December 2006 Archive
Are you ready for even more football? ESPN certainly hopes so. The top cable sports channel, which this season took over the venerable Monday Night Football franchise, inked a five-year broadcasting deal this month with the Arena Football League that will put at least 26 games on ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC starting next year. As part of the deal, ESPN also gained a minority stake in the indoor football league, a move that suggests the sports network will be pulling out all the stops to promote the AFL.
Over the past five years that the AFL was broadcast on NBC, I doubt I saw much if any screen time devoted to arena football coverage on ESPN, and little mention of it on its top-ranked Web site. But given that the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports has a virtual iron lock on what is and isn’t news in sports entertainment these days, I’m sure we’ll be hearing all about the joys and thrills of indoor football in the months to come.
Looking at the announced TV schedule for 2007, it’s interesting to note that of the 18 regular season games, 11 of those contests involve either the Chicago Rush or the Philadelphia Soul. What’s interesting about that is ESPN personality and former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka bought a stake in the Chicago franchise. Ron Jaworski, another ESPN announcer, is president of the Philadelphia team. I’m guessing there might be some finger wagging by the network’s ombudsman about that.
Some months back I wrote in this blog space about when the US might see a Chinese car land on its shores. It looks like the wait, at least for one potential importer, just got longer.
Yugo mastermind Malcolm Bricklin, through his Visionary Vehicles, originally planned to have a low-priced, high-quality, Chinese-built car in the US by early January. Delays were followed by more delays. Finally, the Chinese company Bricklin tapped to build the cars, Chery Automobile, backed out of the deal citing the fact that it was just not ready for the US automotive Prime Time.
When Bricklin first rolled out his idea for importing Chinese cars, many snickered that rounding up dealers would be tough. After all, the conventional wisdom was that “high-quality Chinese car” was right up there with “honest used car salesman” in the world of automotive oxymorons.
However, to date Bricklin has lined up nearly 30 dealers eager to get in on the ground floor of the Chinese-built car market. Perhaps surprisingly, Bricklin’s dealers cheered the bust-up of his deal with Chery. They claim that while manufacturing prowess in China is up to snuff, the fledgling economic powerhouse still has a ways to go on engineering and design.
Excuse me? Aren’t these the same people who gave the world paper, gunpowder, and the printed word? I know, I know. What have you done for me lately?
So Bricklin and his dealers hope to move forward with an as-yet-unnamed Chinese partner or partners to build cars that will be designed and engineered in the US. Only no one is saying who those engineers and designers might be. This blogger has an idea or two on that.
Will it be a year of “que sera, sera” for the semiconductor industry in 2007? Not likely.
The chip business is settling into a period of mature, smooth growth. It’s too soon to say the boom-or-bust days are over for good, but the recent trend is for steady growth of about 10% a year. Worldwide sales reached nearly $250 billion in 2006, and some forecasters see the market climbing to $275 billion in 2007 and $300 billion in 2008.
That last figure is significant, since the market topped $100 billion for the first time in 1994 and popped over $200 billion in 2000, before dramatically plunging in 2001-2003 and reaching $200 billion again in 2004.
What will be the hot microchip markets in 2007?
Look for flash memory to be a volatile niche (that’s a little inside joke for my EE peeps, since flash is a non-volatile memory device). Flash memory is in all the hot consumer electronics products, from the iPod to camera phones to game consoles. Its widespread demand has set off construction projects all over the globe, which has led to predictions that there will be a supply glut and crashing prices in – you pick it – Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4 of the new year.
Flash is the new DRAM, so to speak; it doesn’t functionally replace dynamic random-access memory in electronics design, yet it’s become the hot commodity product in the memory device market. The big-pimpin’ playas in flash include Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, Spansion, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba.
Meanwhile, DRAM is enjoying its own renaissance, with increasing sales volume if not higher unit prices. The “big 4” DRAM suppliers – Hynix Semiconductor, Micron, Qimonda, and Samsung – may not get big boosts in 2007, but the second-tier players are gunning for market share. Elpida Memory (#5 in DRAM) has joined with seventh-ranked Powerchip Semiconductor in an ambitious, $15 billion program to build four new DRAM plants in Taiwan, the first of which will come online in 2007.
Humans. Ten thousand years of civilization and stunning technological advances, and when they go online where their wildest dreams can come true, it turns out all they want to do is pay their mortgages.
Sort of.
Companies as diverse as Dell, adidas, and Toyota have established outposts in Linden’s Second Life, one of the top online reality games, more for branding purposes than anything else. Now ABN AMRO has done it as well.
The Dutch financial services giant won’t be set up for actual banking activities at first. Initially, it will offer financial counseling. (No, you can’t pay your taxes in Linden dollars; the IRS frowns on that.)
If the bank is smart, though, it will ditch the branding-only strategy quickly. Far better would be to provide currency exchange between Linden dollars and real currency. The money is already being traded — just offer a better exchange rate. Entice players to sign up for real accounts with a bonus of Linden bucks. Offer credit cards. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with branding, but sometimes you gotta make money, too.
In a way, Second Life is a lot like China. Western companies are looking at the still exploding Chinese market with extreme interest, carefully taking note of a rising middle class with one of the highest savings rates in the world. Well, Second Life only has two million residents compared to China’s three billion, but there’s a lot less regulation and a whole lot more familiarity with the capitalist lifestyle.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years we start seeing virtual reality revenues accounted for in annual reports – geographical segment data that includes Asia, Europe, North America, and the Metaverse.
After all, the possibilities, like that of online gaming itself, are virtually endless.
In a bold move, Time Magazine has dubbed “You” as its “Person of the Year.” In the end, though the opportunistic attempt to align the magazine’s image with the buzz surrounding the Web 2.0 craze may prove to be the next source of mockery from the digital peanut gallery. By associating themselves with the digital community, traditional print publications may just be setting themselves up to be burned by the blogosphere.
While companies like The New York Times, Guardian Newspapers, and Gannett Co. (publisher of USA Today) fight to keep their share of advertising dollars by beefing up their digital operations, the open-source community has whizzed past them by providing a content base that seems to expand exponentially overnight. Sites like MySpace and YouTube boast user counts that render newspaper and magazine circulation numbers comical in comparison. As a result, advertisers follow.
Reference book publishers realized that they have something to worry about, too, after a study by science journal Nature found Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia to be no less accurate than the Encyclopædia Britannica. Large media, publishing, and broadcasting outfits have attempted to answer the call for more interactive interfaces by adding blog and forum sections to their site indexes. But, faced with declining advertising revenues, most traditional companies have not bought the technology necessary to bring them up to par with that of the current free-blogging world. They also don’t have the credibility of the hip newcomers.
CNET Networks’ News.com product, for example, split its content so that online-free users can comment on every news stories it publishes. Posts are put online immediately, without much administrator review. Blog aggregator Technorati skips the editorial, opting to clock the most blogged-about articles on the Web.
Time’s article is certainly timely but you have to wonder if the mag is being too candid for its own good. As Greg Verdino wrote in his blog, “It is a sure sign that the culture of consumer control has truly taken hold when even an old media stalwart like Time magazine sees fit to celebrate the trend.”