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.

Four months after the FCC approved final white spaces rules Sept. 23, the Office of Engineering and Technology said nine companies have been selected as geolocation database providers. The order was announced quietly, compared to the fanfare that marked the September order. But it marks a critical step toward the sale of the first devices designed to use the TV band to surf the Internet.

Ultimate Electronics’ plunge into bankruptcy comes less than a year after the chain embarked on an ambitious expansion plan that lacked the infrastructure to support it, industry executives told Consumer Electronics Daily Thursday. Ultimate executives didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUSTIN, Texas -- How to engage the consumer in energy and management was the main theme of the Parks Associates Smart Energy Summit this week, and utilities will have to learn a new way to communicate with consumers if they're going to navigate the transition successfully, participants said. Multiple issues stand in the way of broad consumer adoption of energy management products and services including reluctance to cede power to utilities in a demand-response smart meter program, cost -- if the return on investment isn’t enough to justify consumers to spend for energy management services -- lack of education about the benefits of energy management, and varying levels of consumer comfort with technology, said Ron Ambrosio, a staffer at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center. He’s also chairman emeritus of the U.S. Department of Energy’s GridWise Architecture Council.

Logitech continues to believe tablet devices offer “an additive opportunity” for the accessory company’s business, but “it’s unlikely that the market can support the huge number of tablets on display at CES” early this month, CEO Gerald Quindlen said in a Thursday earnings call. The company has aggressive plans for tablet accessories next fiscal year, he said as Logitech reported strong results for fiscal 2011 Q3 ended Dec. 31.

A delayed FCC proposal to let all pay-TV subscribers connect video devices, such as set-tops boxes and DVRs, bought from retailers or other third parties seems to have been slowed by concerns expressed by many multichannel video programming distributors and their content suppliers, said commission, industry and nonprofit officials on both sides of the issue. An AllVid rulemaking notice on a gateway device to connect CE gear to all MVPDs was supposed to have been voted on by commissioners last quarter, under the National Broadband Plan’s agenda. The item may not circulate until later this quarter or Q2, said officials inside and outside the commission watching development of the item.

Less than a month after they took effect, California’s energy standards for TVs, the first in the nation, are working without any major hitch, said state regulators, TV makers and efficiency advocates. “Contrary to doom and gloom predictions from opponents, there is an abundance and variety of all types of TVs available for purchase and customers are buying,” said Adam Gottlieb, spokesman for the California Energy Commission (CEC). California’s efficiency standards are “essentially old Energy Star requirements that the market has long since surpassed, which suggests that the CEC’s process was more about creating unnecessary regulations than saving energy,” said Douglas Johnson, CEA vice president of technology policy.

Sony Computer Entertainment didn’t provide pricing or an exact ship date for a new portable videogame system that it introduced Thursday at a Tokyo news briefing, saying only that the device will ship at year-end. The company left open many questions, including the device’s name, which it referred to only by the code name “NGP,” for Next Generation Portable, and whether the device, a followup to the PSP, will ship simultaneously in Japan, Europe and North America. The company will announce the official name and launch details “later,” said SCE Europe spokesman Jonathan Fargher.

Over-the-top online video distributors are setting themselves up to be another middleman in a long chain of media industry transactions that bring content to consumers, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said Thursday. It’s unclear whether the OTT distributors add any other value than an improved user-interface to the pay-TV market, he said on the company’s Q4 earnings conference call.

At Netflix, the hope is “to expand quite rapidly in 2012 and 2013, assuming we continue to see the kind of success that we've seen in Canada,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a Q4 earnings call. The company wants “to go country by country,” he said, declining to specify which countries the company plans to expand into. “Wherever we go next is just one building block,” Hastings said. Netflix expanded from the U.S. into Canada last year, but only with a streaming service (CED Sept 23 p8).