Rebecca Day

Black Friday came early at Target online Friday as the retailer held a one-day-only “Back in Black Friday” sale. “Yeah, it’s only July,” read the email notice to Target customers, “but huge Black Friday deals are back.” Within minutes after we received the email, a Philips TV advertised as “$250 off” was listed as sold out. A 19-inch Vizio LED-backlit LCD TV was quoted at $99.99, or 50 percent off, and a Kodak 14-megapixel M52, at $89.99, was selling at a 40 percent discount. Twenty percent was shaved from the price of an Xbox 360 4-gigabyte console with two controllers, bringing the bundle to $199. A Kodak’s waterproof mini video camera with a 2-gigabyte MicroSD Card was tagged $44.99. The retailer took $5 off the price of a 7-inch Digital Labs portable DVD Player, bringing it to $49.99. The sale ran from midnight to midnight. Retailers may have to hold more of these out-of-season Black Friday specials to spur spending if sentiment reported in a consumer confidence study by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan released Friday carries through the rest of the year. “While spending gains can be expected in the second half of 2011, the overall trend is more likely to vary between lackluster and zero than between lackluster and robust,” said Richard Curtin, Surveys of Consumers chief economist. Resurgent spending “is not on the horizon,” he said. Long-term, changes in consumer spending could be significant, he said. “The consumer no longer has the financial wherewithal to power the economy into overdrive,” he said. Continued economic stagnation “may ultimately dampen their spending desires in favor of a more permanent shift toward economic caution and risk aversion,” he said.

Google is “enjoying high consumer success” with YouTube, Android and Chrome, CEO Larry Page said Thursday on a quarterly earnings call, but for the second quarter in a row Google TV seems to have dropped off the company radar. Instead, Page highlighted Android and Google+, the company’s social media venture that has gained 10 million users in its first few weeks in operation. “One billion items have been shared and received” over Google+, Page said. “We want to create services that people use twice a day like a toothbrush,” he said, adding the company is only at “one percent of what we can accomplish.”

A popular item on consumers’ holiday gift lists this year could be digital content subscriptions, if announcements made Thursday hit their marks. On the same day Spotify unveiled U.S. availability of its long-promised streaming music service, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) said it began its licensing program for UltraViolet. That starts the infrastructure installation process for a fall start of the UltraViolet ecosystem.

Consumers who want to use the much-hyped Spotify streaming music service on non-PC devices such as cellphones, tablets and AV receivers will need to subscribe to the top-level subscription package, according to audio companies we polled Thursday. Already Sonos and Logitech are pushing Spotify’s premium $9.99-a-month service for owners of their wireless multi-room audio systems, which also stream Pandora, Rhapsody and Sirius XM, among others. The free, ad-supported and $4.99 PC-only versions of Spotify aren’t available on external devices including multi-room music systems, multi-room players or cellphones. A premium account is required for the service to be used on “external (non-PC) devices like our receivers,” said a spokesman for Onkyo. Subscribers to the premium plan can have the app on an unlimited number of devices, a spokeswoman for Spotify told us, but they can only stream on one device at a time. Users can play offline playlists on up to three devices, however, she said. Additional features of the top-shelf plan include higher sound quality and “exclusive competitions and offers,” she said. Although the top-tier plan is capable of streaming at 320 kbps, not all songs are available at that data rate, she said. Onkyo began uploading firmware updates via zip files Thursday that owners of its 2011 networked receivers could download to PC and install through USB ports on receivers, it said. Sonos called the Europe-based streaming music service “one of the most anticipated music services” ever to come to this country. To have Spotify on Sonos, consumers need a Sonos player, a Sonos controller app for Android, iPhone or iPad and the Spotify premium account, Sonos said. Denon, which also sells Internet-ready AV receivers and was one of the first to support Apple’s AirPlay, didn’t respond by our deadline about whether its receivers would have access to Spotify. Spotify said its library is at 15 million tracks “and counting.” Spotify is offering U.S. users six months of unlimited free streaming, a spokeswoman for the on-demand music service told us. Its formal launch in the U.S. Thursday capped two years of false starts and frustrated negotiations with major labels. Spotify bragged Thursday that 15 percent of its users in Europe were paying subscribers, either to its Unlimited desktop-streaming plan or Premium mobile-phone plan; it passed 1 million subscribers this spring. The ad-supported free version in the U.S. is invitation-only at this point, the spokeswoman said: Those with an invitation can listen with no limits for six months, after which the free offering will cap listening to 10 hours a month and five plays per track. “We're going to see how things go over the next few weeks as to how many invites will be distributed and how long the free service will be invite-only,” she said, calling invitations a “hot commodity.” Users can sign up on the invite list at Spotify.com. Those who purchase a subscription can get immediate access. When the invitation-only phase ends, users can get 20 hours of free streaming a month for six months, at which time the free service will revert back to 10 hours and five track plays, the same limits as its European service. Spotify makes it easy for users to share tracks with friends and, in a feature already drawing raves from U.S. users on Twitter, lets users listen to songs offline. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said on its blog that the U.S. service would launch with brand partners Coca-Cola, Sprite, Chevrolet, Motorola, Reebok, Sonos and News Corp.’s The Daily for iPad. Giles Cottle, Informa Telecoms & Media principal analyst, said Spotify could only succeed in the U.S. if it repeats its formula in Europe: “A clean, intuitive user interface, deep links with properties like Facebook and Last.fm (a Pandora deal is not out of the question) and high penetration across mobile handsets and other devices.” But Spotify has a steep hill to climb in the U.S., he said, with “limited brand awareness,” established on-demand competitors like Rhapsody and Napster, upstarts like Mog and Rdio and 100-million user Pandora. With no brand having broken a million paying users, Spotify will be considered a failure if it only manages to “poach a few users from its competitors,” Cottle said. And it may not draw the large user base it needs to placate major labels if it is “forced to cap its free offer too quickly,” he added.

Energy savings and a “new level of convenience” for users are at the heart of tablet and smartphone features introduced recently by Lutron for its lighting and shade control products, the company told Consumer Electronics Daily.

3D is “cool technology” and offers promise for local TV programmers down the road, but it’s not ready for prime-time for cost-conscious Public, Education and Government (PEG) operators, said Matt DeHaven, principal engineer for Columbia Telecommunications, during a technology briefing Monday sponsored by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors. Instead, PEG operators should focus on Internet TV as the cutting-edge technology for the near future, DeHaven said in the webcast.

Iriver said Target will be the exclusive retailer of its $139.99 Story HD e-reader that’s due in stores July 17. Iriver said the 7.3-ounce e-reader is the lightest in its class and the first to use E-Ink’s 768 x 1024 display that’s said to have 63.8 percent more pixels than other e-readers. The iriver Story HD uses a Cortex A8 chipset and has access to “millions” of e-books at the Google eBookstore, iriver said. Using a side-loading SD card slot or USB connection, users can add to their libraries with other books or documents, iriver said. Target also sells the Sony Digital Reader Pocket Edition for $179 and three Amazon Kindle models priced at $114, $139 and $189. A Target spokeswoman said the iriver reader and accessories will be located on end caps in the electronics aisle of Target stores. She didn’t respond to our question about how Target would position the iriver device versus the Kindles or Sony Reader. Already released in Europe, the iriver e-reader can operate for six weeks on standby or for 14,000 page turns from a single charge, iriver said.

Valens Semiconductor, which secured $14 million in second-round financing this week (CED July 7 p5), remains on track to ship HDBaseT chipsets to manufacturers of TVs and connecting components in time for delivery of products “early next year,” a company spokeswoman told us Friday. HDBaseT, along with DiiVA (Digital Interactive Interface for Video & Audio), is competing to be a next-gen networking technology in the home combining uncompressed and protected audio and video, Ethernet and control through one Cat5/6 cable. HDBaseT claims its technology can transmit power up to 100 watts, while DiiVA, officially specified at 5 watts, has demonstrated power transmission up to 24 watts.

Apple’s next iPhone, rumored to be a 4G LTE model, will be “significantly more expensive to make” than the current iPhone, according to IHS’s Teardown Analysis Service. That’s leading analysts at IHS to speculate whether the next iPhone will be the expected 4G LTE model or something else.

Demand in the tablet market “may not be quite as strong as recent media hype suggests,” said a report International Data Corp. released Friday. IDC said seasonal trends typically found in more mature consumer electronics and computing categories “had a notable impact on the burgeoning media tablet market.” Despite a 28 percent drop in tablet shipments in Q1 2011, shipments are expected to grow to a higher-than-expected 53.5 million units for the year, up from a forecast of 50.4 million units, IDC said. A challenging Q1 owed to concerns over macroeconomic issues and a “post-holiday letdown” that took a toll on demand, IDC said.