the industry are certain the government will do so.

A possible merger with Nanya Technology also fell through, suggesting the company's balance sheet may be even worse than implied.

Elpida's demise began after Samsung expanded into the sector, driving prices down to all-time lows.

Apple is seeking approval in New York to sue the bankrupt photography pioneer over patent infringement.

Kodak, the storied company, filed for bankruptcy protection last month looking to shred major expenses.

The company released the world's first consumer camera in 1888 and is still looking to sell off some of its patent portfolio and a successful deal would keep the company out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has 1100 very valuable photography and digital photography patents and internally they value the portfolio at around $2 billion. Despite inventing the digital camera in 1975, the company never capitalized on it, instead sticking to their film business, which has all but disappeared and had already begun shrinking in the 1990s.

Earlier this month, the company announced it would stop making digital cameras in an effort to focus on its more profitable businesses. Into the future, the company will focus only on photo printing and desktop inkjet printers. Unfortunately for the company, Apple's patent complaint is for technologies used in printers, which would effectively kill what is left of the company if Apple was to be victorious.

According to inside sources, it appears HTC is on the verge of unveiling a streaming music service.

The company is working with Beats Audio, in which it has a controlling stake, to create the service which will be the default music client on all future HTC phones and tablets.

Pricing and other details are still being worked out, but the company has long wanted to offer their own music service on HTC devices, say the sources.

In the past, the company made contact with Spotify and other unknown streaming services, but negotiations quickly fell apart. Backed by Beats this time, and the brand muscle of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, the company has higher expectations and hopes. Iovine is widely regarded as one of the most powerful men in the music industry and he does not like Spotify, so the service will almost certainly be different.

HTC purchased a very large stake in Beats for $330 million last year.

Following their standard "Patch Tuesday" protocol, Microsoft has issued nine security updates today that patch 21 vulnerabilities in their products.

The products in question include Windows, Internet Explorer, .Net, Silverlight, Sharepoint server and MS Office.

Four of the nine updates were dubbed "critical," which is Microsoft's highest threat rating, while all the others were labeled "important." Of the vulnerabilities, 6 were critical, 14 were important and the final one was "moderate."

The most notable fixes came for vulnerabilities in IE and Windows as they were "drive-by" attacks, which needed nothing more than the user to visit a malicious site to be affected.

Many of the other fixes were related to media files. More info here: Patch Tuesday

Thanks to a new academic paper from researchers at the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College, the world has more evidence that piracy via torrents has no real effect on the U.S. movie box office.

Internationally, however, downloads and revenue were more correlated, and the researchers blamed delayed release windows for that phenomenon.

In their paper, called 'Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales," the researchers concluded that "the longer it takes before a movie is released internationally, the more box office revenues are impacted through piracy," says TF.

Continues the report: "We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent?s adoption and in heavily pirated genres."

The PlayStation Vita will see Sony's largest marketing push, ever, when it begins shipping in the U.S. next week.

Sony will spend over $50 million to promote the handheld console, its largest marketing push for a gaming console, to date.

Using the marketing firm Deutsch, the company has created a line of ads, each with the tagline "Never Stop Playing." Gamespot says these will include ads on "26 websites including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as on television, during The Simpsons, South Park, Tosh.O, and NBA and NCAA basketball games."

Furthermore, Sony will promote the Vita on billboards in the U.S. in New York, Chicago and San Francisco and via Sirius XM radio.

The console launches in the North American markets on the 22nd.

For the last few months, speculation has been rampant that Apple is preparing to enter the HDTV market in 2012, and even Steve Jobs suggested the TV was coming before his passing last year.

Following in the trend of all of its other devices, the TV is expected to be called the "iTV" as it will likely run on a variant of the iOS operating system.

ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster, is saying however that it will do all it can to make sure that is not the name Apple chooses for its still unconfirmed device.

The two companies discussed the former's concerns in 2010, but ITV is said to be nervous that new CEO Tim Cook will take a different stance than Steve Jobs did when he told ITV CEO Adam Crozier he would not infringe on the name, at least in Europe.

Apple is looking to launch a "game changing" device, and there are plenty of rumors, each of which seems reasonable. The iTV would run on iOS, have a dual-core processor, have voice and motion controls, have Siri and cost $1500 for a 42-inch device. Additionally, Apple is said to be negotiating a way for consumers to have their TV programming delivered ala carte, with everyone picking only the stations they want, each of which will have its own price tag. The move would certainly disrupt the industry which packages hundreds of channels for a set monthly price.

HTC will become one of the only companies outside of Sony to have full PlayStation certification for its mobile devices.

The announcement will come at some point this year, and HTC device owners will then be able to download and play Sony PSOne games.

Sony introduced the certification program when it launched the PS Vita in Japan last year. At the time, new CEO Kaz Hirai had said the program "expands the PlayStation experience beyond the PSP border. It is the first cross-platform endeavor."

The program is available to all Android tablet/smartphone makers.

HTC has tried to halt its recent sales slide by moving on popular features for the younger generations, including buying Beats Audio and making all current devices Beats certified.

When Google announced their buyout of Motorola Mobility last year, it appeared to be primarily motivated by access to a handful of mobile phone patents. Even as the two biggest regulatory hurdles are cleared, there is growing evidence which suggests video technology was their primary goal all along.

It's no secret that Google wants to be in your living room. Since 2010 they have made a number of moves in that direction, some more obvious than others. In January of 2010 YouTube started experimenting with movie rentals. By late April the program had been expanded twice. It was still small and focused on independent movies, but clearly past the experimental stage.

At the same time Google was working out a deal to buy On2, whose VP6 video compression was used in Adobe's Flash Video format. Google's primary goal was developing On2's VP8 standard into an open source, and more importantly royalty free, alternative to H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC).

At the time it seemed like a questionable move. H.264 had already been established as the new defacto standard for web video. Google, however, continued promoting VP8 through development of the WebM (Matroska-based) container format to combine it with royalty free Vorbis audio.

Last Saturday opponents of ACTA, the secretly negotiated intellectual property treaty, held protests across the European Union.

The protests provoked two very different reactions from EU officials. One came from the European Commission, who reaffirmed their support for the treaty via Twitter. EC spokesman Cezary Lewanowicz tweeted, "ACTA does not change EU law, does not prevent people from sharing content online, will not monitor the internet."

What's more notable is that the EC statement appeared to be a reaction to comments made earlier in the day by European Parliament President Martin Shulz during a TV appearance in his home country of Germany. Shulz criticized ACTA for failing to adequately protect the public's rights. He said (translation via EUobserver.com):

As a head's up to potential buyers, Wal-Mart is still offering the popular Kindle Fire with a $50 gift card to the store for $199, the regular retail price.

The deal is available until the 14th, and is the lowest price available for the tablet especially since the device still sells for the same price on Amazon, with no gift card.

Check the deal here: Deal News

The Kindle Fire has a 7" 1024x600 IPS display, a dual-core processor, Wi-Fi, 8GB of internal storage and deep integration into the Amazon ecosystem of movies, music, Cloud storage and of course, shopping.

Sony has posted a 12-minute hands-on video today of the PS Vita, in an effort to boost interest in the handheld console before its launch in the U.S. and Europe this month.

The Vita runs on an ARM Cortex A9 quad-core processor, powered by a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU. Featuring a 5-inch capacitive multitouch OLED screen (with 16 million colors), the device is 7.16 by 0.73 by 3.28 inches.

Furthermore, the console has 512MB RAM and 128MB VRAM in its graphics processor. The rear camera will be capable of 60fps and 640x480 resolution or 120fps at 320x240 resolution. Sony's Vita will playback MP3, AAC, WAV (Linear PCM) files and MPEG-4 video including H.264 AVC encodings in high, main, or baseline profiles.

According to a new report in Xbox World Magazine, the next generation Xbox will also include a Wii U-esque touchscreen controller.

Says the magazine: "The controller will be a matt-black media hub with a mission to bring games to life in your living room with augmented reality, directional sound, and a four-player, finger-tracking Kinect."

The Xbox Next controller will be "an HD screen surrounded by the traditional 360 buttons and sticks." Continuing on, the report says "that touchcreen will be second only to Kinect in how you operate your console. It could be a remote control when you're watching TV, a browser when you're on the internet, extra buttons and information when you're playing a game or a portable display when you want to take your game with you."

What will the new system cost you? The magazine speculates the high-end console and controller will cost $600 at lunch, many times more expensive than the Xbox 360: "Microsoft are playing it safe with the CPU and GPU but running wild with the functions that will change how you play, but it won't be cheap."

Within a few hours, the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice have approved Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility.

The company now just needs approval from China, Taiwan, and Israel before the acquisition is completely official.

In August, Google shocked the tech world by announcing it was acquiring the company for $12.5 billion, mainly in an effort to protect its Android platform. Motorola had over 17,000 valuable patents, which Google will use in defense of its smartphone platform.

Despite being cleared, regulators in the U.S. and Europe will continue to monitor the situation to see if Google will license Motorola patents to competitors on fair terms (FRAND/Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) as they have been ordered to.

Motorola Mobility will run separately from Google, and the company will continue to license Android to all current and future manufacturers.

Sony Music is facing intense criticism today after they were found to have raised the price of Whitney's Houston's greatest hits album right after the singer passed away.

Houston passed away on Saturday at the age of 48.

The record label raised the wholesale price of the album, called "The Ultimate Collection," at 7am EST on Sunday morning, just hours after her death, prompting iTunes to automatically lift the retail price from £4.99 to £7.99.

According to insiders speaking to the Guardian, the change came directly after the label "reviewed Houston's iTunes catalogue after the singer was pronounced dead." The same insider says the move was not intended to "cash in" on the singer's death but was rather a fix that should have been made earlier had they been reviewing prices more often.

iTunes had returned the price to normal by late Sunday.