Technologizer

For tech journalists, the busiest week of all is the first full one of the year. It starts with San Francisco’s Macworld Expo, which involves a whole lot of hoopla about a handful of products (Apple ones, naturally). And then it segues into the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, at which no single product will receive a hundredth of the attention reaped by Apple’s Macworld news. But at CES there are thousands of new products, from nearly every company in the industry except Apple. The show packs Vegas to the rafters, and attendees fill just about every hotel room in the city.

Or so they have for many years–especially after Comdex, once the nation’s biggest tech trade show, went to the great convention center in the sky after its 2003 edition. But with a little more than a month to go until CES 2009 and the economy in tatters, there are rumblings that the show’s hypergrowth may have stalled. CNBC’s Jim Goldman is reporting that the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the show, is saying that this year’s version will be down from 2008 and 2007 in terms of floor space. It’s not saying whether it’ll be down a little or a lot. But hotel room rates, which have been gougingly high in recent years, are coming down this time around–a sure sign that fewer conventioneers are planning to make the pricey trek to the desert.

Anecdotally, a lot of the folks I see every year at CES are telling me that they won’t be there this year…and not one of them seems griefstricken at the prospect of missing it. That’s not a good sign for the show’s health: Comdex managed the incredible feat of going from being the country’s largest trade show of any sort to irrelevance and death in just a few years in part because people disliked attending it and discovered that they didn’t have to. I’m kind of assuming that the CES bubble will burst in similar fashion someday; I don’t know if this will be the year it happens, but it’s worth noting that external forces (the 2000 stock market meltdown and 9/11) probably hastened Comdex’s demise.

Me, I’m still looking forward to the trip to CES–when I worked at PC World I tended to spend most of the show holed up in a PCW conference suite at the Las Vegas Hilton, but this year I figure I’ll be able to roam around and actually see stuff. I’ve always said the only thing I’d find more stressful than attending CES is not attending CES; I hope I still feel that way after next month’s show.

And hey, a slightly smaller, more managable CES might be more enjoyable and productive. Even if only .000001% of the items at the show are a big whoop, I’ll have plenty of stuff to report on here at Technologizer…

If Microsoft wants to become a serious Web competitor to Google it should stop tripping over its own feet. On Black Friday, it was offering more apologies than bargains after embarrassing technical glitches incapacitated the company’s Live Search Cashback, scuttling its initiative to gain a larger share of the search market by giving searchers discounts on products they find through Live Search.

Apparently, someone in Redmond neglected to remember that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. The Cashback site was unable to cope with the heavy volume, and some customers–ones that were able to access the site at all, that is–were left with the wrong amount of cash back credited to their accounts.

One of the biggest snafus occurred when customers that were trying to take advantage of a generous 40 percent discount on HP products received as little as 3 percent cash back posted to their account, according to News.com, which also reported that Microsoft apoligized to shoppers who encountered Cashback glitches . A spokesperson told Technologizer that customers interested in following up on their Cashback rebate should contract Microsoft Live Search support to have their accounts credited.

The company’s initiative to compensate people for using its search engine began in May. Since that time, Microsoft’s share of the search business has fallen, according to multiple surveys. That’s not to say that the Live Search Cashback program is a bad idea–Microsoft is an underdog, and it needs to be creative and scrappy.

However, it had an opportunity to benefit from word of mouth had its Black Friday promotion gone well, and its failure to execute has left it at best no better off than it would have been on any given Friday.

As you saw in Harry’s earlier post, our Swoopo coverage still tops the charts as some of Technologizer’s most frequented articles. This has obviously put us on the radar of the folks at the auction site, so they have been keeping us informed of the goings on with the company. This latest round of changes aren’t all that surprising: many of them we already new about from our interview with US business chief Chris Bauman in October.

Beginner auctions are now live on the site, which Bauman claims will help first-time and new users learn the ropes of what is obviously a new method of online auctions. It will also prevent experienced users from taking advantage of the inexperienced ones as they are barred from bidding.

Many across our pages have also complained about the bidding fee of Swoopo’s auctions, which cost $1 per bid placed. Swoopo has lowered the this to 75 cents, which it claims has increased bidding on items.

While for many, the per-bid charge is a turnoff, at least they look to be realizing that a $1 per bid is a little steep. I’m not sure how much this will do since you’re still paying for those bids even when you lose — my biggest problem with the site — but I guess this is a step in the right direction.

With movies, it’s unquestionably 1939, the fabled year that saw the release of Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, and Goodbye Mr. Chips. With baseball, there are multiple contenders, including 1924, 1949, and 1998…but I’m a Red Sox fan, so let’s just say it–it was 2004. Rock music? Maybe 1967, the year of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, The Doors’ The Doors, The Who’s The Who Sell Out, and Aretha’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You.

But what was the greatest year in technology history–the one that saw the highest number of significant products appear and/or other important events transpire? As far as I know, nobody has ever asked that question, let alone attempted to answer it. Will you join me in trying to figure it out?

In the coming days, Technologizer will recap significant moments, year by year and decade by decade, and give you the chance to vote on the years that made the biggest difference. For reasons of practicality, we’re beginning all this with 1970–we’re pretty sure that the greatest year, whatever it may be, happened in the past 39 years. (If you want to advocate for an earlier year, we’ll give you the chance to do so at some point via write-in votes; anyone know for sure what year the wheel was invented?) We’re also defining technology to cover personal technology relating to information and entertainment: PCs, Web stuff, TVs, MP3s, phones, and GPS, but not airplanes, cars, or clones. Eventually, we’ll winnow down the contenders and determine a winner.

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Data compiled by research firm iSuppli indicates that 2008 will be a tough year for memory chip suppliers. Overall, global semiconductor revenue will drop by two percent thanks to a 16 percent plunge in sales of memory. This would be the second year in a row of falling revenues, the firm said.

“For the memory IC business, 2008 can only be described as disastrous,” iSuppli’s Dale Ford says.

The effects of this downturn are broad: of the top 29 memory chipmakers, only two will see positive gains for the year in terms of revenue. This is dragging down the entire semiconductor market — without memory chips, revenues would have been up 2 percent.

iSuppli cautions to not blame memory solely for the industry’s problems, as six of the top ten semiconductor producers will see falling revenues. But overall, the biggest losers are the memory chip makers. Hynix will see revenues fall nearly 30 percent, and Micron and Samsung 9 percent each.

There is some silver lining to this. Even though this year’s decline was pretty steep, it is by far not the worst. In 2001, memory revenues plummeted 48 percent.

“However, the dot-com-bust decline in 2001 was preceded by a 42.7 percent surge in 2000,” Ford says.

The US’s biggest retail shopping day of the year turned out fine after all, although the results were likely nowhere near as good as investors would have liked. While data shows brick-and-mortar retail sales were up 3 percent, online sales rose only 1 percent.

comScore says that $534 million was spent by consumers online on Friday, likely attracted by better-than-normal deals being offered by desperate retailers. There was some crazy deals: the Epson store offered its R280 photo printer for $29.99, a $70 savings.

Traditionally, heavier online shopping comes today, known as “Cyber Monday.” This is basically due to the fact that as people return to work, they use their downtime to further complete their holiday shopping. It has also been perpetuated by online retailers, which have begun to offer special deals just for the day.

Looking around, there’s not as many deals this year, although Best Buy has its own special page as does competitor Circuit City. comScore says to watch the growth for Cyber Monday: typically it has come within a few percentage points of the overall holiday season growth for online shopping.

If comScore is right, expect that number to be flat. The firm says it sees no growth year-over-year for online shopping.

I’m sorry to say that I fell out of the habit of my Simpsons Sunday-night ritual a long, long time ago. So I missed last night’s episode, which involved a consumer-electronics company known as…Mapple. You know, the one that makes Mipods and Miphones.

Here (thanks, Engadget) are highlights (in two parts, until Fox yanks them off YouTube). They’re good enough that I’m going to try and remember to start making time for the Simps again…

(UPDATE: Based on feedback from commenters JEF and Vox–thanks!–I’m also embedding the whole episode via Hulu, but leaving the YouTube versions up, too.)

Over at Forbes.com, there’s an article on a worthwhile topic: iPhone applications for businessfolk. There are, however, some things about the piece that I just don’t understand. Such as the fact that it seems to argue that buying an iPhone will let you save money on the pens and paper you’d otherwise tote along when you travel. ($200 to $300 for the phone plus two years’ worth of service fees make for a hefty investment to avoid buying a few Bics and memo pads.)

More important, I’m also mystified by this bit:

Gregg Brockway, president of TripIt, a start-up that organizes travel itineraries online and on mobile devices, says iPhones are the greatest gadgets that business travelers don’t know they have. “Smart-phone sales are up 80%, so the whole category is on fire,” Brockway says. “But only a third of business travelers who have a smart phone realize that they can access the Internet. Of the business travelers who do realize, only 50% of them use their phones to actually access the Internet.”

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