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A new study from Nokia predicts that by 2012, a quarter of all entertainment will be created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than being generated by traditional media.

Jointly conducted with the trend research firm The Future Laboratory, Nokia's study asked trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles. The company also used information gathered from its 900 million customers as well as views of leading industry analysts.

"From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call 'circular.' The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up, and pass it on within their peer groups-- a form of collaborative social media," says Mark Selby, vice president of multimedia for Nokia. Nokia pinpoints four emerging trends that propel this kind of "circular entertainment": immersive living; geek culture; G tech; and localism.

Selby continues, "We think it will work something like this: someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend. That friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file--the sound track of the evening--then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

Tom Savigar, trends director at The Future Laboratory, adds, "Consumers are increasingly demanding that their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging, and collaborative. Whereas once the act of watching, reading, and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment. Key to this evolution is consumers' basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of."

Of course, you have to take surveys sponsored by big brands with a grain of salt. Nokia's intent is obviously to ride the wave of a powerful current and promote its mobile devices as the venue where that new kind of "circular," convergent entertainment will take place. Moreover, user-generated content (and user-generated entertainment in particular) is neither a breathtakingly new phenomenon, nor is it beyond any dispute that the traditional networks will just sit and watch their dominance wane.

Nokia's study also ignores the fact that the distinction between traditional and "circular" entertainment is becoming increasingly difficult. In times of professional mash-ups, amateur reality TV, and 24/7 life-casting, where does original content end and recycled content start? What if traditional entertainment becomes a micro-format within user-generated entertainment and vice versa? Naturally, the two intermingle, and it may not even be too bold a statement to forecast that at some stage of a highly fragmented and collaborative distribution chain, all entertainment will be "circular" in 2012.

Shipments of digital cameras jumped 22 percent in the second quarter compared with the year earlier, and growth for coming months likely will outpace earlier expectations, analyst firm IDC said Thursday.

"IDC expects to raise its forecast for the CY2007 year due to this continued, stronger-than-expected growth," analyst Christopher Chute said in a statement.

Consumers are replacing earlier cameras with new models that stabilize images to counteract camera shake, but more importantly, they're also responding to lower prices, he said.

Canon remained the No. 1 seller, with 26 percent of shipments in the second quarter. Sony was No. 2 with 18 percent share and Kodak No. 3 with 12 percent. Samsung "rocketed to the No. 4 position" with 11 percent, bumping Nikon and others. Nikon, though, "continues to do very well with digital SLRs," Chute said.

Although Kodak took the No. 3 spot, its shipments declined 15 percent, IDC said.

This is based on an initial, somewhat superficial look at Thursday's stock tumble, but it's hard to say tech stocks played all that much of a role in the plunge. Many of them lost a little ground but didn't get hammered like some among the Dow industrials, which ended up almost 300 points lower at the end of their second-worst trading day of the year. Most of the selling was said to be prompted by concerns over weakness in the housing market and grim prospects for buyout financing.

As of about 4:30 p.m. East Coast time, for example, the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 48.83 points, or 1.84 percent, to 2599; the Dow had lost 306.62 points, or 2.22 percent, and landed at 13,478.45. Apple (on Nasdaq) managed a more-than 5 percent climb while Google, Microsoft and Oracle (all on Nasdaq) and Sony (NYSE) dropped anywhere from just under 1 percent to just over 2.5 percent. Bets are the sellers will take a break Friday and the bargain hunters will do their thing.

More computers than expected will ship this year, thanks to the need for PCs in emerging markets, particularly China, according to research firm Gartner.

Although Microsoft's new Vista operating system hasn't provided as big a boost as previously thought, worldwide PC shipments should pass 257 million units by the end of this year, according to the figures compiled by Garter analyst George Shiffler. That's an 11.1-percent increase over the 2006 shipment total of 231.5 million units.

It's also a slight bump up from the 10.5 percent unit growth Gartner had projected back in March. The adjusted forecast can be attributed to better sales of notebooks, in addition to the flood of new PCs to places like China, according to Shiffler.

More than half of the 128 million PCs expected to ship to emerging markets over the next two years will be for first-time use rather than as replacement computers, a trend expected to continue in the next decade, according to an eight-year forecast compiled by Forrester Research and released earlier this month.

The average selling price in 2007 for desktops and notebooks worldwide is hovering around $852, according to Gartner. That's about $20 above analysts' estimate earlier this year, but Shiffler said the increase in prices--due to the decline of the dollar, higher shipments of notebooks and a small boost by the release of Windows Vista--is likely temporary.

"They're still falling, but what happened is this year is, they started falling at a slightly slower rate. Bottom line: I don't think vendors should take comfort in the notion that price (declines) have decelerated a bit," he said. "We think we'll be back falling at a 7 percent year-over-year rate before long."

Stronger-than-expected notebook shipments in the beginning of the year should push the overall growth of the PC market higher than previously anticipated, according to market research firm iSuppli.

The worldwide PC industry is expected to reach 264 million units in 2007, up 11.2 percent from 239 million units shipped last year, according to iSuppli. The previous estimate was 10.7 percent growth for the year.

The firm, which periodically issues forecasts for a variety of markets, said Monday that shipments of notebook PCs in the first quarter of 2007 were up 23 percent, 3 percent higher than previously anticipated. Many had expected Intel's May introduction of its new Santa Rosa mobile chipset to cause buyers to hold off purchasing notebooks until later this year. So far, it doesn't appear that was the case, and this year notebooks should account for 40 percent of all PCs shipped.