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Sony has just confirmed Kazuo Hirai as its new CEO and President, validating rumors that have been swirling for a few weeks now. Outgoing CEO Howard Stringer, meanwhile, has been appointed Chairman of Sony's Board of Directors. The Hirai era officially begins April 1st, while Stringer will assume his new role sometime in June (until then, he'll remain executive chairman). Today's announcement, coming a day before Sony's earnings call, brings an end to more than a year's worth of speculation, though Hirai's selection hardly comes as a surprise, considering his recent string of promotions. In April, he was named Executive Deputy President; five months later, he was promoted to Sony Computer Entertainment Chairman. According to Stringer, in fact, Sony has been grooming Hirai since as early as 2009, when the Board began designing its succession plans. Kaz, he says, stood out from the crowd:

Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature. I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead. I look forward to helping Kaz in every way I can so that succession leads inevitably to success. It was my honor to recommend him to the Board for the positions of President and CEO, because he is ready to lead, and the time to make this change is now.

Kaz, for his part, acknowledges that Sony is going through some "challenging" times at this juncture, but credits Stringer with steadying the ship, and seems clear-minded about the future. "The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains," the 51-year-old PSN architect explained. "The foundations are now firmly in place for the new management team and me to fully leverage Sony's diverse electronics product portfolio, in conjunction with our rich entertainment assets and growing array of networked services, to engage with our customers around the world in new and exciting ways."

Click past the break for Sony's full press release.

Continue reading Sony confirms Kazuo Hirai as new President and CEO, replacing Howard Stringer

Sony confirms Kazuo Hirai as new President and CEO, replacing Howard Stringer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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UK pay TV service Sky has just announced its quarterly results, and despite adding 100,000 subscribers as well as notching its "highest ever first-half adjusted operating profit" it will launch a new internet TV service, available to anyone in the country with a broadband connection. Sky describes the new over the top (OTT) service as being aimed at the 13 million UK households who don't currently subscribe to pay TV, with access available via "PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, games console or connected TV." Initially, it will offer Sky Movies on demand joined by sports and entertainment options later, with access based on either monthly unlimited subscription or "pay-as-you-go" pricing. As far as the company's basic services, it will continue to develop its existing Sky Go product for standard pay-TV subscribers and zeebox iPad companion app, although this seems to initially be a worth competitor for things like Lovefilm and recent UK entrant Netflix. We have plenty of questions about what it will offer cord-cutters and cord-nevers in the UK when it launches in the first half of this year, we should find out more on the earnings call shortly. Until then, hit the PDF link for more detailed financial breakdowns, or check out the IPTV service press release after the break.

Update: Still waiting for Sky Go on Android? The company mentioned during its presentation that the app will finally arrive on Google's platform in February, starting with Samsung Galaxy and HTC handsets. It will also have new channels, including Sky 1, Sky Living and Sky Arts, plus, of course, the new Sky Sports F1 HD channel. The company is also expanding its broadband reach, with plans to cover a million more homes by June 2013, and add a Sky Broadband Unlimited Fibre option. For 20 a month, it offers 40 megabit download speed with no usage caps based on BT Fibre.

Continue reading Sky will launch an internet based TV service in the UK in the first half of 2012

Sky will launch an internet based TV service in the UK in the first half of 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Former Palm chief Jon Rubinstein has left Hewlett-Packard, having completed the 24-month commitment period he agreed to when HP acquired Palm. An HP spokesperson has confirmed the story, first reported by AllThingsD, in a brief statement: "Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well."

Rubinstein rose to fame as a hardware guru at NeXT, ultimately joining Apple after the company acquired NeXT in 1996. He was instrumental in developing the iMac and PowerMac desktops before spearheading the iPod project that would herald the company's business dominance. After retiring in 2006, he joined Palm to revitalize the flagging device maker's fortunes, developing the Palm Pre and WebOS software before being crowned as its CEO in 2009. A year later, Hewlett-Packard purchased the company for $1.2 billion: but just a year later, pulled the shutters down as Rubinstein was shifted (or "dumped") to a "product innovation role" within HP, where he saw out the last of his retention period before departing. In a terse comment to The Verge, the man himself has said that he's "going to take some well deserved time off," and after the last twelve months, we wouldn't blame him.

Jon Rubinstein leaves Hewlett-Packard originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia released its latest quarterly earnings report today, following up on a somewhat disappointing Q3 with a similarly bleak Q4. The Finnish manufacturer finished 2011 with a little more than €10 billion ($13.1 billion) in net sales -- 11 percent higher than Q3, but 21 percent lower than 2010, when Nokia raked in about €12.7 billion (approximately $16.7 billion). Operating profit, meanwhile, rose by 90 percent over Q3, but is still down on the year by a whopping 56 percent; this quarter, in fact, saw an operating loss of €954 million (about $1.3 billion). Its net cash and liquid assets also dropped by €1.4 billion over the year, marking a 20 percent decline. The general takeaway, then, is that things are looking better than they were last quarter, but worse than they were last year.

To date, the company has sold "well over" one million Lumia devices, but this Windows Phone surge has apparently come at Symbian's expense. "In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian's traditional strengths," CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement. "As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated." Looking forward, Nokia expects to break even during the first quarter of 2012, due in part to lower than expected seasonal sales and what it calls "competitive industry dynamics." For the full report, check out the source link below.

Nokia releases Q4 2011 earnings report: operating profits drop, Lumia sales break one million originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netflix's Q4 2011 earnings report is in, and the company indicates its streaming subscriber count is now 21.67 million. DVD subscribers were still down however, although not as much as expected with cancellations peaking in September when the services split, leaving it with a total number of 24.4 million customers. This closes out a tough 2011 that saw its subscriber count drop by 800k in Q3, and most recently resulted in the search for a new Chief Marketing Officer. The company exceeded its own targets for growth in streaming customers and domestically, the segment reported a higher-than-expected profit of $52 million.When it comes to its competition however, Netflix cosigned a rumor indicated today by the New York Post that Amazon may spin off its Prime Instant video service into a cheaper-than-Netflix standalone offering. For now however, it believes Amazon and Hulu offer only a fraction of its content, and net subscriber viewing hours that are less than 10 percent of the 2 billion --around 30 per member -- it reported during Q4.

Regarding the new 56-day delay for DVDs and Blu-ray discs from Warner Bros., it "didn't like" the new terms, but decided it was more efficient to keep a direct relationship for discs than to try buying discs from retail again, and expects more "differentiated dates" from studios going forward. With its Starz deal coming to an end soon, Netflix plans to plug the content hole by licensing some of the movies from Encore directly from the studios, and the kid-friendly Disney fare with flicks like The Adventures of Tin Tin and Rango from Paramount (via Epix) until its new Dreamworks deal takes effect in 2013. Interestingly, it also comments that "content is a differentiator", and that it's "increasingly" licensing content exclusively to fight its true competition, TV Everywhere services like HBO Go. We'll be back with any interesting remarks from the earnings call (scheduled for 6PM ET), until then check out the press release itself linked below.

Update: The earnings call (just finished) was predictably boring, but CEO Reed Hastings confirmed the company has "no plans" to offer videogames for rental, which had been announced as part of the later-retracted Qwikster spinoff. As far as offering current season episodes of TV shows for cord-cutters, it won't be bidding on those either. When it comes to 3D, Blu-ray 3D discs are already in the mix, while the company is "looking into" streaming 3D.

Netflix Q4 results: 220k new streaming-only customers, beats earnings estimates (Update: no game rentals coming) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There's an alarming rumor circulating that suggests that UK network O2 forwards your phone number to any website visited on a smartphone. Lewis Peckover built a site that displays the header data sent to sites you visit, finding a network-specific field called "x-up-calling-line-id" which displayed his number. Angry users who tested the site have flooded the company's official Twitter, which is currently responding with:

"Security is our top most priority, we're investigating this at the moment & will come back with more info as soon as we can."

The Next Web confirmed that Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone numbers are unaffected by the issue, but GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile (both MVNOs that operate on the same network) do. TNW's sources say it's most likely an internal testing setup, while Mr. Peckover suggests it's because the network transparently proxies HTTP traffic, using the number as a UID.

Update: We received confirmation from O2, who said that it was "investigating with internal teams and it's our top priority." Slashgear and Think Broadband were unable to replicate the problem, but in our tests (pictured) it was sharing our data with the site.

Update 2: Consumer magazine Which? contacted UK privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office which offered the following:

"Keeping people's personal information secure is a fundamental principle that sits at the heart of the Data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. When people visit a website via their mobile phone they would not expect their number to be made available to that website.

We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed."

We'll let you draw your own conclusions from that one, but it's not shaping up to be a good day for the company (or its users).

Update 3: Our tests have stopped working now, as it looks like the network is hurriedly trying to close the hole, but we've had no official word that it's over just yet.

Update 4: O2 has issued a full statement and Q&A which we've embedded after the jump. Long story short, it's fixed the issue -- caused by accidental routine maintenance. 3G / WAP users will have shared your number with any site you visited since January 10th. The network has promised it will co-operate fully with the ICO and has reported itself to Ofcom.

Continue reading O2 data breach potentially shares your cellphone number with the world (Updated)

O2 data breach potentially shares your cellphone number with the world (Updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There's an alarming rumor circulating that suggests that UK network O2 forwards your phone number to any website visited on a smartphone. Lewis Peckover built a site that displays the header data sent to sites you visit, finding a network-specific field called "x-up-calling-line-id" which displayed his number. Angry users who tested the site have flooded the company's official Twitter, which is currently responding with:

"Security is our top most priority, we're investigating this at the moment & will come back with more info as soon as we can."

The Next Web confirmed that Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone numbers are unaffected by the issue, but GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile (both MVNOs that operate on the same network) do. TNW's sources say it's most likely an internal testing setup, while Mr. Peckover suggests it's because the network transparently proxies HTTP traffic, using the number as a UID.

Update: We received confirmation from O2, who said that it was "investigating with internal teams and it's our top priority." Slashgear and Think Broadband were unable to replicate the problem, but in our tests (pictured) it was sharing our data with the site.

Update 2: Consumer magazine Which? contacted UK privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office which offered the following:

"Keeping people's personal information secure is a fundamental principle that sits at the heart of the Data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. When people visit a website via their mobile phone they would not expect their number to be made available to that website.

We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed."

We'll let you draw your own conclusions from that one, but it's not shaping up to be a good day for the company (or its users).

O2 data breach potentially shares your cellphone number with the world originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's that time folks: time for the quarterly running of the spreadsheets. Today Apple, one the most anticipated of all, is revealing its earnings for the past three months and let's just say things are lookin' pretty good for the Cupertino crew. The company set a new record for quarterly revenue and profit in Q1 of 2012, netting $46.33 billion in total with $13.06 billion earnings -- the latter number representing about half of the company's annual profit. That's nearly twice what Apple announced for the same (at the time record-setting) period last year -- $26.74 billion and $6 billion, respectively. In total the company shipped 15.4 million iPads, 15.4 million iPods and 5.2 million Macs this quarter. That last number is particularly surprising since it represents a growth of 26 percent over last year, bucking trends that indicated PC growth would remain flat. Even the Apple TV enjoyed a record quarter, selling 1.4 million units.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the company sold just over 37 million iPhones -- a 128 percent increase over the same quarter last year and greatly exceeding industry estimates. This also moves Apple back into the number one slot, ahead of Samsung which sold a stunning 35 million units this last quarter. Sales of iPhones and accessories accounted for 24.4 billion of the quarter's revenue. Apple also anticipates to have a strong Q2, though maybe not a record-breaking one, thanks to "some amazing new products in the pipeline." But even if Q2 turns out to be a slow one, Cupertino should be perfectly fine thanks to its $97 billion in cash on hand. Check out the complete PR after the break.

Continue reading Apple announces Q1 earnings, sets quarterly record with $46.33 billion in revenue

Apple announces Q1 earnings, sets quarterly record with $46.33 billion in revenue originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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