ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

HMV reports total fiscal H2 2012 losses reach £36.1 million, an improvement from the £50.1m for H2 2011-- even if the retailer is still going through what it describes as "material uncertainties."

Total sales amount to £288.6m with a -13.5% Y-o-Y decline while like-for-like sales drop by -10.2% (from -11.9% during H2 2011).

Due to current uncertainties the retailer potentially faces another problem come January 2012-- banking agreement breach. HMV already has "constructive discussions" with banks in order to solve the situation, even if it hopes the holiday season will be "productive."

"Christmas gets later every year," HMV CE Trevor Moore tells Reuters. "People are also in search of the promotional offer and being very careful about where they spend their money."

Moore describes the coming Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Chrismas Eve as "very important"-- not only for HMV, but for the high street in general.

To help solve debt issues the retailer promises new (if unspecified) initiatives for suppliers come January 2013, and is also dropping the remainders of its live entertainment business.

Go HMV H2 2012 Interim Results

Go HMV Faces 12 Critical Days to Avoid Banking Breach (Reuters)

Finally B2B gets a payments platform that matches the internet age.

No one loves a bank except bankers and bank robbers. And sometimes not even the bankers.

The founder of Traxpay worked for Deutsche Bank for more than 10 years. There, in the Payments Department, in the middle of the profitable B2B payments section, one could make a good bank career churning out bank profits-- if one could suffer the typical complaints and frustrations of customers.

The banks, not just Deutsche Bank for sure, but all banks today give a horribly antiquated service, a service that basically ignores the needs of quickened supply chains. A service that's slow by modern internet-enabled business standards... and yet expensive by any standard.

Think about how long it still takes bank transfers. Our own bank, for example, still charges 24 euro if you would like a 24-hour guaranteed transfer. Another one of our banks takes three days to clear an incoming transfer. All this aggravation and cost still prevails in the age of internet, the era of simultaneous communication.

We are lulled into expecting this low level of service because banks are incumbent in a business designed long before internet. Yet all of our businesses are tied to banks from birth by an invisible umbilical cord.

Scan teams up with the BBC to produce a PC case set to delight your nerdier customers-- the TARDIS case, an official aluminium replica of iconic prop from the Doctor Who TV series.

Looking like a blue police box, the TARDIS (stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space) is actually a time machine and happens to be the preferred mode of transport for an immortal alien known only as "The Doctor."

According to the show, the TARDIS is supposed to be bigger on the insde than the outside. No such luck for the PC case, although Scan fits in a 3.1GHz Pentium G2120 processor, 8GB of DDR3 memory, a 300W PSU and a Sony Blu-ray writer cleverly hidden behind the "Police Box" sign.

Go Scan TARDIS PC

The MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories may have developed a potential replacement to silicon transistors-- a transistor just 22nm in length made out of indium gallium arsenide (InGaAS).

The material, a compound semiconductor made out indium, gallium and arsenic, already has use in high-power and high-frequency electronics as well as a detector material in optical fibre communications.

What makes the MIT development significant is size-- at 22nm (the size of 9 strands of human DNA), the InGaAS transistor points towards a future of more densely packed (and higher performance) processors.

InGaAs is also a potential replacement to silicon, whose performance degrades on the nanometer scale. Co-developer and MIT professor Jesús del Alamo even claims it "promises to take Moore's Law beyond the reach of silicon."

Moore's Law is the famous prediction by Intel founder Gordon Moore saying the number of transistors on microchips will double every 2 years.

Following the presentation of results at the International Electron Devices Meeting, the MIT team will work on improving electrical performance (and therefore speed) of the transistor, before attempting to shrink its size further-- to below 10nm in gate length.

Go Tiny Compound Semiconductor Transistor Could Challenge Silicon Dominance (MIT News)