A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti has been sold at auction in London for the world record price of £65,001,250.

It took just eight minutes for bidders to reach the hammer price after L'Homme Qui Marche I opened at £12m at Sotheby's auction house.

Sotheby's said it was the most expensive work ever sold at auction.

An anonymous phone bidder bought the work for £58m. The £65m price tag includes the buyer's premium.

The sculpture is considered to be one of the most important by the 20th Century Swiss artist.

It had been estimated to sell for between £12m and £18m but furious bidding saw more than 10 rivals bump the price up, eventually reaching the hammer price of £58m.

Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper, said the price was so high because there were so few Giacometti sculptures and it was very rare for them to be put up for auction.

She told the BBC: "There's a market which is sort of exceptional for exceptional things.

"If something is a one in a lifetime opportunity, people will really step up to the plate and they will spend enormous amounts of money because it was a now or never opportunity."

The previous record for an art work sold at auction -$104,168,000 (£58,520,830) - was held by Pablo Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe which sold in New York in 2004.

Other works have reached more in private sales. Jackson Pollock's No5, 1948, reached $140m (£73m at the time) in 2006.

Another art work also exceeded expectations at Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art sale.

Gustav Klimt's Kirche in Cassone went for £26,921,250, above the £12m to £18m estimate.

Paul Cezanne's Pichet et fruits sur une table was sold for just under £12m.

Melanie Clore, of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art department, said: "We are thrilled to have sold these great works this evening and that they have been recognised for the masterpieces that they are.

"The competition which generated these exceptional results demonstrates the continued quest for quality that compels today's collectors."

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Feb 4 2010, 01:10 AM

Discovery, Imax and Sony confirmed on Tuesday that they are forming a joint venture for a 3-D television channel.

The announcement was timed to coincide with this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where 3-D television is expected to be a hot topic.

Discovery Communications, which operates the Discovery Channel, TLC and other cable channels, will distribute the channel, which has a 2011 start date. It is expected to showcase a mix of 3-D content, including entertainment and sports. It will also show some of the natural history programming for which Discovery is well known.

The three companies will own equal stakes in the channel, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

In a statement Tuesday morning, the Sony Corporation chairman Howard Stringer called it a “groundbreaking new venture.”

“It is clear to us that consumers will always migrate to a better and richer entertainment experience, and together we are determined to be the leader in providing that around the world,” he said.

Earlier Tuesday, ESPN announced that it would start “ESPN 3D” in June 2010. The channel will show a minimum of 85 live 3-D events during the first year. USA Today reported that ESPN is committing to the network through June 2011.

The ESPN network will only operate for live events. The Discovery/Imax/Sony venture will be a full 24-hour channel.

David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, said in an interview that the 3D move is part of “this overall quest that we’re on for closest-to-real.”

Speaking about the joint venture, he said, “With Sony promoting it on their sets and Imax promoting it in the theaters, and all of us contributing content, we think we can have something that will be pretty strong for consumers.”

Companies like Discovery, Imax, Sony and the Walt Disney Company, which controls ESPN, are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as media companies did in the HDTV arms race. 3-D televisions may not be mainstream for many years, but “every TV manufacturer is putting on a 3-D push,” Jason Oxman, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, told the BBC.

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Jan 5 2010, 11:15 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — There will soon be something new to watch on the living room TV: your relatives and friends in different parts of the world.

On Tuesday, Panasonic and LG Electronics, two of the top television makers, are to announce that they are integrating the free online calling service Skype into their Internet-connected high-definition televisions.

People who buy these TVs, along with an extra Web camera and microphone accessory designed for the living room, can conduct free, live video chats and phone calls from the couch.

The announcement is the first of many expected from TV manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Television makers are trying to give consumers reasons to begin replacing their high-definition TVs that they bought only in the last few years. TV makers are also trotting out ever-slimmer TVs, adding Internet connections and preparing to introduce 3-D technology.

“This is the year when Internet-connected TVs will start to take off, and there is no doubt that soon every TV that ships will have built in Wi-Fi, webcams and microphones,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, chief technology strategist of Skype. “This is our first step.”

The domestic TV market survived the recession in surprisingly good health, shipping 33.86 million units during 2009, up 17 percent from 2008, while retail sales were generally flat, according to the research firm iSuppli. But furious competition among manufacturers cut deeply into prices and profits, with the price of a 46-inch LCD TV, for example, falling under $1,000 for the first time.

Internet-enabled TV sets, though they have not yet proved a hit with consumers, can restore some of those shrunken profits. A 50-inch plasma, high-definition TV with a broadband connection from LG runs about $300 more on Amazon.com than a TV of the same size without the connection. In some cases, TV makers also get a slice of the revenue when customers make Web purchases from their TVs.

That is where Skype comes in. Until now, Web-connected TVs have accessed only a limited number of online services, like widgets from Yahoo that offer weather and news updates, or Netflix’s streaming movie service. By adding other services and making a television more like a PC, TV makers now want to change the very identity of the primary screen in the house.

“The TV is not just a one-way entertainment device, but a two-way communications device and a portal into other people’s lives,” said Bob Perry, a senior vice president at Panasonic.

The Skype service on a TV will work much as it does on a PC, but with some limitations. A TV program will stop playing once a Skype call is made or answered; TV processors are not yet powerful enough to allow people to chat while they watch a show, the companies say.

Panasonic, based in Japan, and LG, based in South Korea, will sell specially designed Web cameras for their Skype-enabled sets, which should cost $100 to $200. These cameras, unlike typical webcams, are customized for the technically challenging environment of the living room, where there can be a wide range of distances between the TV and viewers.

The deals give the newly independent Skype, formerly a division of eBay, another valuable foothold in the home. About 520 million people around the world use the service to place free phone calls and have video chats with one another from their computers and other devices that run Skype software. The company makes money by charging competitive rates for people to call regular phone numbers and for add-on services like voice mail.

Video chatting has become an increasingly important feature of Skype. The company says video chats account for 34 percent of calls on the service, and as many as half on days like Christmas and New Year’s, when families seek to connect face to face.

To further nurture this activity, Skype is also announcing on Tuesday that its software for Windows PCs and televisions will support high-definition video calling in the 720p HD format, if users have webcams that support the technology.

Skype makes no money from video chats, at least for now. But Mr. Rosenberg of the company says that it may soon start charging for add-on services, like the ability to set up a video conference call for three or more parties.

“What we finally created with the Skype network is a community of users that are available via video. Having Skype on the TV is a big part of building that,” he said.

Not everyone believes Internet-enabled TVs, with features like Skype, are going to make much of a difference to consumers. Riddhi Patel, an analyst at iSuppli, says he thinks that innovations like LED-backlighting for LCDs, which can result in a picture with a crisper contrast ratio and a thinner screen, are what catch shoppers’ eyes in stores.

“When a consumer walks into the store, they make a purchase when they can instantly see the benefit of upgrading to a new TV,” Ms. Patel said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/technology/internet/05hdtv.html?ref=technology

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Jan 5 2010, 11:10 PM

LOS ANGELES – A U.S. software maker is suing China and seven major computer makers on accusations of pirating its Cybersitter content filtering software.

The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles by Cybersitter LLC seeks $2.2 billion. The company alleges that the Chinese copied its codes and incorporated them into software used to block Chinese citizens' access to sites deemed politically undesirable by the government.

Cybersitter was designed to help parents filter content seen by children. Seven computer manufacturers, including Sony, Lenovo, and Toshiba, also were sued for distributing the Chinese program with PCs sold in the country.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100105/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_filtering_software_china;

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Jan 5 2010, 11:09 PM

BERLIN – Millions of German bank cards have been affected by a "millennium bug"-like problem because they contain software that can't process the number 2010, industry groups said Tuesday.

The DSGV group, which represents public-sector banks, said some 20 million debit cards issued by those banks were affected, along with around 3.5 million credit cards — nearly half of the total number of cards issued by those banks.

The group said cash machines were adjusted hours after the problem emerged to ensure that customers could withdraw money, but there may still be problems using some debit-card terminals. Those should be fixed by Monday, it said.

Problems remain with credit cards and customers should use debit cards instead for now, added the group.

The BVR group of cooperative banks said about 4 million debit cards issued by its members — about 15 percent of the total — also were afflicted by the faulty software, although there were no problems withdrawing cash. Its credit cards were unaffected.

Another 2.5 million cards issued by German private banks were affected.

The problem stemmed from a chip on the cards which, due to a programming fault, wouldn't correctly process the number 2010.

Computer experts widely believed that hardware and software systems would fail as the clocks rolled over to the year 2000.

The problem, they said, would be caused when computers and other devices, which used only two digits to represent the year, mistook the year 2000 for the year 1900. In the end, however, the so-called "millennium bug" caused few problems.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100105/ap_on_hi_te/eu_germany_bank_card_bug

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Jan 5 2010, 11:07 PM

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) – Google Inc took the wraps off the first of its smartphones on Tuesday, a device with speech recognition that it hopes can take on Apple's iPhone over time and help shore up the company's dominance in Internet advertising.

Analysts say the phone -- to be sold directly to consumers -- is not expected to dramatically alter the carrier-hardware vendor relationship the industry relies on, nor is it likely to yield a revenue windfall in the short term, though executives said it could be profitable.

Google plans to use what it calls a "superphone" -- the first of many types of smartphones that it will make -- to expand its reach from the PC to the mobile world and ensure its online products and ads get prominent placement on a new breed of wireless Internet devices.

The highly anticipated Nexus One, which marks the first time the 11-year-old Internet search titan has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device, could provide Google with a viable challenge to the iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry.

It "wasn't the game-changer people thought it could be," Canaccord Adams analyst Jeff Rath said. Google could have shaken up the industry by offering the device for free, but instead chose more traditional pricing, he said.

Rath added that though his early impression was that the Nexus One was a good phone, it was unclear how much better it was than Motorola's Droid, released last year and that also runs on Google's Android operating system platform.

"It's very close to the Droid, some people will debate whether it's better. But it looks like an incremental improvement rather than a blow-the-doors-off improvement," Rath said.

The Nexus One, which was garnering favorable first reviews on tech Websites and forums on Tuesday, ships immediately from Google's online store for $179 with a two-year contract from Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA, or $529 without a service plan.

Executives said the phone will be carried on Verizon Wireless's network in the United States, and eventually on Vodafone's in Europe. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Vodafone and Verizon Communications.

WAIT AND SEE

Investors are taking a wait-and-see view on Google's first effort to sell a hardware product directly to consumers.

Google's stock has risen about 7 percent since the start of December, setting a 52-week high of $629.51 on Monday. But analysts say that was driven by improvements in its core business of Internet search advertising, rather than the prospect of tapping a new pool of revenue selling smartphones.

Its shares closed 0.44 percent down at $623.99.

The Nexus One phone comes a little more than two years after Google jumped into the mobile market with the announcement it was developing a free smartphone operating system. Google's Android software is currently available on more than 20 phones from vendors including Motorola and Samsung Electronics.

It pits Google -- the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, with annual revenue of about $22 billion in 2008 -- against a variety of more experienced players in the increasingly crowded smartphone market, including Palm Inc and Nokia.

Some analysts were positive on Google's effort to continue to establish the Android as a popular operating system for smartphones and wireless devices.

"It will help them keep consistency for Android platform," said Jim McGregor, Chief Technology Strategist for In-Stat.

The new phone helps Google "get their partners all on developing a single platform that applications can be developed on."

Motorola, which is banking on the Android system to power a new generation of smartphones to revitalize a flagging business, said on Tuesday it welcomed the competition. Co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha told Google's audience he did not see the Nexus One as a threat, but as an expansion of the market.

Google worked closely with HTC to develop its phone, which uses a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm Inc. The Nexus One is 11.5 millimeters thick and weighs 130 grams -- which executives said was lighter than a Swiss Army knife and no thicker than a No. 2 pencil.

The phone will feature a 3.7-inch (9.4 centimeter) touchscreen display. It will run the 2.1 version of the Android operating system and feature OLED display technology, a trackball for user interface control, an accelerometer chip, and a 5 megapixel camera.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/technology/internet/06google.html?ref=technology

Last post made by: Spacebunny on Jan 5 2010, 11:05 PM