E-Commerce Blog

Nintendo’s first-half profit plunged as sales of its hit Wii home console fizzled, forcing it to forecast annual earnings would fall for the first time in six years. The recent global price cut for the Wii also hurt Nintendo, which Thursday reported its profit for the April-September period was down 52 percent from a year earlier. Hiroshi Kamide, a director at KBC Securities Japan, said the numbers weren’t good but within expectations, and said Nintendo would have to look to next year and a new machine, perhaps a handheld, to spur the next stage of growth.

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Wii’s Glory Days May Be Over

“The connected home” is a term used frequently but often defined ambiguously. Consumer electronics manufacturers, the PC industry, pay-television service providers and broadband providers are driving the development of the connected home, for obvious reasons, as the interplay of these elements expands the businesses for all these players. There are two trends driving home networking of consumer electronics: the growth of stored media collections on home servers and the influx of online content services.

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The Wide-Open Gateway to the Connected Home

In research conducted among over 200 companies in 2008 for a reported titled “B2B TeleServices and Appointment-Setting: Less Risk, Less Reward?,” Aberdeen Group found that end-user sales organizations relying primarily on external appointment-setting vendors for lead generation realized dramatically lower business results if the vendor deliverable was limited to simple appointments, rather than meetings accompanied by business intelligence. New data indicates that this trend continues.

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B2B TeleServices: Bring the Right Intel to the Table

Consumers across the country soon will be able to find impartial information about out-of-network healthcare costs on a new Web site, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday. The information will be collected by a new not-for-profit company, FAIR Health, in partnership with a research consortium based at Syracuse University, Cuomo said. The new database “will bring much-needed transparency, accountability and fairness to a broken consumer reimbursement system” and could benefit more than 100 million Americans nationwide, Cuomo said.

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New Medical Web Site to Open Window on Out-of-Network Fees

Fans of “Family Guy” are chortling about Microsoft’s belated discovery that a “Family Guy” special might not jibe with the software giant’s corporate image. On Monday, Microsoft said it’s pulling out as sponsor of a “Family Guy” variety show, just two weeks after announcing its sole sponsorship of the special, “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” scheduled to air Nov. 8. The special includes “typical ‘Family Guy’-style jokes, including riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest,” said “Variety.”

Originally posted here:
Microsoft a Little Slow on the Uptake in ‘Family Guy’ Brouhaha