Rebecca Day

TV Everywhere, the theme of the 2011 CES, still has “a long way to go before the vision is realized,” said Jonathan Weitz, partner at IBB Consulting Group, during a panel on the business of TV Everywhere at Streaming Media East in New York Wednesday. Looming issues include working business models to meet the needs of different content providers, a globalization path, and which devices and operating systems to support as disparate cloud-, mobile and traditional viewing devices hit the market.

Following a 2011 holiday sales season where “I've never been so unimpressed by a product portfolio,” Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca is looking to new design and packaging this year to refresh the line, he said at a Morgan Stanley conference Tuesday in Boston. There was a “misplacement of the value of our products,” De Luca said. “We make products that nobody needs but people want,” De Luca said, “and if our products aren’t wanted, they don’t buy them.” Over the past 2-3 years, Logitech made a couple of “mistakes,” De Luca said, including its Google TV Revue product, which was the fault of Logitech, not Google TV, he added. “We went after it like it was sliced bread, and it wasn’t,” he said.

Recent elections in France and Greece and further uncertainty about the euro is leading Voxx to temper sales projections for fiscal 2013, the company said on an earnings call Tuesday. Based on sales and expense projections, CEO Pat Lavelle projected $900 million in sales for fiscal 2013, basically little changed year over year. “The euro conversion will reduce sales by approximately $26 million alone,” and another $10-$20 million of low-margin commodity business “may be eliminated,” Lavelle said.

When Jawbone begins selling its Big Jambox on Tuesday, a wireless speaker designed to deliver “big sound” from a portable music player “to fill a much larger space,” it will usher in a new era of 3D audio. The $299 speaker connects wirelessly using Bluetooth to any Bluetooth-enabled device -- including smartphones, tablets and computers -- to stream music, movies, games and phone calls inside or outdoors, the company said. The Big Jambox, which doubles as a speaker phone, is the first to use BAACH filter technology, developed in the 3-D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Laboratory at Princeton.

NEW ORLEANS -- Growing with the proliferation of smartphones is the number of models that first owners no longer use. So, too, is the number of resellers hoping to capitalize on their availability. A group of wireless industry companies wants to ensure that phones that can still breathe profit into the supply chain get the full bang for the buck, and is developing a set of standards designed to bring pre-owned vehicle respectability to the second-hand cellphone market.

NEW ORLEANS -- The wide variation in lead times for technology and automotive companies, concerns of driver distraction and safety, and forging collaborative efforts with carriers lead the challenges facing the connected car space, panelists said Wednesday at the CTIA Wireless 2012 show.

NEW ORLEANS -- Clarion’s plug-and-play iPhone controller won’t be available through its specialty dealers when it ships on June 1, Adam Thomas, Clarion’s marketing vice president, told Consumer Electronics Daily at the CTIA Wireless 2012 show here Tuesday. Instead, the seven-inch touch-screen controller will launch at $269 through “more appropriate” retailers such as Amazon and Crutchfield beginning next month, with other national retailers to follow, Thomas said.

A cultural shift to more personalized audio products is one of the drivers behind DEI Holdings’ Global Design Center that the company opened at its Vista, Calif., headquarters last week, Chief Design Officer Michael DiTullo told Consumer Electronics Daily. The design center’s primary focus is on personal audio products, according to DEI Holdings President Kevin Duffy. DEI’s product lineup will expand to include other portable audio products for the company’s portfolio, which also includes the Definitive Technology and Boom audio brands. Products on the roadmap that aren’t currently fielded by the company include Bluetooth speakers, Duffy told us.

Partner pushback over costs of codec licensing for “traditional media playback” were behind Microsoft’s decision not to offer optical disc or digital TV tuner support within Windows Media Player in Windows 8 devices, Microsoft last week said in a blog post. “Our partners have shared clear concerns over the costs associated with codec licensing for traditional media playback, especially as Windows 8 enables an unprecedented variety of form factors,” according to the post, attributed to Bernardo Caldas from the Windows business group, and Linda Averett, head of program management for the developer experience team.

Following concerns over the role Dolby Labs would play in the Windows 8 ecosystem without de facto optical disc support in Windows Media Player, Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman said on the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings call that Microsoft’s decision to incorporate Dolby technologies for online and file-based content into all versions of Windows 8 is a “significant step forward” in Dolby’s efforts to bring “premium media experiences” to the cloud and portable devices. Microsoft’s use of Dolby Digital Plus in Windows 8 “ensures the presence of our format and the Windows’ ecosystem beyond DVD” while offering a “differentiating audio experience to Windows-based PCs and tablets,” he said.