Rebecca Day

After 15 years, with the Home Technology Specialists of America, including a name change, Richard Glikes, executive director, resigned Wednesday over a contract dispute and is looking to start a new buying group, Glikes told Consumer Electronics Daily. Glikes’ departure comes two weeks after the exit of David Berman, HTSA’s training director, to join Texas-based AV specialty store Stereo East. “I'd been paid the same salary for the last 5 years,” Glikes said, saying the board rejected his request for a salary increase and a 3-year contract.

Philips, Sharp, TCL and Toshiba “expressed support” for activities of the Full HD 3D Glasses Initiative, said a statement released Tuesday by Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Xpand. The initiative is intended to provide a technology standard for consumer 3D active shutter glasses, the consortium said. The standardization encompasses RF and IR protocols including M-3DI, proprietary protocols from Samsung and Sony and chips provided by Broadcom, Nordic and CSR (CED Aug 9 p1).

The push to smaller and lighter speakers is on a collision course with the meteoric price rise of neodymium magnets that make such compact speakers possible, speaker suppliers, OEMs and others close to the situation told Consumer Electronics Daily. They peg the surging price of neodymium -- a rare earth element used to make the extremely powerful magnets found in speaker drivers, microphones, cellphones, hybrid vehicle motors and many other products -- to Chinese government supply and demand tactics that are creating crisis conditions for speaker makers who depend heavily on the element that’s almost exclusively mined in China.

Micron’s strategic move to shift mix from DRAM to NAND memory is paying off, said CEO Steve Appleton during the webcast of Micron’s Summer Analyst Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Appleton said the company’s diversified portfolio, despite softness in its low-margin PC and consumer products business, “is very strong."

China passed the U.S. in Q2 to become the world’s largest PC market, according to IDC. During the quarter, roughly 18.5 million units -- both consumer and commercial -- worth $11.9 billion shipped in China, compared to 17.7 million units worth $11.7 billion in the U.S., IDC said. China represented 22 percent of global unit shipments of PCs, compared to the U.S. with 21 percent it said. For the full year, IDC still expects the U.S. to remain the largest market, with 73.5 million units forecast to ship in the U.S. versus 72.4 million in China, due to Q4 holiday season sales. China’s market, in contrast, traditionally contracts after its Q3 summer promotions, IDC said. China is not forecast to surpass the U.S. in annual PC shipments until 2012, when 85.2 million units are expected to ship in China and 76.6 million in the U.S., IDC said.

Hewlett-Packard shares were down as much as 23 percent in morning trading Friday, a day after the company announced its decision to shut down its PC, tablet and smartphone business and focus on higher-margin enterprise, cloud, software and services revenue. In the company’s earnings webcast late Thursday, CEO Leo Apotheker spoke of “tough decisions” and the “velocity of change” in the PC marketplace that led the company to scrap its TouchPad webOS-based tablet a month and a half after hitting stores because it was “not meeting expectations."

HP confirmed Thursday ahead of its late-day earnings webcast that it was seeking a buyer for its computer, tablet and mobile business. It said its board had authorized “the exploration of strategic alternatives” for its Personal Systems Group (PSG), which could include a “full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction.” PSG’s portfolio includes PCs, mobile products, client virtualization and connected entertainment solutions, Internet services and support for consumers, small- to mid-sized business and enterprise customers.

Asus, which turned heads at Computex in May with the UX21, based on Intel’s Ultrabook platform, is now on track for a late-October debut in stores with prices that “should be under $1,000,” Tammy Lin, marketing specialist, told us in New York on a media tour touting new tablets and notebooks. Asus had originally planned to have Ultrabooks in stores in September. The company is planning 10-, 12- and 13-inch models based on the second-gen Intel Core i5 processor, Lin said, but pricing and feature details aren’t yet available, she said.

The 3D Audio Alliance is “well on the way” to a spec for MDA (Multi-Dimensional Audio) open, royalty-free 3D audio transmission standards, with the goal of having tools, a player and a spec defining the fundamentals of the MDA program available by the end of this year, John Kellogg, executive director of corporate strategy at SRS Labs, told Consumer Electronics Daily. At SRS’s studio in Santa Monica, Calif., “I can demonstrate MDA live, fully functional, right now,” Kellogg said.

In the future, “consumers will be more likely to access the Internet through their televisions than via their PCs,” said Jordan Selburn, principal analyst for consumer platforms at IHS iSuppli, in a report. Shipments of Internet-enabled consumer electronics devices will surpass PC shipments for the first time in 2013, according to the report. Shipments of connected CE devices -- including televisions, video game consoles, tablets, set-top boxes, digital media adapters and Blu-ray players -- will jump to 503.6 million units in 2013, from 161 million in 2010, IHS said. PC shipments during the same period will advance to 433.7 million from 345.4 million, it said. In 2015, shipments of connected consumer devices will reach 780.8 million units, outpacing PC shipments of 479.1 million units, it said.