Sure, the customer is King but that's about to change. Now the customer will become a real Dictator.
Retailers, already facing massive disruption to their business model from the Internet, will now be forced to confront further shifts of power into consumer hands.
Imagine if consumers knew exactly WHEN to purchase a consumer electronics product to minimize their spend? How many consumers would follow pricing cycles to buy cheaper-- and how much would that impact retailer margin?
Oren Etzioni's latest startup, Decide.com applies to consumer electronics and appliances the same science behind Farecast (Etzioni started this travel-fare prediction company and then sold it to Microsoft for Bing.)
Decide analyzes web sources (thousands of sources on the history of prices, the models in the range, even to rumors of new models) to answer the consumer's most important question: WHEN to buy or wait on their consumer electronics purchases.
The Chinese vendor is better known as the 2nd biggest PC vendor in the world... or 3rd biggest, depending on which analyst reports you refer to.
BlackBerry 10 is a shift from earlier versions, being an entirely new platform with a focus on virtual keyboards. The prototype device seen at Blackberry World has no physical keyboard-- it is a 4.2" iPhone-style device lacking in physical buttons.
In comparison global Q1 2012 tablet shipments triple from Q1 2011, reaching 20.3m units.
Apparently the EC wants to start working on the framework required to "unlock the economic and societal benefits of the internet of things," together with control on the gathering, processing and storage of data by devices.
