Producing and marketing unprofitable handsets cost BlackBerry “quite a bit of money” and was “a drag to the bottom line” before the company decided in the fall to exit that business, said CEO John Chen Wednesday at the company's first shareholder meeting since departing the hardware business in September for a royalty-bearing licensing model. It plans soon a “second program” in which it will license its embedded software to a variety of makers for TVs, wearables “or many of the devices that you will get in contact with on a day-in and day-out basis,” he said. Those devices “will not carry the BlackBerry brand, but they will carry the BlackBerry technology on which we will also get a piece of the royalty,“ he said. BlackBerry has “very good relations” with carriers “on the software side,” Chen said. From “their business case,” there’s no rationale for the carriers to “put in the money” to support the BB10 operating system, he said. “For that, I apologize, but this is the crux of the problems that we had in the company, and this is why we had to move on to a different set of operating systems.”
The 39-member VR Industry Forum began work to tackle virtual-reality motion sickness that threatens adoption, Mary-Luc Champel, Technicolor director-standards, told participants in a Tuesday Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers webinar. “The intention is to produce guidelines on how to create content and distribute content in a way that can have less impact on human factors.” VR motion sickness is “not fun to test,” joked Nick Mitchell, vice president-immersive technology at the Technicolor Experience Center (TEC) that opened officially Thursday in Culver City, California. “One of the reasons why we set up the TEC was to give people kind of a safe place to come in and get in a headset and really take their time to feel out the medium.” He conceded that amid all the VR buzz, there’s “a little bit of a line that you have to walk when talking to people because the interest level is so high, sometimes it can sort of cloud reality.” Industry is “being very cautious” in targeting VR to children, said Mitchell. The next big technical advance is “we’ll probably get rid of the wires” in VR headsets, said Mitchell. Work is progressing at the Motion Picture Experts Group on the suite of standards known as “MPEG-1,” said Champel of “immersive media” spec activities that he co-chairs.
A bill winding its way through the Oregon legislature that would decriminalize the use of drones for firing bullets when properly authorized by the FAA or local police is drawing the wrath of CTA for fear that the wording in one section of the legislation would thwart the commercialization of drones. “Oregon, call your senators to encourage them" to defeat HB-3047, "which prevents drone innovation,” CTA President Gary Shapiro tweeted Friday. HB-3047, which cleared the Oregon House Thursday, contains a provision that would bar individuals from operating drones over private property “in a manner so as to intentionally, knowingly or recklessly harass or annoy the owner or occupant of the privately owned premises.” CTA wrote in a policy blog post that Oregon lawmakers, through the wording in that section of HB-3047, “want to slow drone innovation with a bill that prohibits drone flights that ‘annoy.’ This rule is impossible to define and totally senseless -- Oregon already has laws in place to protect privacy and prevent harassment. Don’t let an overly-broad bill crush drone use in your state.” Representatives of HB-3047's sponsors didn’t comment Monday.
Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said OLED remains important for smartphones, comprising 24 percent of display viewing area of small screens, “and we expect that to double over the next several years." In “small screens” for smartphones, OLED “has potential,” he told investors Friday. “Glass utilization for OLEDs is basically the same as for LCDs, but the increasingly demanding manufacturing processes for flexible OLEDs creates the need for an even higher-performance glass.” The CEO noted Samsung picked Lotus glass for the flexible OLED screens built into the Galaxy S8 and S8+. “Superior drop performance” of its fifth-generation Gorilla Glass for mobile devices “opens up opportunities to increase the amount of glass per phone,” said Weeks. Though plastics and metals were “primary materials” used for backs of smartphones, “glass offers design advantages, including more elegant form factors and better scratch resistance,” he said. Device makers also are starting “to incorporate new capabilities” into the backs of their smartphones, including wireless charging and faster data transmission, meaning more layers of glass are used, Weeks said.
Reports that Best Buy will team with Lumoid to offer a “try before you buy” rental service are “generally accurate,” except for the product categories the service will cover, spokeswoman Paula Baldwin emailed us Monday. Contrary to the reports, “drones will not be available for rental -- but health & fitness, digital imaging and smart home devices will be,” Baldwin said. The service will launch later this month at BestBuy.com, Baldwin said. “It is a not an in-store offering,” she said: “When customers visit bestbuy.com, they’ll be able to use Lumoid to try out products” in the selected categories “for a period of time (usually about a week),” she said.
LG Electronics was right to urge the FCC to incorporate into its rules both the A/322 and A/321 physical-layer documents within the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards (see 1705100003), Hatfield & Dawson Consulting Engineers told the commission in comments posted Wednesday in the next-generation broadcast standard rulemaking proceeding (docket 16-142). The engineers' "primary concern" in the ATSC 3.0 rulemaking "is with minimizing the potential for intersystem interference among users of the broadcast spectrum," they said. “While in general we support a minimum of regulation, fundamental technical standards must be a part of the regulation package,” said the engineers. “A/321, by itself, is insufficient to define the waveform and interference requirements” of ATSC 3.0, they said. “A possible solution would be to incorporate A/322 as a part of the Commission’s rules, applicable to television broadcast content, allowing flexibility for use of non-television content so long as the basic emission waveform criteria are met.” LG has called the A/322 document on physical-layer protocol "critical for ensuring that an ATSC 3.0 signal is reliably transmitted and received." A/321 on system discovery and signaling was the only ATSC 3.0 physical-layer document that ATSC had ratified when CTA, NAB and others filed their petition for rulemaking last April asking the FCC to allow broadcasters to begin using the new broadcast standard (see 1604130065). ATSC ratified A/322 in September and approved a 2017 amendment to the document just this Tuesday. Reply comments in the ATSC 3.0 rulemaking are due Thursday.
CTA, unlike much of the tech industry, has “not taken a position” on the Paris climate accord, nor on President Donald Trump’s decision Thursday withdrawing the U.S. from the agreement, spokesman Jeff Joseph emailed us Monday. The Information Technology Industry Council released a statement criticizing Trump's decision Thursday as “a setback for America’s leadership in the world.” Earlier in the week, Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft were the tech firms among the two dozen companies taking out full-page ads in major newspapers urging Trump not to withdraw the U.S. from the climate accord on ground that the Paris agreement "benefits U.S. businesses and the U.S. economy in many ways."
CTA wants EPA to scrap considering tighter limits against disabling energy-saving automatic brightness control (ABC) features for TVs to qualify for Energy Star V8.0, it told the agency in comments posted last week. CTA used its first known comments in the 10-month-long proceeding to “caution” EPA to “resist the temptation to micromanage the functionality of televisions.” EPA said it wants to release V8.0's final draft by mid-month (see 1701300015). Samsung faulted the methodology of EPA tests the agency described during a May 15 webinar in which six individuals were asked to give "subjective luminance preferences” (see 1705160048): "Such a small sample size is not sufficient to make any determinations about representative consumer preferences." The Natural Resources Defense Council sees no “evidence that justifies allowing TV manufacturers to automatically disable” ABC in most situations. California utilities also were supportive.
IDTechEx sees virtual- and augmented-reality headsets becoming a $37 billion global market by 2027, Harry Zervos, principal analyst, told a Thursday webinar. The research firm forecasts 220 million devices will ship in 2027, 130 million of them for VR, the rest for AR, he said. IDC Thursday reported VR and AR shipments jumped 77.4 percent in Q1 to 2.3 million units, forecasting 2017 triple-digit growth. A "challenge is the slow growth in content that appeals to a mass audience, combined with the confusion associated with a lack of cross-platform support," the researcher said.
Lawyers for songwriter Sammy Cahn and four music publishers have until June 26 to retrieve six sealed documents filed in the July 1990 complaint (case 1:90-cv-04537) they brought to stop Sony from importing and selling digital audio tape recorders in the U.S. Clerks at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will destroy the documents, which remain sealed, if they’re not picked up by the deadline, said court notices (in Pacer) posted May 25. Cahn and his fellow plaintiffs -- JAC Music, Fort Knox Music, Trio Music and Peer International -- with support from the National Music Publishers’ Association and the Songwriters Guild of America, sued Sony for contributory infringement on grounds that the company's digital audio tape recorders produced perfect copies that would inhibit future sales of commercial sound recordings. The complaint was terminated a year later after the consumer electronics industry reached the compromise legislative deal with the recording industry, music publishers and songwriters that became the framework for the Audio Home Recording Act. President George H.W. Bush signed the AHRA into law in 1992. Cahn died in 1993.