eSP - IT Solution Providers in Europe

Rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated as plasma sets an all-time sales high: led by the price gap between PDP and LCD panel, Q2 shipments of PDP module shipments recorded 5M units and an increase of 27% M/M or 53% Y/Y.

And if circumstances continue, the PDP module shipments for year 2010 can reach 19.00M units, largely exceed the 16.20M units originally forecasted in early 2010.

In shipment by size, 50"class PDP module shipments exceeded 2M units with the expanded share penetration of large-sized PDP module. For the 42" class, the share is recorded at 56%.

Looking at the shipments by maker, Panasonic, a company that had shown decreased shipments in the previous first-quarter (the quarter for yearly account due to inventory organization and transition to new product) showed shipments exceeding 2M units in Q2 2010 to recover its market share of 40% level.

Samsung SDI shipped its record high 1.62M units shipments and LG Electronics shipped 1.15M units.

COC is showing relatively lower shipments compared to others but the shipment is expected to continuously grow with the company's new 42" model launch in Q2 2010.

The Korea-based makers are currently running at maximum production capacity. Their PDP module shipments for 2H 2010 is expected to remain at the level of slight increase. If Panasonic increases its operating ratio actively then, the market share is expected to largely increase.

Jusy Hong, senior analyst in Display research group at Displaybank notes "the current booming of PDP module business can be reasoned from continuous demand increase for PDP TV as well as lower price compared to LCD. While LCD panel price is lowered in its price declining gap depending on the supply/demand situation, PDP is widening its price gap as the price continuously has decreased."

Hong adds "while LCD TV panel price declining trend is expected continue until next month and either slightly increase or maintain from September, PDP module price is expected to go down during the 2H of 2010."

Go Displaybank on Plasma

While Steve Jobs battles "Antennagate," Bill Gates is riding under the radar with Corbisgate.

A 6-person company near Seattle sued stock photo company Corbis (Bill Gates is sole owner) and won a $20 million judgment. Naturally Corbis is appealing the decision.

The Superior Court jury decided Corbis did enter business with Infoflows and then developed the company's ideas into a service for identifying objects in its digital photo collection. The court called Corbis's behaviour "fraudulent."

If you've been in the computer business for a while, you'd heard stories and allegations like this. Wouldn't it be ironic if Bill's fingers are caught in the Corbis cookie jar?

Infoflows, run by mostly former Microsofties, launched to create tech to identify digital objects. Corbis made an agreement with Infoflows around 2005, but gave info from Inflows to its outside patent counsel (presumably to figure how best to legally re-engineer similar technology). Corbis terminated the agreement in 2006, just days after receiving some key software designs.

How involved was Bill Gates? According to Infoflows, before going to court they first complained in Feb. 2006 about Corbis directly to The Man himself–in Bill Gates' office at Microsoft HQ in February 2006.

The content of that meeting between Infoflows and Corbis has been sealed by the courts, but the President of Infoflows says tantaizingly, "There's a big fat secret in there. I'll tell you this: We would be happy to have it unsealed."

Go Corbis vs Infoflow

Samsung releases its 50 and 30 series LED monitors.

The 50 and 30 series LED monitors highlight Samsung’s commitment to putting the PlanetFirst™.

LED-backlit displays contain few or no environmentally hazardous substances, such as mercury or lead, and use about 40% less energy. Samsung’s Touch of Colour (ToC) technology doesn’t use paints, sprays or glues, ensuring they contain no Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), making recycling simpler and safer.

Samsung’s Magic Eco feature allows users to adjust a monitor’s brightness based on different energy consumption levels with four preset energy-saving options.

Both the 50 and 30 series introduce new, sleek designs and support Samsung’s proprietary Magic Angle feature to reduce eye strain (ensures that images are centred when viewed from any angle).

Also unique to the 50 series is a new feature: When users are working with two monitors, Magic Return automatically moves content from a screen that is abruptly turned off to the screen that is still on (enabling content to be accessed even if one of the monitors gets disconnected, or shuts off).

Go Samsung 50 and 30 Series

We are about to witness the largest deployment of digital signage in history.

That's right - the largest deployment of digital signage technology, ever.

How big?

Well, well over 100 million (yes, million) people (translation: sets of eyeballs) will instantly be part of the world's largest digital signage network tomorrow (July 1st) when Apple launches iAd on the iPhone, iPod Touch and, one assumes, the iPad.

Apple has laid out its plan with iAd and it's pretty simple - advertisers can embed "interactive" ads inside Apps (I also assumes that eventually - although this hasn't been addressed directly by Apple, yet - ads could be embedded into other services that Apple includes on all iPhones (e.g., Mail, Text Messaging/MMS, Safari).

However, these aren't just banner ads, the ads are interactive such that you can run the ad totally inside the App itself and when you finish the ad, go back to where you were in the App. May not seem like a big deal, but one of the biggest complaints of banner ads is that they take you somewhere on a website that you may not want to go - thus, many people never click on them.