The Tech Opportunity in Toys

The $20 billion toy industry has faltered in recent years as children’s tastes and styles of play have changed. Toy spending has been widely seen as migrating to consumer electronics. Children are increasingly craving devices their parents want, many analysts say, like cellphones, digital cameras and portable digital music players, iPod being the best example of a beneficiary of this shift. Is there an opportunity for the tech sector innovators in this transition?

Digital Projection: Minus the last bit of Analog

Collinear is a little company that is working on Solid State Illumination for Front and Rear Projection Systems. Led by a veteran CEO with extensive background in Consumer Electronics, the company is working on a very hard problem: “Utilizing semiconductor lasers and non-linear optics, the Company’s illumination module replaces the last remaining analog components of

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India’s Hardware Prospects

Hardware System design or manufacturing has never been India’s sweet-spot. However, as the country becomes a major consumer of electronics systems, especially computers, consumer electronics and cellular handsets, it makes more and more sense to do more hardware design and manufacturing locally. EETimes reports on a couple of acquisitions: PCB manufacturer Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik

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Indiana Jones & the Quest for Silent Cooling

Amidst an industry that is today largely dealing with incremental, little problems, why not take on something that is truly a fundamental problem?

Memory: The Next Frontier

There is no single semiconductor memory technology today that has all the desired attributes, which on top of speed, density and non-volatility include: low-cost of manufacture, low switching energy and scalability to nanometer-scale dimension. Products in various stages of commercialization that include at least some of the attributes include: Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM), Magneto-Resistive RAM (MRAM), Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) and Nanotube RAM (NRAM), iSuppli said. But the rewards for a winning technology are likely to be immense with the memory market set to double from $46.8 billion posted in 2004 to $95.4 billion by 2019.

India, Inc.: Wake up!

What the Chinese are doing is doing leveraged buy-outs on big, fat, powerful American brands reeling under margin pressures, and applying what they do really well: low-cost manufacturing to shave the fat off, while at the same time gaining access to brand power and distribution channels. This leads me to wonder how long India, Inc. will remain asleep at the wheels?

Much Ado About Pricing

The software industry is going through much turmoil over licensing versus subscription, concurrent user versus named user, maintenance fees versus not, per processor … A survey from Macrovision shows how Enterprises prefer to buy software (64% prefer perpetual licenses, versus 36% subscription). Surprisingly, they still prefer Perpetual License models, as opposed to Subscriptions, although all

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Some mild stir in Programmable ASICs

EE Times reports: “End markets are presenting a serious problem to traditional ASIC design. Especially in consumer applications, but increasingly in other areas as well, markets tend to be fast-moving and fragmented. The system-on-chip that is perfect for midrange portable media players in China now is wrong today in the rest of the world and

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