Rent-a-Center (RAC) is aggressively expanding its customer-credit business as it adds 300 kiosk-based locations this year, building on its acquisition of TRS (CED Dec 27 p3).

TV manufacturers offered varied responses this week to a report in South Korea’s Joongang Daily that Samsung had formed “3D TV alliances” in Beijing last weekend with Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Haier and Changhong. The report, attributed to Samsung, said the six companies “agreed that the active-shutter glasses format is the best technology for a full high-definition, 3D experience.” It also said the six companies, which accounted for 90 percent of the Chinese 3D TV market last year, vowed “to expand their presence” with the active-shutter format.

Cable and telecom ISPs are continuing efforts toward IPv6 deployment, as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority issues the last five IPv4 address blocks, executives told us Tuesday. Cable operators and consumer electronics manufacturers are working together and with other companies affected by the looming transition to IPv6 from IPv4, said CableLabs and CEA officials.

Control4’s EMS 100 energy management system will be deployed as part of NV Energy’s demand response system, beginning in June, the first rollout of a customer-driven demand response management system in the U.S., Control4 said this week. Utilities have conducted trials of demand response systems, but the NV Energy program, expected to roll out to a minimum of 20,000 homes in southern Nevada by 2012, is the first to integrate a utility’s billing systems and its ability to push price and demand response, Paul Nagel, Control4 vice president of business development for energy systems, told us. “We've seen in the industry a number of small pilots with a couple of thousand units being tested in the home.” Those have used manual, “artificial” events to simulate a demand response or price message, he said.

An inch will go a long way in telling the story of plasma TV market share this year.

Netgear is repositioning the home router as a “platform” rather than just a hardware gateway into the home, Phil Pyo, director of product marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily last week. “The role of the router is changing,” he said, because of the increasing number of Internet-based apps available and advanced features that the company is building into its products to address different consumer needs. “It’s not just about the router anymore,” he said. The home router of the future, he said, will have “different things” and be more of a hybrid network, to “give people choices about how they connect” with extenders, bridges and powerline options.

AU Optronics is starting volume delivery of tablet displays as it capitalizes on its acquisition of Toshiba Mobile Display’s low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) factory, company officials told analysts in a conference call.

Amazon on Friday disputed Kindle-related claims in the latest in a series of patent infringement cases. The latest complaint was filed against the company by Technology Innovations in U.S. District Court in Houston on Dec. 23, court records show. The plaintiff claimed that Amazon’s sale of e-books and Kindle e-readers infringed a patent owned by Technology Innovations for a “Device For Including Enhancing Information With Printed Information And Method For Electronic Searching Thereof,” U.S. Patent 5,517,407.

Strong demand for the new Kinect for Xbox 360 motion sensor helped drive a 55 percent revenue increase for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division (EDD) in Q2 ended Dec. 31 versus the same period a year earlier, it said. The 8 million Kinect sensors sold in its first 60 days available “exceeded our expectations,” Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said in an earnings call.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Vendors and conference organizers at the annual tribute to Apple products said they remain confident that the company will continue to churn out successful products, with or without Chairman Steve Jobs, who is on his second medical leave from the CEO position since January 2009. They said they're confident Jobs has created a team and corporate culture that will keep introducing products that can follow the success of devices such as the iPhone and iPad, and they said many of the products probably bear Jobs’ stamp.