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The only "Philips" you'll see at CES 2009 will be at the Funai booth.

(Credit: CNET)

Philips will not be exhibiting at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. The Philips brand, however, will still be on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center, thanks to the expanded presence of Funai--the Japanese company that will be producing TVs sold in North America under the Philips name starting later this year.

A Philips representative confirmed to CNET that the Dutch electronics giant will not have a presence on the show floor at the mammoth Las Vegas trade show, verifying rumors that had surfaced earlier this year.

Traditionally, the Consumer Electronics Association's massive January event is used by industry stalwarts to highlight emerging trends and key products that will be introduced over the course of the subsequent year and beyond. Philips' exit from that high-profile showcase comes in the wake of its recent announcement that it's outsourcing TV production to Funai for Philips- and Magnavox-branded sets sold in the North American market.

Indeed, Funai is doing its part to fill the void left by Philips' exit from the show. A spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry group that runs CES, had this to say:

Philips has been a pioneer in the consumer technology industry, and a well-known brand for consumers in the U.S. and around the world. The recent license agreement between Philips and Funai was a strategic business decision between two consumer technology companies. CEA respects the strategic decisions that all of our 2,700 exhibitors make regarding their business model and the International CES. We look forward to welcoming the Philips brand back to the 2009 CES in a new way, through its partnership with Funai, which has significantly increased exhibit space for the 2009 show to approximately 10,000 net square feet.

Keep in mind that 10,000 square feet may sound like a lot, but it's small potatoes compared with the megabooths that house major manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, and--up through last year--Philips.

While not having to pay for all that space on the show floor will undoubtedly save Philips considerable expense, it will also mean forfeiting the publicity and intangible buzz that comes from being at the center of the industry's biggest annual event. Just last year, for instance, the company snagged the Best of CES award for its energy-efficient Eco TV (though its admittedly impressive low power consumption couldn't overshadow the middling picture quality evident when we reviewed the final product).

The company could still use the show as a springboard for new product announcements, however: it's all but certain Philips will still have some personnel on hand at CES for meetings with journalists, analysts, retailers, and other industry insiders. And plenty of CES no-shows still crank out the press releases during that week--with the seemingly endless list of gadget blogs and tech sites covering the show, all a company really needs is a product photo and a descriptive blurb to get some virtual ink.

To be sure, skipping CES doesn't necessarily confine a company to also-ran status. Nintendo and Apple, two of the hottest names in the industry, have long since spurned the Vegas show. Likewise, Onkyo and Yamaha have opted out in recent years. Furthermore, Philips is quick to point out that the company is still producing, selling, and marketing all of its own non-TV products for North America. And it will continue to produce TVs for other global territories--most notably Europe--where its brand remains stronger.

Still, when one considers that Funai already produces electronics that are sold under the labels Sylvania and Emerson, you have to wonder: is Philips on the road to joining those once hoary companies as a ghost brand--a holding company that just licenses its Western name to give better brand cachet on store shelves to an anonymous Asian manufacturer? Maybe, maybe not. But skipping the world's biggest consumer electronics show doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

What do you think: Is the Philips brand in decline? Does Philips' no-show mean CES is losing some of its luster as the consumer electronics industry's ultimate sneak preview? Or is this just more "inside baseball" industry gossip that will have little impact on the future of consumer electronics? Share your thoughts below.

The Bush administration on Wednesday hit out at the European Union for imposing taxes on imports of certain electronics in alleged violation of an existing trade agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said the United States has filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization, which means that U.S. and European officials now have 60 days to consult about the dispute. If they don't reach a resolution at that point, the United States can call for a panel to determine whether the EU is complying with its World Trade Organization obligations under the 1996 Information Technology Agreement (PDF).

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab

(Credit: U.S. Trade Representative)

The ITA, as it's known, counts 71 signatories, including Japan and China, and dictates that a "wide range" of high-tech products must be imported duty-free, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. But Schwab said EU customs officials now claim they can charge taxes on certain products--namely, certain multifunction printers, cable and satellite set-top boxes, and flat-screen monitors--because they incorporate newer features or technologies than those spelled out in the original agreement.

"The EU should be working with the United States to promote new technologies, not finding protectionist gimmicks to apply new duties to these products," Schwab said in a statement. "Therefore, we urge the EU to eliminate permanently the new duties and to cease manipulating tariffs to discourage technological innovation."

Schwab said the U.S. has been raising its concerns with EU officials for the last 20 months but has failed to see progress. She said Japan also plans to join the formal case.

EU representatives were not immediately available for comment.

American high-tech companies were quick to applaud the USTR announcement. The Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Apple, Dell, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony, said it's concerned that European countries are currently posing taxes as high as 14 percent on imports of flat-screen monitors, set-top boxes, and multifunction printers. Approximately $70 billion of those products were exported globally in 2007, according to the USTR.

"The EU is violating the letter and spirit of the ITA, which has been the most successful, pro-innovation and pro-growth agreement of the past decade," said John Neuffer, an ITI vice president. "The EU is taxing innovation by removing products from the ITA's zero-tariff status simply because companies have found ways to improve them for businesses and consumers."

A recent NPD survey cited by the New York Times' Bits blog confirms what I've suspected for a long time: the record industry's campaign against file-sharing sites is not only ineffective, but misguided. According to the survey, 19 percent of the music in consumers' collections comes from file-sharing networks. That's up 5 percent from last year--in other words, lawsuits and education campaigns have so far been ineffective.

But 38 percent of music listeners' collections come from CDs that they borrowed, then ripped to their hard drive or burned to a CD-R. (I'm not sure why NPD made the distinction between ripped and burned. I suppose it's academically interesting--ripped CDs are presumably listened to on MP3 players or computers, while burned CDs can be listened to in CD players.) In other words, file-sharing networks aren't the primary cause of declining CD sales--copied CDs are. That behavior's impossible to stamp out, and adding copy-protection software to CDs is not a viable solution--it's either ineffective or exercises too much control over the user's computer, leading to potential PR nightmares and even legal liability.

85% of the music on my Zune was recorded from a CD or LP that I legitimately own. Most of the rest comes from CDs I borrowed and ripped.

Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I took a quick look through my Zune 30, which is my primary personal MP3 player (the iPod has more family stuff on it), and catalogued my own digital music collection by origin. Here's how it stacked up:
• 2,714 songs (85 percent) from a CD or LP purchased by me or given to me as a gift.
• 439 songs (14 percent) acquired from somebody else without payment--a CD I borrowed and ripped, or that was burned for me by a friend, or given to me as digital files on a flash drive.
• 47 songs (1 percent) downloaded from an approved Internet source, such as the Zune Marketplace.
• 10 songs (<1 percent) downloaded for free from non-industry-approved Internet sources.

Obviously, I'm not a normal music consumer. I'm almost 40 years old, so much of my collection stems from the pre-Internet days, when the only real way to get music was to buy it. The question is, how does the industry make the average user look more like me? I don't know the answer, although lowering prices on CDs or promoting vinyl (which is harder to rip) with codes for one-time digital downloads might help. One area where I don't look like the ideal consumer is with digital downloads: I'm at far less than the average 10 percent. I might buy more music online if (a.) it were in a format that could be used on both my iPod and my Zune (b.) online catalogs were deeper, with more obscurities, no black-outs for long songs, and so on.

Protesters gather in front of San Francisco's City Hall on Tuesday to protest the Olympic torch's arrival in the city and oppose plans to carry it through Tibet.

(Credit: Hanna Sistek/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Wearing T-shirts reading "Free Tibet," hundreds of protesters raised their fists here Tuesday to protest the Beijing Olympic torch relay's arrival to the city. Most were from the Bay Area, but some came all the way from New York and Canada to mark their opposition to the Chinese government's plans to carry the torch through Tibet and to the summit of Mount Everest.

SF Team Tibet, a coalition of Tibetans and human-rights supporters that organized the event, is calling on corporate Olympic sponsors Samsung, Lenovo, and Coca-Cola to withdraw their support of the torch relay. The organizers are also calling on international governments to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics "to show they do not endorse the Chinese government's brutal actions in Tibet."

Some of the groups in the coalition support the Olympics being held in China as long as the games result in dialogue.

Organizers of Tuesday's protests, which are expected to continue full force Wednesday, are, not surprisingly, using the Web as a tool at the site SFTorch2008.org. Not only is the site being used as a rallying point for information and photos, the organizers are signing up people to receive e-mails on events in the area and asking for donations.

Protester Thupten Dhondup, 40, was born in Nepal to Tibetan parents.

(Credit: Hanna Sistek/CNET News.com)

The protesters are hardly the first to use Web sites. The massive rallies prior to the Iraq War--and flash mob-like protests in cities such as San Francisco--were largely organized through the Web and other electronic communications such as texting.

At Tuesday's protest, some demonstrators held up red signs reading "Made in China" to bring attention to Americans' use of goods made in the country. Last year, U.S. trade with China amounted to $322 billion in imports and $65 billion in exports, according to figures from the U.S. Census bureau. Twenty-seven percent of the imports from China, or $88 billion worth, were "advanced technology products," according to the Census Bureau, while one-third of the exports to China fell into that category. This includes computers, biotech products, solar cells, and fiber-optic cable.

Among the speakers Tuesday were representatives of Students for a Free Tibet, the Tibet Association of Northern California, and Regional Tibetan Youth Congress. Protester Thupten Dhondup, 40, was born in Nepal to Tibetan parents. "I came here today because I support the suffering Tibetans," he said. "So many people are being killed and nobody knows what is happening in Lhasa now; nobody is allowed in."

At the rally, monks release 50 white doves as a sign of the Tibetan quest for freedom. 'We should express our views peacefully, in a dignified way,' Tenzin Chonden, North American representative to the Tibetan government, later said onstage.

(Credit: Hanna Sistek/CNET News.com)

TradeVibes, a site that aggregates information, news, and opinions about start-ups, raised $900,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors that includes serial technology investor Ron Conway, early Google employee Aydin Senkut, and the Kinsey Hills Group.

Mill River Labs, the company behind TradeVibes, is certainly well-connected, given that its four founders were early employees of PayPal. Conway, who was an early investor in Google and PayPal, will act as an adviser to the company, along with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Ariba co-founder Ed Kinsey.

Mountain View, Calif.-based TradeVibes launched its free site in beta test form on Friday in a move to take on major sources of company news such as Dow Jones and Hoover's, as well as rival upstarts KillerStartups.com and TechCrunch. It initially opened its site in November by invitation only while the company was building up a database of about 1,000 start-ups, largely in the field of technology.

David Li, co-founder and CEO, said he expects that the site will eventually include start-ups in other fields, thanks to its open system that lets businesses or individuals add information to the site. "We want to be the Wikipedia for company information. But we've created a structured wiki, so it's easier for people to edit information in the same format," Li said.

TradeVides provides basic information like a company's founders, rivals and funding information, but it also gives people a way to discover start-ups in a given interest area, such as clean tech or social networks. Visitors can comment on or rate a start-up, as well as review news and blogs about the company.

Li said TradeVibes plans to make money initially by selling job listings on a company page. He said he can also envision eventually selling subscriptions to investors for added services such as private social networking, in which they could talk to other fellow investors about potential deals.

Mill River Labs was founded in February 2007 by Li; Peter Chu, who is chief technology officer; and David Kang and Doug Ihde, who are both developers. According to its site, TradeVibes employs five people.

What do you do when some of the biggest names in consumer electronics might be in violation of your patents?

Why, try to take away their right to sell their products in the U.S., of course.

Blu-ray players like this one from Samsung uses technology a former Columbia professor claims she patented.

(Credit: Samsung)

Columbia University Professor Emeritus Gertrude Neumark Rothschild says 30 companies are infringing on her patent for laser and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In response, she wants the U.S. government to ban those companies' imports to the U.S. that are in violation. A lot of companies use LEDs and laser diodes for a variety of reasons--Sony uses blue laser diodes in its Blu-ray players, for example, and LEDs are used as light sources in TV and notebook computer screens.

But the list of 30 companies includes many of the giants of the industry: Sony, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Toshiba, Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Pioneer, and Samsung.

Sounds like a bit of an uphill climb, right? (Something she probably knows a bit about--Rothschild was the first woman to be named a chair of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science department at Columbia) Well, the U.S. International Trade Commission gave Rothschild a boost when it recently agreed to investigate all 30 companies over her claim.

She also has a history of standing up to the man: Rothschild sued two companies in 2005 over similar semiconductor patents and settled with them out of court.

Feel like a sucker for buying an HD DVD player? Well, if you happen to have bought it at Best Buy, you're in line to get a $50 gift card from the retail giant as part of its pity program for HD DVD owners. OK, I'm kidding about the pity program, but the $50 gift certificate is real, and you don't have to give up your HD DVD player to get one.

According the official release, Best Buy is giving $50 gift cards to "Customers who purchased an HD DVD player or HD DVD attachment from its U.S. stores before February 23, 2008." And owners of multiple HD DVD players can receive a gift card for each player or HD DVD attachment they purchased. Best Buy says it plans to distribute more than $10 million in gift cards.

The release goes on to say that, "Best Buy will proactively mail cards to all customers that the company can identify as having purchased an HD DVD player. Members of the Best Buy Reward Zone program, customers who purchased Performance Service Plans (PSPs), or who made their purchase on BestBuy.com should look for their gift cards in the mail by May 1. Other customers who may not be easily identified can call (888) BEST-BUY to receive their gift cards with proof of purchase through a credit card or their Best Buy receipt."

There's another little tidbit in the release that's also worth mentioning. If you just want to get rid of your HD DVD player, Best Buy is opening its Online Trade-In Center on March 21 to HD DVD owners (this deal is open to any HD DVD owner regardless of where you bought your player). "Visitors to the site will receive instant estimates of the value of their HD DVD players and movies," the release says. "Those who agree with the estimates can then ship their goods to the Trade-In Center free of charge by downloading a prepaid shipping label and will receive an additional gift card as payment for their trade-in."

Best Buy isn't the first store to offer relief to HD DVD buyers. Circuit City has apparently been allowing customers who bought players within 90 days of HD DVD officially going belly up to return them for store credit.

As for for those $50 gift cards, you can buy whatever you want with them, but if you're cynical, you're probably thinking what I'm thinking: Perhaps Best Buy is hoping to entice current HD DVD owners to buy up its remaining stock of HD DVD movies, which are already being significantly discounted.

Any HD DVD owners care to comment on what they plan on doing with their $50 gift card?

In a speech at the Midem music trade show, U2 manager Paul McGuinness claims that Internet service providers bear a portion of responsibility for the sales decline in recorded music. It's so laughable on so many levels that I can't let it pass without comment:

1. File trading's not the sole cause of lower sales. McGuinness, like the RIAA and IFPI and other recording industry bodies, assumes that piracy on P2P networks is the main driver of the decline in music sales. This ignores several studies that have shown that heavy P2P users are also the heaviest music buyers (although those studies themselves are controversial). More to the point, this argument ignores other ways users are getting music for free. I'd guess that friends ripping CDs and swapping music on flash drives account for a fairly large proportion of purchase-replacements--I'm not going to buy a whole record for a song that I heard once on the radio if my friend's already got it and I can just rip it from him. And that's the other big problem: radio. It used to play new music and break new acts. But consolidation has led to exceptionally narrow, lowest-common-denominator playlists, and radio's become irrelevant to hard-core music fans, who drive popularity of new acts.

2. Net neutrality and safe harbor. As Mathew Ingram of The Globe and Mail argued very eloquently, it's absurd and unreasonable to expect ISPs to monitor all traffic traveling their networks for pirated content. Safe-harbor laws ensure that an ISP's not held responsible every time somebody uses their pipe for something illegal--imagine if victims of traffic accidents caused by drunk drivers could sue the state for building roads, or if victims of telephone scams could sue the phone companies. And monitoring is uncomfortably close to giving preferential treatment to content providers in exchange for an extra fee.

An aside: he shows his misunderstanding of the entire situation when he says: "There are many other examples that prove the ability of ISPs to switch off selectively activity they have a problem with: Google excluded BMW from their search engine when BMW started to play games." How is Google an ISP?

3. Broadband demand isn't driven by P2P. McGuinness' assumption that the main driver of ISP fees is P2P music shows the music industry's myopia. As he puts it, "Kids don't pay $25 a month for broadband just to share their photos, do their homework, and e-mail their pals." True, kids don't. Their parents pay the bill--and have been paying since long before P2P music networks became mainstream. People do a lot of things on the Intertubes--read, shop (eBay? Amazon?), blog, send IMs--and all of those things are much faster and more convenient with a broadband account.

4. The hippies cashed out long ago. The funniest and weirdest part of the speech is when he blames counterculture values coming from the West Coast of America for the tacit assumption that music should be free. He may be right that a lot of early techies came out of that community--Steve Jobs attended Reed College, and we all know that Stewart Brand deserves some credit for early online community The WELL--but Silicon Valley's been driven by the profit motive almost since its inception. And it's not like the Grateful Dead was ever a charity organization.

The thing is, I actually agree with his overall thesis: the best future business model for the recorded music industry I can think of is adding a few bucks to ISP fees, watermarking content, then splitting that revenue among rights holders based on how often a particular piece of content is played. The problem is that mandatory fees are unfair to those who couldn't care less about music and might not be legal, while voluntary fees work only if you have some sort of policing mechanism. But these interesting ideas deserve a spokesperson who's a little more familiar with the underlying technology.

(One last dose of vinegar: I can't dispute that U2 has had a lucrative career as a live band, but I saw them on the Zoo Station tour in 1992 and say with confidence that their live show is the weakest part of their act. Great props, great singer, but little variation. Even the ancient Stones swap songs frequently and occasionally stretch out a jam. Flame away.)

Established defense contractor iRobot has prevailed in courtroom battles against Robotic FX, effectively gaining an unconditional surrender from the upstart military-industrial wannabe.

An iRobot-supplied SUGV helps a pair of soldiers clear a building during an evaluation exercise early in 2007.

(Credit: U.S. Army)

Late on Friday, Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot said that two federal courts had ruled in its favor. The U.S. District Court in Massachusetts determined that Robotic FX and founder Jameel Ahed--a former iRobot employee--had misused trade secrets belonging to iRobot, while the U.S. District Court in Northern Alabama determined that Robotic FX had deliberately infringed on patents.

As if that weren't enough, a related settlement requires the disbanding of Robotic FX, with certain assets to be retained by iRobot, and the banning of Ahed from competitive activities in the robotics industry for five years, according to iRobot. As of Sunday morning, the Robotic FX Web site was pointing to an iRobot page.

For a number of years, iRobot has been supplying the Pentagon with its Packbot technology--small, tracked robots that have been instrumental in locating and neutralizing explosive devices in Iraq. The company--best known for its Roomba, Scooba, and Looj gadgets for consumers--is also working on a related system known as SUGV (for small unmanned ground vehicle) as part of the Army's Future Combat Systems initiative.

A few months back, Allsip, Ill.-based Robotic FX had won a major contract with the U.S. Army to supply just those sorts of robots. But in a harbinger of the court rulings, the Army just days ago turned that contract--a $286 million, five-year deal to crank out up to 3,000 robots--over to iRobot. It plans to deliver the first 101 of those new robots "for urgent deployment."

In total, iRobot says it will have spent about $2.9 million on the dispute.

For the most thorough coverage of the months of legal wrangling between iRobot and Robotic FX, including links to the Massachusetts and Alabama rulings, check out Xconomy.com.