Technology Slice Blog

"The world’s largest Internet marketplace, eBay , reported a whopping profit on Wednesday spurred along by strong growth from PayPal online payments, StubHub, Skype, classifieds, and advertising as well overseas auctions. But its weaker-than expected forecast for 2008 sales and profit sent shares tumbling, overshadowing the departure of long-time Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman." It seems Ebay has already peaked in terms of success and is now on the way down. They have enjoyed years of prosperity but now lack the innovation to keep the momentum. With other auction sites springing up everywhere and VOIP available with different software packages Ebay and SKYPE are no longer the industry leaders. They need to come up with something original to be able to stay on top of the industry.

It seems Bluray is extending it's lead over HD DVD as the preferable new media format. In January it has extended it's market share to over 90%. This is mainly due to the fact that major companies are putting their weight behind the Bluray format. Major movie production studios are using Bluray, even Microsoft is releasing an add-on for the XBOX 360 to be able to play Bluray DVDs. Toshiba's HD DVD format is all but dead.

Canon has a broad range of quality printers, and the Canon Pixma iP4300 inkjet printer is no exception. It features photo printing , 30 pages per minute in black and white, 24 pages per minute in color, can handle envelopes and glossy paper, runs on both MacOS and Windows and weighs in at 14.3 pounds. It has a stylish design and is more than capable when printing presentations, plain text and photos. Priced at around $160 it's definitely a cost effective solution to your printing needs.

Skype is common place for most internet users. It has become to standard when it comes to VOIP. Many businesses are utilizing it to make cost free calls between offices whether they be interstate or international. Now Skype has partnered with Sony to make Skype calls possible on the Sony PSP . This is a pretty nifty innovation for current PSP fanatics. They can make free PSP to PSP or PSP to PC calls and for an extra charge can obtain an actual phone number and make calls to landlines. The availability of Skype phone calls on the Sony PSP is a great marketing tool for Skype. There are many Sony PSP users that will be tempted to pay for the service once they get a taste of the free calls.

For the past 5 years DVD sales world wide have been diminishing substantially. This is due to several reasons. Firstly piracy has taken a big slice of the pie for production studios. People are pirating DVD's effectively stealing from actors, production companies, producers etc. This has proved a major set back. Another reason is the split in the new high definition disc formats. On the one side is Sony with the Blu Ray format, on the other side is Toshiba with the HD DVD format. A clear winner is yet to be announced. The quicker a universal format is agreed on the better. An important factor affecting DVD sales is the state of the economy in the United States. The country is on the verge of a recession. Gas prices, electricity prices, food prices are sky rocketing while un-employment is on the increase and business investment is slowing considerably. All these factors contribute to a with-drawn consumer. When consumers are faced with the possibility of a recession they won't