Rebecca Day

"An inflection point is occurring in retail,” driven by mobile technology that’s “revolutionizing” how people shop and pay, said John Donahoe, eBay CEO, on the company’s earnings call late Wednesday. The company expects eBay and PayPal Mobile to each handle more than $10 billion in transactions this year, which Donahoe called “a stunning surge in purchases and payments on devices that did not even exist just a few short years ago.” PayPal Mobile transactions were up 150 percent in Q2 over last year, he said, noting that last quarter four major U.K. retailers added an in-store PayPal app and Starbucks added PayPal to its Android app.

Panasonic is taking a stab at a new product category -- a combination Skype display/photo frame that it’s calling the UN-W700 Multimedia Video System Featuring Skype. If the name doesn’t flow off the tongue, retailers may have an equally difficult time positioning it -- a “fair question,” Alex Fried, group manager of home entertainment, told us at the company’s holiday preview event in Manhattan Wednesday. The seven-inch 800x480 touch screen LCD display -- which has Bluetooth, SD and USB inputs, built-in Wi-Fi, 4 GB memory and a 2-megapixel webcam -- could be positioned with digital photo frames or in the video aisle with Blu-ray players, Fried said. But the company is calling it a “communications tool,” emphasizing the Skype functionality, he said. As a music player, it supports MP3 and WMA, and the video player supports H.264, MPEG-4 and WMV, according to literature. Suggested retail price is $249 and it will ship in September, Gene Kelsey, director of retail sales support, told us. The frame, which runs a Qualcomm 1 GHz processor on the Android operating system, also comes with apps for Google Play, Twitter, Facebook and TuneIn Radio along with a “limited” browser, Kelsey said. Regarding whether the touch-screen device might be a way to test the waters for a tablet product further on, Fried said the tablet market is “very competitive,” but that Panasonic is always looking to see if the time is right for new technology. Target customers include military personnel and “technophobes,” who want the benefits of Skype without buying into the full PC experience, but Grandma would have to have Wi-Fi to make it work, Fried said. Panasonic also showed a white Bluetooth speaker roughly the size of a hockey puck ($69.99), which can run on AA batteries or charge by USB, Fried said. The Bluetooth speaker, designed to stream music from smartphones and tablets, will ship next month, he said.

Slammed by customer reviews and shocked by a threat from Amazon a year ago to drop its headphone line because of poor ratings, Klipsch Group is on an all-out campaign against counterfeiters who are selling “virtually identical” headphones online, Klipsch said. The call from Amazon turned “a light on” to how big the problem was, Mike Klipsch, president of global operations, told Consumer Electronics Daily. “We discovered the ones that were getting bad ratings weren’t real product,” he said, and the company announced Wednesday it’s adopting a product authentication program that it hopes will curb counterfeit sales.

Target advertised “Black Friday-like deals all week” in an email newsletter Tuesday, including a $25 gift card with the purchase of any iPad and $20 gift cards with purchase of the iPod touch. The store was selling a 16GB new iPad for $499, the same price of the device at the Apple Store, and the iPad 2 was priced at $399, also matching the Apple price. The 16GB iPhone 4S was cut $20 to $179 with 2-year activation. The retailer is also issuing $25 gift cards to buyers of a $149 Wii console bundle, it said, and a $10 gift card is the reward for a $99 Nintendo DSi bundle. All gift card bundles run through Saturday. Also running under “temporary price cuts,” the 8GB iPod touch was trimmed by $11 to $184 and the black 32GB version by $32 to $272.99, a dollar under the white version at $273.99, the ad said. The 8GB iPod nano was shaved $10 top $119, as were the 16GB models to $139, it said. Target issued temporary price cuts on some TVs, including $50 off a Polaroid 32-inch 720p 60 Hz LCD TV, bringing it to $199, and $50 off a 39-inch Westinghouse 1080p 60 Hz LCD TV, dropping it to $329 online, according to the ad. An RCA Blu-ray player is on sale for $59.99, down from $79.99, and a Garmin Nuvi took a $35 hit to $84, the ad said. Dorm deals at Target include an Acer 15-inch notebook PC with 4GB memory and a 500GB hard drive, cut by $90 to $329, and an 11-inch Acer model with 2GB RAM and 320GB hard drive, pared by $30 to $269, according to the ad. A Canon Pixma printer was chopped $20 to $39.99, it said. Lexar 16GB thumb drives, shown in green and a diamond pattern, were listed on sale at $9.99. The retailer also took names and email addresses for “Bonus Black Friday” sales that start Friday and end Saturday.

Former Harman and Boston Acoustics executive Eli Harary is heading a team of audio industry veterans in launching a luxury audio brand called AudioXperts, which the company hopes will give the specialty retail channel a differentiating product line “with margin."

Average selling prices of OLED technology devices will become “very competitive with LCD” over the next 2-3 years, Barry Young, managing director of the OLED Association, said during a preview webcast for the group’s OLED Summit to be held in San Francisco Sept. 26-28. Capacity for small-medium OLED panels will grow from roughly a million square meters last year to 2 million square meters in 2012, Young said, and is expected to jump to more than 8 million square meters by 2016, as a result of new fabs announced by several market players.

Polk has brought back the heart and dropped the “Audio” in a new branding and logo campaign announced Thursday that’s designed to bring out the company’s “friendly” side, Al Ballard, marketing vice president, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The company abandoned the heart that used to dot the “i” in Audio on its logo about 10 years ago, Ballard said. “The original logo had a following,” he said, but was replaced to be “more serious” with a more generic logo that “could have been an industrial product or a bank,” he said. The word “Audio” was dropped because “we don’t feel like we need it,” he said. “People who know the brand call us Polk.” At the same time, part of the rebranding is to reach out to new digital customers who know “little to nothing about audio,” he said. The company website has been overhauled, too, and now focuses more on applications than products. Consumers who discover Polk from seeing a product at a friend’s house or from a Google search can find products based on usage: in the home, on the road, personal and portable and in the office, he said. A consumer who learned about Polk headphones at a rock ‘n’ roll event can discover they can have a music system for their office, too, “an idea they didn’t have before,” he said. Polk will sell products directly from the new site, which it did in the past, Ballard said. “But we're not trying to be an e-tailer that’s in your face or offering discounts,” he said, adding that consumers can typically get better prices from a dealer. The first products to carry the new logo will be the SurroundBar 9000 and 5000 due out in September, Ballard said. Digital and print ads will accompany the re-launch, but Ballard wouldn’t put a price tag on the cost of the rebranding effort. The company is looking at new categories along with the fresh face, he said. Polk will expand its headphone line where “the tent is so large” there are opportunities for new products, despite the large number of manufacturers serving the market. The company is also looking at new areas such as portable Bluetooth speakers, he said. Polk worked with San Francisco-based Frog Design on the logo and branding with a near-term goal of reaching an “increasingly diverse audience,” the company said.

Bose has lopped $1,500 off the suggested retail price of its first-generation 46-inch VideoWave TV/sound system as it brings to market two new models -- in 46-inch and 55-inch screen sizes -- Santiago Carvajal, business director for Bose Video products, told us Thursday. Suggested retail prices of the VideoWave II Entertainment System products are $4,999 and $5,999, steep for today’s cutthroat flat-panel market, but Carvajal justified the prices, as “three products in one” combining a TV, home theater system and music system in one package with no wires or separate speakers.

WealthTV’s 3D TV programming will be available via 3D content distribution portal Yabazam, in the first TV network distribution agreement for Yabazam parent company DDD, the companies said Wednesday. WealthTV programming covers travel, automotive, documentaries and other topics, the companies said. New 3D episodes from WealthTV will be released on Yabazam “on a regular basis,” from series including “Wonders of the World,” “Take Off,” “Private Islands” and “Boys Toys,” the companies said. Earlier this week Yabazam said its app would be available for Samsung TVs, following an announcement earlier that an app would available for LG 3D TVs later this month. The Samsung app will follow, a spokeswoman for DDD told us. The struggling 3D video content world will see a further bump in offerings later this month when Yabazam launches its pay-per-view 3D video service with roughly 50 titles, she said. Yabazam positions its 3D library as content “beyond the 3D features released by the major studios.” Prices for titles will range from $1.99 to $4.99, she said. Yabazam’s latest release is “UYUYUI!” from Timbo Estudio, which ran on the international film festival circuit in 2011, Yabazam said, and other titles include the “Safety Geeks SVI” series, “The Curse of Skull Rock” and “Rio de Janeiro Carnival.” Currently, “anyone with a smart TV” can view trailers via Yabazam, which is “aggressively building” a 3D content library, the spokeswoman said. Yabazam’s content comes from mostly independent producers of 3D content who don’t have distribution networks, she added. LG and Samsung TVs use DDD’s TriDef 3D technology, she said.

Google’s entry-level 8GB Nexus 7 tablet has a $151.75 bill of materials (BOM), $18 higher than that of the Kindle Fire, according to a preliminary report by IHS’s Teardown Analysis Service. The BOM -- including design, components and cost -- goes up to $159.25 with the addition of manufacturing expenses, IHS said. The high-end 16GB model has a BOM of $159.25 and total cost of $166.75 with manufacturing added, IHS said.