Rebecca Day

Azione Unlimited, the nascent buying group for custom integrators and retailers, delayed its launch by a month but named five of 11 founding members to its advisory board, President Richard Glikes told Consumer Electronics Daily Tuesday. Glikes is targeting 11 board members “to have an odd number and have one more dealer than vendor,” he said. He'll firm up the remaining six board members -- four dealers and two manufacturers -- after meetings at CES, he said. “After those meetings I'll know exactly who’s with me and who’s not,” he said, and post-CES he'll finalize vendor programs and release them to dealers.

To date, the concept of “wearable electronics” has referred to accessories such as goggles that could project a big-screen TV image or glasses with a built-in 720p video recorder. The next step could be electronics built into the actual fabric of clothing. Extreme Tech reported last week that a team of multinational scientists has created electronic circuits and transistors out of cotton fibers. According to the researchers’ report, they created two kinds of transistors: a field-effect transistor, similar to those found in a CPU, and an electrochemical transistor, which is capable of switching at lower voltages, and thus better suited for wearable computers. To make conductive threads, the team coated the fibers with gold nanoparticles, followed by a conductive polymer, according to the article. The cotton wire was dipped into another polymer to make it a semiconductor, then dipped in a glycol coating to make it waterproof. According to the scientists, cotton yarns can be used to construct the basic building blocks of a computer circuit while still retaining flexibility. That could develop into one smart outfit.

Three in four U.S. businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees plan to buy tablets in the next 12 months, with the iPad topping most lists, said NPD Group’s Q3 SMB Technology Monitor. The average small- or medium-sized business will spend more than $21,000 on tablets the next 12 months, but depending on company size, the intent and amount changes dramatically, NPD said. Companies with fewer than 50 employees plan to spend an average $1,912 on tablets, and companies with 501-999 employees plan to spend $38,749 on average, NPD said.

ERecyclingCorps’ recent $35 million cash infusion from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers will help fund an international expansion of the company’s efforts to profit from the growing number of mobile handsets proliferating worldwide each year, CEO David Edmondson told us. Citing EPA data, Edmondson, the former RadioShack CEO, said more than 130 million mobile devices are retired each year in the U.S. alone, but only 10 percent are recycled.

Amid no-margin $198 Black Friday TVs and $699 blow-out 50-inch plasma sets, at least accessories makers were giving retailers some price padding during the holiday sales season. Tech news site Slashdot poked a little post-Christmas fun at Best Buy for listing a $1,095.99 three-foot HDMI cable on its website, citing a spate of tongue-in-cheek reviews. “While Best Buy seems to be oblivious to the absurdity of this price for a digital cable, those posting customer reviews are not,” the writer said. One commenter said the four-figure cable could have been the case of a “pricing bot run amok, or a ridiculously over-inflated sense of worth.” The cable, which the Best Buy website said is “sold out online,” scored 91 percent on the satisfaction scale, with 40 of 44 customers saying they'd recommend the cable to a friend. When we zoomed in, though, closer inspection revealed consumer attitudes toward the disparity of pricing between the cable connecting electronics and the products that actually deliver the content: “Saved a ton of money on a new TV on Black Friday and decided to use the extra cash to get the best cable available. At a whopping 3.3 feet in length, this cable is no joke. When all my friends come over to watch football, they always say, ‘Wow, what kind of HDMI cable do you have?’ I proudly tell them about my AudioQuest diamond and its advanced features such as its dark gray/black finish.” Another: “This is the best cable ever! I was so impressed by the 2160p picture and 3D sound I sold a kidney to buy a second one!” One person said after purchasing the cable he could watch shows he hadn’t chosen, including ones from the future. Another reviewer claimed the clarity provided by the HDMI cable caused flashbacks from terrifying scenes that led to PTSD [Posttraumatic stress disorder] and HPPD [Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder]. There were a few positive posts praising the cable, too, but maybe Best Buy had the last laugh, offering 36-month financing to Best Buy cardholders.

Financial newsletter 24/7 Wall St. on Tuesday tapped Research in Motion’s PlayBook and Netflix’s short-lived Qwikster as the “worst product flops of 2011.” Noting that products often fail because they are inferior versions of popular products, 24/7 Wall St. said, “there was no room for a poorly designed tablet” in a market dominated by iPad at the high-end and Kindle Fire at the entry level.” Netflix’s failure, on the other hand, was a lack of understanding of consumer sentiment and expectations for demand, 24/7 said. When Netflix announced Qwikster, customers were “outraged,” it said, noting that Qwikster failed before even getting off the ground.

Only half of one percent of electrical damage to electronics is caused by surges, according to power protection company Innovolt. The company wants to apply its “intelligent power management” technology to address the 98 percent of issues that can include power sags and interruptions that can wreak havoc on microprocessors and hard disks. Jeff Spence, president of Innovolt, told Consumer Electronics Daily that the company is heading to CES with the goal of partnering with OEMs, ODMs and service providers for its chip-based power protection technology that can reside either inside electronics or as a chipset in the power supply between the component and the power outlet.

LG made a last-ditch effort to push out video inventory at Amazon warehouses Friday with instant manufacturer rebates of as much as 60 percent, Consumer Electronics Daily found. In TVs, the more consumers were willing to spend, the steeper were the discounts offered. For example, LG’s 42LV4400 42-Inch LED-backlit LCD TV was marked down to $529 from $799, and the high-end 60-inch Active 3D THX-Certified Infinia 60-inch 60PZ950 was slashed 60 percent to $1,435.96, we found. The discount was less steep on the 60-inch 60PZ550 60-inch plasma with active 3D and Internet apps, which was discounted from $1,699 to $1,199. LG’s BD670 Blu-ray 3D player was sliced 45 percent to $109, while a non-3D Blu-ray player fell to $59.98 from $119. LG offered instant rebates on nine products in total Friday, including two 720p projectors shaved to $579 and $669. The rebates were good through Christmas Eve, but only on products bought from Amazon directly, not from Amazon’s third-party vendors, according to the website.

Online retailers without a brick-and-mortar presence have a difficult time expanding their businesses through traditional financial services companies, said Marc Gorlin, chairman of Kabbage, a funding company heading to CES next month to promote its funding and data collection services for small online businesses.

Stream TV Networks at CES will bow “Ultra-D," billed as a proprietary next-gen autostereoscopic 3D technology. Stream TV which makes the 7-inch eLocity Android-based tablet, said Ultra-D leverages custom hardware, middleware and software algorithms to create autostereoscopic 3D images. The no-3D-glasses technology promises to give consumers access to unlimited 3D content by enabling real-time conversion of 2D content into autostereoscopic 3D, the company said. It also converts 3D stereoscopic content requiring 3D glasses to achieve the 3D effect to 3D that doesn’t require glasses, it said. The technology works with various content formats including Blu-ray, DVD, PC gaming, Internet, cable and satellite, Stream TV said, and users can customize the 3D effect to address individual differences in spatial perception for personal comfort. Users can boost or cut the real-time 3D rendering effect to adjust for differences in content quality and source, along with personal preference, Stream TV said. “Our ultimate goal was to create a solution that addresses existing concerns impeding the adoption of 3D -— consumer aversion to expensive glasses, viewer discomfort, variance in individual vision and preference and the slow creation of 3D content,” said CEO Mathu Rajan. The company did not respond to questions regarding how many products will be shown at CES using Ultra-D technology, from which categories, whether they'd hit the market in 2012 and how the Ultra-D solution differs from other autostereoscopic methods introduced in the past.