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Next week Sony will hold its annual spring line show detailing new product rollouts for 2009 and supplementing its CES 2009 HDTV announcements with specifics like pricing and availability. A couple days early, HDGuru.com has an article spelling out pricing for a number of Sony's new lines of Bravia-branded LCD TVs.

On a series-by-series basis, the Guru also provides advice to shoppers facing the inevitable question of whether to buy now while the deals on 2008 models are very good, or wait for the '09 versions to come out. In general, given the price difference and closeout deals on '08 versions, he advises shoppers to get a good deal now and not wait. We tend to agree, at least for folks who don't care about Yahoo Widgets or 240Hz.

The Guru leaked prices and estimated release dates for most of the series below. Pricing is listed as MAP, Sony's estimated street price.… Read more

Another week, another rumor that a PS3 price cut is right around the corner. This time the fuel comes from Janco Partners' Mike Hickey, who, according to the site gamesindustry.biz, said in his latest note to investors that Sony needs to chop $100 off the 80GB PS3's price to "restart unit velocity at retail" and that "recent channel checks indicate increased speculation for a PS3 price cut announcement from Sony in the next couple of days."

To cap things off, Hickey added more brutal commentary:

"If Sony does not cut the price of … Read more

After a technology review site claimed Intel solid-state drives slow considerably after extended use, Intel said it has not been able to duplicate the results.

SSDs have been gaining in popularity because independent testing done to date has typically shown that SSDs--especially the newest generation of drives--outpeform hard disk drives.

A review, however, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs" on technology Web site PC Perspectives claimed, among other things, that the Intel X25-M solid-state drive may degrade in performance as a result of "internal fragmentation" and that "a 'used' X25-M will always perform … Read more

I'm currently working on pricing models for several new open-source companies, and I keep running into a similar set of challenges. The primary issue is that when you shrink a market, as open source does, you must to find a pricing model that solves the equation, meaning that your costs must substantially lower in order for you to make money.

Customers assume that open source is free and that commercial open source is cheaper, but most companies aren't prepared to deal with the implications of having a lower-cost product. Even when you can clearly demonstrate value, you run … Read more

Blu-ray U.S. disc sales have tripled in the past year, according to The Digital Entertainment Group, but there's a slight problem--Blu-ray sales are still lower than where film studios would like them to be, and there's no indication that Blu-ray sales will top DVD sales anytime soon.

The studios blame Blu-ray's performance on the economy, and claim that if we were enjoying better economic times, the format's sales would be higher.

But there's one person, Bill Mechanic, a film producer and former Fox Filmed Entertainment chief, who believes there's more to this story.

"I think it's one part recession, but there are bigger factors," Mechanic told The Wrap in an interview. "That's a misreading of consumer behavior as well as a misreading of the economic environment. It's devalued the libraries."

"If you can buy 'Titanic' for $4.99," Mechanic continued, "[consumers will say] 'Well, wait a minute...'" when they consider buying another film on Blu-ray at a substantially higher price.

"There's no rhyme or reason of what I see in the market place in terms of pricing," Mechanic said.

He has a point. Even on Amazon.com, where Blu-ray movies are usually priced at their cheapest level, there's a major difference between DVD pricing and Blu-ray pricing. In fact, an older film like "Independence Day" is currently being offered on DVD for $14.99 and on Blu-ray for $25.99. A DVD of a new film, "The Dark Knight," is retailing for $14.99 on the site, while its Blu-ray counterpart is going for $23.99.

It sure looks like DVD pricing is holding Blu-ray back.… Read more

Update: This article was corrected to reflect that the information is for the fourth quarter of 2008, not the whole year.

The liquid crystal display TV market is beginning to lose some steam.

The fourth quarter was the first time that the total number of shipments of LCD TVs in North America was lower than the same quarter the previous year. Just 8.7 million units were shipped during the last quarter of 2008, a 2 percent decline from the 8.9 million shipped during the same time in 2007, according to data released Thursday by DisplaySearch, which tracks the … Read more

Intel has slashed solid-state drive prices, but probably not enough to sway many consumers.

Intel's mainstream, and currently most widely available, 80GB X18-M was cut to $390 from $595--about a 34 percent drop in price. But paying almost $400 for an 80GB drive may still be too much to ask of consumers when, for example, a 160GB, 7,200-rpm laptop hard-disk drive from Toshiba can be had for less than $100 on Amazon.

Solid-state drives, particularly the newest generation of SSDs, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest users of Intel solid-state drives … Read more

Memory chip prices shot up on Monday--a welcome bit of news for beleaguered chipmakers, who have been caught in a relentless downward price spiral.

Prices for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), the main memory in PCs, shot up as much as 26 percent, according to data posted on DRAMeXchange. A number of reports have attributed this to the bankruptcy of Germany-based chipmaker Qimonda, and seem to indicate that this will relieve some of the pressure on prices caused by oversupply.

The price of certain DDR2 (Double Data Rate, second generation) memory chips rose as much as 28 percent Monday. Flash … Read more

It was a rather blase day for Yahoo's closing stock price Friday. It didn't shoot to the moon on the latest Microsoft takeover rumor, nor crater to the Earth's core on fears that the software giant is never coming back in some shape or form.

But, nonetheless, Yahoo's newly minted CEO, Carol Bartz, was likely taking notice. Her potential fortune is tied to Friday's closing stock price.

Bartz, under her compensation package, is eligible to reap the rewards of 5 million stock options, which carry an exercise price based on Friday's close of $11.… Read more