LG announces 47-inch digital photo frame

LG has announced that a new television will be able to be used as a digital photo frame when not being used for programmes – consuming much less power when in the frame mode.

LG's 47-inch Digital Photo TV also allows people to use a screen grab and display it, along with your own photos, when you put the television in standby mode.

"Users can even display family photos or a famous painting via the TV screen without hammering a nail on the wall. This innovative, new concept enhances the home as an interior décor item, providing an elegant living space," insists the Korean firm's press release.

Low power

The power consumption is much lower when in standby (though TechRadar would like to point out that not displaying anything at all is presumably even lower).

LG claims that power consumption falls to 10-15 per cent when it is being used for photos rather than television.

In-Jae Chung, Executive Vice President and CTO of LG Display, said, "Today's TV continues to evolve due to continued developments such as enhanced picture quality and slimmer designs.

"Looking ahead to the future, we can expect to see next-generation TVs featuring multiple functions.

"Our new Digital Photo TV enhances the role of the TV in households - serving as a medium that's capable of more than watching TV and playing video games - but also stores consumers' cherished memories."

LG Blu-ray players to stream YouTube

High Definition meets low culture, with news from LG that its new Network Blu-ray players will be able to stream UGC from Google's YouTube.

In the second of its pre-CES leaks today, LG confirmed that YouTube and CinemaNow will be joining Netflix on its new internet-connected Network Blu-ray players, due for launch in Las Vegas in just over a week's time.

CinemaNow allows users to rent or buy Hollywood films, US TV shows and music videos, while YouTube contains the world's entire known supply of home movies starring pet cats dressed as 1970s pop stars.

High Definition streaming from CinemaNow

CinemaNow does have some High Definition content and claims that users will be able to "browse the entire catalogue" from the LG devices, "instantly stream content" and "access movies purchased from other CinemaNow-powered stores".

"As millions of US consumers view and download movies or TV shows through the Internet, they are demanding easier ways to access content and more home entertainment options," said Tim Alessi, Director of Product Development, at LG Electronics USA.

"LG is bridging the gap between packaged media and video-on-demand services to provide entertainment solutions for consumers' demand for content," he said. "With these new alliances, LG continues its innovation leadership by allowing consumers easy access to multiple entertainment options in one device."

The new players will be available in the first half of 2009 in the USA, with no news yet on a worldwide roll-out.

LG launching world's thinnest TV at CES

LG Electronics is set to unveil the world's slimmest LED LCD TV at CES in Las Vegas next week.

The LG LH95 is set to go up against offerings from Sony and Samsung – both of whom were claiming the thinnest TV crown at IFA in Berlin earlier this year.

How thin?!

So exactly how thin is the LG LH95? It is an impressive 24.8mm thin (or just under an inch, for the fans of imperial measurements).

The LG LH95 also supports 240Hz TrueMotion Drive technology and 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

Also, according to LG, this LED LCD TV is set to bag the 2009 CES Innovation Award winner in the Display category.

Samsung and Yahoo! unleash Internet Widgets

At last, some good news for Yahoo! The beleaguered web giant has inked a deal to supply its Widget Engine technology to Samsung's new internet-connected HDTVs.

Repackaged as 'Internet@TV – Content Service', Yahoo!'s technology will enable Samsung's 2009 line-up of HDTVs to access selected web content via onscreen Javascript- and XML-based apps. What it's not doing is adding a web browser.

The appeal of a widget, rather than a full-blown browser, is that a widget can deliver internet content in a format that's optimised for viewing on a TV.

Widgets are also designed to be controlled using the TV's remote. So you don't have to sit on the sofa trying to balance a keyboard on your knees, while squinting to read a URL in a teeny-tiny font. Content choice is limited, but usability is vastly improved.

Bringing web Widgets to TV

So if you buy a compatible Samsung HDTV this year, you'll be able to call up a local weather forecast using data from Yahoo! Weather or track stocks and shares via Yahoo! Finance.

A Yahoo! News feed will give the rolling news channels some competition, while a Flickr Widget will let you browse photos on a big screen. And if existing Widgets are anything to go by, they'll sit on top of whatever you're watching.

Other popular internet services will also get 'widgetised'. The conversion of USA Today, YouTube and Showtime is already well under way. While a peek at the current Yahoo! Widgets website suggests that RSS feeds, Internet TV guides and far too many clock applications will ultimately follow.

Would-be Widget developers will have access to a Widget Development Kit, so there's the possibility of an iPhone-esque 'Widget Store' to look forward to.

Usefully, the Internet@TV – Content Service isn't just another US-only affair. Samsung says that its new HDTVs featuring the Yahoo! Widget Engine will be available in another 12 countries in 2009 including: Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

The future of TV?

Internet-enabled TVs could well be one of the year's more interesting product categories, especially as more advanced devices – Digital Media Players, Media Center PCs and Apple TVs – have failed to break out of geekdom and into the mainstream.

"Samsung has been a proven innovator in Internet-enabled TV technology for some time now," said Boo-Keun Yoon, Executive Vice President of the Visual Display Division at Samsung Electronics. "There's no denying that the easy-to-use, one-touch of the remote control service successfully provides information simply and effectively. The collaboration with Yahoo! lets viewers go one step further.

"This new interface allows them to interact and connect with many of their favourite Web services on a personal level. It's frankly way beyond just passively watching broadcasts and is no doubt the future of TV."

Samsung's new HDTVs, equipped with the Internet@TV service will be on show at CES.

"I want to build the next Yahoo! or Wikipedia"

Jason Calacanis isn't exactly the most popular online entrepreneur around.

In the past he's called SEO "bullshit" and "a wasted industry" while speaking in front of thousands of delegates at search engine marketing conferences.

February's Affiliate Summit keynote was less controversial, but Jason still pointed out that affiliate spam was polluting the internet and also joked that anyone in attendance from PayPerPost should kill themselves. And at the Future of Web Apps conference he quipped that if you want to be average, you should go and work at 37signals but not for him. Jason Calacanis tells it as it is. And he's not too concerned about the consequences.

"You've got thousands of SEOs who hate the fact that I damaged their industry and told people not to hire an SEO," Jason says. "But I don't mind that. People can disagree with me. A lot of them are anonymous 12-year-old kids anyway – it's no big deal. You can't take it too seriously. People can hate me if they want to and debate what I say but as long as they check out my project and consider using it and talk about it, that's fine with me."

The project Jason is referring to is human powered search engine Mahalo, which he launched a year and a half ago. Mahalo (motto: we're here to help) uses a full-time team in Santa Monica, plus an army of freelancers all over the world, to write and edit results pages, free from spam and other junk. "Nobody is really doing it the way we're doing it," Jason explains.

"There are a lot of copycats that are trying to do social search and letting people vote, but I don't think anybody is actually paying a couple of hundred people to write really high quality pages. We're exactly 50 per cent Wikipedia and 50 per cent Google. And I think that's the future of search, to put a little bit of Google and a little bit of Wikipedia on the same page. Our articles are better than Wikipedia because we have real, paid people working on them and fact checking them. We don't have as many yet but we will. And then our search results are better than Google's because we have humans go through them. It costs us a lot more money than Wikipedia, which spends nothing, but it's probably costing us less per search result than Google because they have a billion dollars in server costs every year."

Mahalo recently reached 100,000 search terms, at which point Jason took the beta label off. Not bad considering the site only launched with 4,000 pages. In August it attracted 4.6million uniques, which – as Jason points out – is a very good result. He says that no other alternative search site has even broken a million uniques and that Mahalo isn't in any rush to make money. The company has secured five years of funding from, among others, Sequoia Capital, CBS, News Corp and Mark Cuban and so has three-and-a-half years to figure out how to turn Mahalo into a proper business.

One thing's for sure, though: according to Jason, 'curation' and 'trust' is the new business model. Mahalo will do well (Jason hopes for five or 10 per cent market share) because there's a lot of information online but no trust available. On Mahalo there's no SEO.

Full HDTV video coming to mobile phones

If it isn't already obvious from the megapixel measuring contest phone makers indulge themselves in that phone imaging is the next big battleground, then this announcement from Renesas will make that doubly clear.

The Japanese chip specialist has one-upped all the competition by going not for more pixels per picture, but for a processor package that will allow cameraphones to shoot proper high-definition video.

Full HD TV

Its new application processor will be made public at a trade show in San Francisco in February, but it has revealed most of the details to whet the appetite.

The CPU will run at up to 500MHz, which is enough to process 1920x1080p video at 30fps. That video can be encoded in any of AVC/H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats.

First at 1080p

Renesas also tells us that the processor uses 65nm technology and 166MHz 64-bit SDRAM to work on HD TV in real time. Its chip is the first announced to make the step up from 720 to 1080 lines.

World's first 3D 1080p HD video on Blu-ray

We don't have any photos of this for you yet and if we did it wouldn't really help, so it's going to have to suffice if we tell you that Panasonic claims it has just created the world's first 3D HD plasma home cinema system.

The new setup uses the company's famous 103-inch PDP and a Blu-ray player that can deliver full 1080p HD video with separate views to each eye.

Cardboard glasses

The tiny differences between the two video streams create the usual 3D effect in the human brain, but the key here is Panasonic's ability to maintain the full high-def experience, albeit with polarising glasses still needed.

The company explains: "Previous consumer 3D display systems have encountered many different problems, including reduced vertical resolution caused by a 3D display method that divides the scanning lines between the left and right eyes, and picture quality degradation caused by pixel skipping."

Moreover, all the 3D goodness fits onto a single standard Blu-ray disk, which has to bode well for the future of the format.

Pros and cons

Still, the skimpy details we received do say that, "Panasonic has developed a technology to decode and play back the left and right full HD image data recorded to the BD in real time."

That sounds to us like we'll be needing yet another new kind of Blu-ray deck if this ever becomes commercially available, which maybe isn't the wisest move right now.

Microsoft unconvinced by 3D games

UK games developer Blitz Games has admitted that it has an uphill struggle convincing platform holders such as Sony and Microsoft of the value of 'true' 3D gaming.

Blitz were showing an Xbox 360 game demo running on 3D-enabled screens to selected developers, platform holders and games publishing execs at the recent 3D Entertainment Summit in Hollywood.

In a recent interview with Develop magazine, Andrew Oliver, CTO of Blitz Games, admitted: "Those [platform holders] that have heard about it have been curious but not convinced.

Games like holograms

It is estimated that around 1.4 million 3D-ready TVs have already been sold.

For the technology to really take hold, it will require mass uptake of 3D TVs, as well as full support from the major games publishers and platform holders.

"Those who have seen it have loved it and agree that it looks stunning and almost feels like we've moved on a console generation," adds Andrew Oliver.

"The games start to look like holograms and very quickly you forget you are wearing glasses."

We will be sure to bring you all the latest news on developments in the world of 3D gaming as and when we get them.

Microsoft: Xbox 360 rocks Christmas

Microsoft has just announced that the Xbox 360 is celebrating its best European Christmas to date.

Latest sales data shows Christmas 2008 was, according to the platform holder, "the biggest sales period ever in the brand's six-year European history, with sales of Xbox 360 almost double those of Christmas 2007."

Eight million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) up to the end of 2008, "widening its lead over PlayStation 3 in the region to more than one million and setting the scene for further growth in 2009."

Fastest growing console

Microsoft also adds that "GfK-ChartTrack data shows that Xbox 360 was the fastest-growing console of 2008, with sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 over double that of the same period in 2007, spurred on by a mix of value, great games and entertainment, and the recently-launched New Xbox Experience."

Chris Lewis, Microsoft's Regional Vice President for the Interactive Entertainment Business in the EMEA region, said: "Christmas 2008 was a resounding success for Xbox 360. 2008 saw us grow faster than any of our competitors and we over-achieved in sales during the crucial Christmas selling period.

"We reduced the entry-level Xbox 360 ERP in September, understanding the need for great value, and European consumers have responded enthusiastically. With eight million consoles sold since we launched, and consistently out-selling PlayStation 3 in EMEA, we're poised to build on this success in 2009."

Lewis also gives a nod to Microsoft's "partnerships with retail and with publishers, with whom we've worked closely to build a strong ecosystem in the region and to bring value to our shared customer base."

Value gaming, friendly analysts

Lewis also talks about the need to provide games at 'the right price' in the current uncertain economic climate.

Nick Gibson, from Games Investor Consulting, is quoted in Microsoft's press release as saying: "Microsoft appears to have enjoyed an excellent end to 2008 in Europe. According to GFK Chart Track data, the Xbox 360 recorded in excess of 100 per cent growth in December sales compared to 2007 across the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain, well ahead of any other console. It also recorded comfortably the highest rate of year-on-year growth for the final quarter of 2008 overall."

Microsoft also quotes another analyst, this time Nick Parker of Parker Consulting, who adds: "I have seen early returns for the December 2008 sales data indicating that the Xbox 360 has shown a significant sales increase year on year and furthermore is ahead of its nearest rival in terms of lifetime consumer hardware sales in the EMEA region, with an installed base of over eight million units."

Microsoft poised to lay off 15,000 staff?

Internet reports have sprung up stating that Microsoft is readying widespread layoffs of its 91,000-strong workforce.

A report from technology blog site Fudzilla says that employees are being told the company is "readying major layoffs to its worldwide operations", meaning that a significant portion could be made redundant.

Up to 15,000 staff members could lose their jobs, with most coming from Microsoft's online presence, MSN.

90 per cent

The layoffs will begin on 15 January according to the report, as Microsoft has apparently cut sale expectations by up to 90 per cent in some divisions, meaning the supporting departments are most at risk.

Fudzilla claims external agency worker numbers are also likely to be reduced, especially in the underperforming departments of the software giant. The company is releasing its Q2 earnings report on 22 January, and it's unlikely the two are unrelated.

However, it seems that working in the Xbox 360 department isn't the end of the world, as recent robust sales of the console mean that most workers in this area are likely to avoid the chopping block.

Microsoft has apparently given some staff a deadline to find another position within the company, but if they fail to meet this date will be let go along with many others.