Sony looks like it is about ready to shut down its failed “Dash” experiment.
The “personal Internet viewer” alarm clocks saw some popularity when they were released but horrible reviews nailed the coffin.
Reads Sony’s site: “Beginning February 29, 2012, the Sony dash developer website (http://dash.sonydeveloper.com) will close and no longer support development of new applications. This closure includes the dash developer forum and dash developer support email address (dash-support@sonydeveloper.com) which will close on March 31, 2012. Sony dash applications will remain available. Thank you for your contributions and we encourage you to continue your development activity on Sony’s other platforms available at SonyDeveloper.com.”
The original Dash machine has a 7-inch touchscreen, 800×480 resolution, a 500Mhz processor and 256MB DDR2 RAM.
What makes the alarm clocks popular is access to 1500 apps for weather, traffic, social networking, movies, music and games.
Result for: internet
Microsoft is on the verge of purchasing Internet phone company Skype for over $7 billion, in what would be the company’s largest ever acquisition.
Negotiations are in the final stages but the deal could still fall apart, say multiple sources speaking to WSJ.
Skype has 663 million users globally and says 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls were made over the service in 2010.
In 2007, Microsoft overpaid for online advertising firm aQuantive, paying $6 billion in what is their current largest deal, ever. In 2008, Microsoft offered $48 billion for Yahoo but was turned down and eventually the deal collapsed. Yahoo is valued at $25 billion today so it certainly appears that Microsoft dodged a bullet.
The Skype deal will be very expensive given the company’s history of no profits.
In 2010, Skype had nice revenue of $860 million but lost $7 million. Google and Facebook were reported as being interested in the VoIP company, as well.
Result for: internet
The RIM Blackberry PlayBook is now on sale in the U.S. and Canada, hitting stores with a mixed bag of critical reviews.
Selling for $499 for a 16GB/Wi-Fi model, RIM is hoping to break into the tablet market dominated by the Apple iPad.
The PlayBook features the standard 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM but its real differentiating factor is its Internet experience. The browser has support for Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, and HMTL 5 and many reviews say it is the best browser on a tablet, ever.
Additionally, the PlayBook has a 7-inch screen, 1024×600 resolution, dual cameras, a microHDMI port and the BlackBerry App World, which has thousands of apps.
Models with 4G access will be available during the summer.
