To everything, turn, turn, turn… 1967 saw the summer of love and a cultural revolution based largely on the rejection of commercialism. By 1969, the Summer of Love was ove  read more »

Click here to listen. Short < 5 minute segment  read more »

My wife and I have been discussing buying our 10 year old daughter a qwerty based cell phone "from Santa" for Christmas. The discussion has now turned into a major disagreement of how to go about this. She wants to get the phone now so we can have it under the tree on Christmas morning so the kids experience the excitement. I on the other hand want to wait until January as it's a given the retailers are going to aggressively slash handset prices because they have too much supply. This is a logical, non-emotive approach in my opinion.

What should I do?

   read more »

The predictions for the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show
coming up in January indicate a lower key event, in keeping with the fact that
a lot of manufacturers and attendees have tightened the belts. We're hearing
rumors of Microsoft unveiling a phone code named "Pink," that is part Zune and
part Danger's Sidekick. OLED TVs should be the star of the show. Samsung will
most likely show a soon-to-ship 14" OLED TV  and may even show  a 50" OLED TV. Can OLED laptops be far
behind? Stay tuned for more CES rumors.  read more »

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) just released the numbers. Internet advertising revenue reached $5.9 billion in the 3rd quarter of 2008, an 11% increase from the third quarter of 2007. Is it good or bad? First for some perspective. When we started 2008, the Internet advertising revenue numbers looked like this:  read more »

Today we launched The Retrevo Pulse, a real-time view into consumer electronics products, prices and demand trends based on the behavior of millions of users who rely on Retrevo to make their buying decisions. The Retrevo Pulse includes two indexes, a CE Price Index and a CE Demand Index that track the Average Selling Prices (ASP) and Demand (in terms of net dollar value of interest) respectively for more than 4,000 electronics products across 40 categories such as HDTVs, Digital Cameras, Laptops and GPS.  read more »

Popular Web Service Applies Artificial Intelligence to Track and Predict CE Shopping Trends for 40 Popular Categories

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – October 29, 2008 – Retrevo^®, the first matchmaker for people and electronics, today introduced Retrevo Pulse^TM – the heartbeat of trends for consumer electronics and gadgets. The Retrevo Pulse consists of the CE Price Index^TM, CE Demand Index^TM and a real-time product buzz ticker. The indices track daily price and demand trends for consumer electronics by product category and in aggregate based on data for more than 4,000 products across 40 categories, such as HDTV’s, digital cameras and laptop computers.  read more »

OLED (Organic LED) first caught my attention at CES in 2007. See my post from that CES here. Subsequent to much fanfare with a 27" prototype OLED TV in 2007 and then at CES in 2008, Sony finally shipped a 11" (3 mm thin and 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio) OLED flat panel TV earlier this year. Retailing at $2,400 and up, I won't quite call it a bargain. As you can see Retrevo's scientific assessment concurs with me on this one here for  read more »

Who can complain about the mood of consumers nowadays. The tech bust of 2000 feels ordinary compared to the financial mess we have got ourselves into. Tech seems like a safe haven this time around with corporations carrying strong balance sheets. Yes, financial sector has a reason to be concerned about (thank goodness, retirement accounts, insurance policies and now the money market accounts are not that vulnerable). And now it is official; retail sector has a reason to be worried about.  read more »