Sure, we’re skeptical about Amazon's Kindle but you can’t judge a book by its cover.

An analyst at Citi argues the $350 machine e-book reader is indeed going to be Amazon's iPod. He now thinks Amazon will sell 378,000 units this year, double his initial guess.

And he thinks instead of being a $750 million business, the Kindle will in 3 years be a $1.1 billion business and 4% of all Amazon sales.

An increasing number of industry players in the value chain will help push 3D virtual worlds into a sustainable industry, reaching 33 million registered users by 2013, according to a Parks Associates report.

Go PC-Based 3D Virtual Worlds

Games Group, with a third of the UK computer gaming market, reports pre-tax profits rose to £33.4m in the first half, up from £1.3m.

The integration of Gamestation, purchased in UK last year, is going better than expected and could lead to £9m of synergies this year and £14m next year. CEO Lisa Morgan says the group is now pursuing growth overseas (especially Spain, Australia, and France) and in online operations. The company purchased JRC, the biggest group Continue reading...

Master of hype analysis, Gartner identifies 27 emerging technologies and predicts 8 of these will transform business in the next 10 years.

Priority Matrix for Emerging Technologies, 2008  

benefit	years to mainstream adoption
	less than 2 years	2 to 5 years	5 to 10 years	more than 10 years
transformational	Web 2.0	Cloud Computing Public Virtual Worlds SOA	3-D Printing Context Delivery Architecture Continue reading...

GfK says consumer IT is holding up demand in 2008 when traditional IT vectors seem to have disappeared.

While consumer notebook units were up 33% in W. Europe, the biggest shift is in “desktop replacements”, i.e., those large screen notebooks. The trend to micro notebooks below 11” (while impressive at +90%) is still marginal within the product mix.

Market demand is more sophisticated than anticipated and will continue to astonish (as did the trend towards larger Continue reading...

On the eve of IFA Berlin and with EITO’s Bitkom Research being based in Berlin, we thought we’d show EITO’s latest market figures. 

But we never expected the negative result: EITO suggests Digital CE in the EU will drop in value next year.

	2007	2008**	2009**
ICT + Digital CE value*	722.6	743.8	760.1
Digital CE value*	61.2	62.7	60.7
*Billions of Euro                  **Estimated Continue reading...

According to EITO, revenues from private Internet access connections in the EU rose 10.2%, reaching 33.7 billion Euro. By the end of 2008 EITO expects 114 million broadband Internet connections in W. Europe, making fast data lines available to 26% of the population. And growth will also continue in 2009, at 9% to hit 36.9 billion Euro.

By far the largest single market in Europe is Germany (8.4 billion Euro for the year 2008 and 8.5 % growth) France is up 22.5% to 4.6 billion Euro.

"Innovative Continue reading...

Blu-ray player sales worldwide will account for just 5% of total sales in 2008, says researcher Understanding & Solutions. Blu-ray will generate shipments of 5 million of the 100 million players expected to ship this year.

GO Blu-ray Report