The 3,200-square-foot store, currently under construction at the tony South Coast Plaza mall here in Orange County, will carry the full line of Pioneer and Pioneer Elite home A/V products, and select mobile SKUs including satellite radio receivers. The store will also test new merchandise, sell other products that are unavailable in the United States and will provide limited installation services.

Pioneer said merchandising insights gleaned from the store will be shared with its retail partners, along with any promising new products that are deemed appropriate for its dealer base.
¼br /> The store opening will come four months after Pioneer began selling direct to consumers online. Both initiatives are being directed by Pioneer veteran Craig McManis, who was appointed to the new positions of direct sales VP and Pioneer stores VP. Pioneer will await results from the Costa Mesa store before determining when, where or if additional locations will be rolled out, he said.

McManis, who previously handled national accounts sales and home electronics marketing for Pioneer USA, said the retail store will serve as a showcase for Pioneer and as a laboratory for new product development. “We’re going to introduce some unique ideas that are hard to launch in larger retail footprints,” he said. “The things we want to accomplish could disrupt business for our retail partners and may require additional support,” he said.

By way of example, McManis pointed to a new line of home theater furniture that incorporates sound into the furniture itself. “We’re going to determine if it’s relevant to our dealer base,” he said, while “customer feedback will help us improve future products.”

The store will also provide customers with single-room home installation services that will be provided by Pioneer staff and may also be outsourced to local retail partners.

McManis added that the South Coast Plaza mall reportedly the highest-grossing shopping mall in California and frequented by the Hollywood elite was chosen for its well-heeled demographic that’s coveted by Pioneer.

Pioneer now joins the growing ranks of CE manufacturers who operate their own retail stores, including Apple, Bose, Sony and most recently Dell and Nokia.

Pioneer will also open a company-operated store in Tokyo, and plans to open 17 in-store shops within Chinese retail stores by fiscal 2008.

Thanks to Les Lieberman for this one!

Music retailer Tower Records has joined the online fray, selling 192 Kbps WMA song downloads for $.99 and albums for $9.99.

In some circles, long-standing music retailing giant Tower Records is known for two things: putting mom-and-pop record shops out of business with their Wal-Mart-like market presence and, like everybody else, struggling to survive hip-deep in the digital music revolution.

Despite being one of the first major retailers to go online, Tower Records is a latecomer to the idea of digital music sales, today finally taking the wraps of Tower Records Digital, a legal online digital music service selling tracks from top-name artists for $0.99 apiece and whole albums for $9.99. Tower Records is striving to set itself apart from the 128 Kbps competition by offering its tunes at a higher-quality 192 Kbps, which may appeal to audophiles and other music fans whose teeth have been set on edge with the quality levels of typical digital music offerings. (Note that Tower’s online help says players should be able to handle 320 Kbps files.) However, iTunes and iPod users aren’t welcome at Tower: tracks are available only in Microsoft’s WMA format, which isn’t compatible with Apple’s market-dominating portable music player.

Tower Records Digital is being powered by Canada’s Puretracks (we’d tell you more but those friendly Canadians don’t even let Mac users look at their site), and is somewhat smaller than other major online music retailers, initially offering about 1.2 million tracks, but Tower is already claiming to offer more depth and variety across genres than other major services, and aims to deepen its selection quickly, using its relationships with labels and distributors as well as its knowledge of the tastes of sophisticated music fans.

An internet cafe offering connections 50 times faster than typical broadband services has opened in Cornwall. Computers at Goonhilly satellite station, on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, are connected to BT’s global internet protocol network.

That means users can download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe.

The service will be free to visitors.

Adrian Hosford of BT said: “It would be possible to use the cafe’s computers to download in less than 15 minutes a file the equivalent size of the DVD version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its 19,000 illustrations, 629 audio and video clips and 100,000 articles.

“A standard broadband connection would typically take in excess of five hours.”

The new internet cafe was officially declared open by Helston Community College pupils Chloe Smith and James Evans, both aged 17.

Goonhilly has 61 antenna dishes and handles thousands of international phone calls, TV broadcasts and data.

The first antenna, known as Arthur, was built to track the Telstar satellite and received the first live transatlantic television broadcasts from the United States in 1962.

Is Google about to introduce a PayPal killer? We’ll find out this week, if an analyst prediction is correct.

Google executives have said that they are working on an online payment service - dubbed GBuy by some analysts - that will allow users to more quickly buy products from online advertisers. But the question remains about the timing of the product’s release and whether it will challenge the industry leader, eBay’s PayPal.

In a recent research note, Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said Google was planning to introduce GBuy Wednesday.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, has gone to great lengths to say that the service is unlike PayPal and therefore won’t compete with it (eBay is a big Google advertiser and probably wouldn’t appreciate a rival service).

The idea is to eliminate the need for consumers to disclose credit card information to merchants - reducing the fear of fraud - as well as speed up the purchasing process.

Consumers will fund a GBuy account with a credit card. They could then use the account to buy products from participating advertisers on Google’s search engine.

Like PayPal, merchants would pay Google a small transaction fee for completed sales. Potentially, merchants would also get a logo on their Google ad such as “trusted GBuy merchant” that would be like a seal of approval that would lead to a higher rate of sales, Rohan said.

The Dell laptop computer seen bursting into flames in photographs on the Internet was being examined as part of the company’s probe of the incident, Dell Inc. said on Tuesday.

  “We have captured the notebook and have begun investigating the event,” Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden said, confirming the computer was made by Dell but declining to specify the model. No one was hurt in the incident, she said.

The report of an exploding laptop at a conference in Osaka, Japan, accompanied by digital photos, was first published on technology industry news Web site The Inquirer last week.

Dell in December 2005 issued a battery recall for some of the batteries in its laptop due to overheating issues, according to the company’s Web site.

Camden said it was too early to draw any conclusions and added that it did not appear that the incident had anything to do with the battery issues related to the recall.

“From here it’s going to be a very methodical and meticulous process to figure out what happened,” Camden said.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Friday it will build a new $3.2 billion microprocessor factory in New York state to boost capacity for its battle against Intel Corp.

The plant would begin operation in 2010 at the earliest and would increase AMD’s total capacity by nearly 50 percent over the expected 2008 level, Preston Snuggs, AMD’s vice president of logic manufacturing operations, told Reuters.

New York state, which has been trying to attract high-tech jobs to upstate Saratoga County, had offered $900 million worth of incentives in the form of cash, research and development subsidies and tax rebates, Snuggs said.

“What this does is give us the flexible capability to extend our manufacturing capacity,” Snuggs said.

The news follows an announcement by AMD last month that it will spend $2.5 billion to expand and upgrade its chip plants in Dresden, Germany, as part of its plan to quadruple capacity between 2005 and 2008.

“This gives us a long-term plan in terms of manufacturing, a good road map for the future. It should supply customers with products they need in the quantities they need,” Snuggs said.

JoAnne Feeney, vice president of research for Punk, Ziegel & Co., a New York-based investment bank, said the site at the Luther Forest technology park in Malta, about 180 miles (100 km) north of New York City, was ideal for chipmakers because it offered easy access to transportation, water and power.

“A lot of the industry’s players are already in the area in a research capacity,” Feeney said.

“They are creating a path for growth given how well their chips are doing against Intel.”

New York Gov. George Pataki said 2,000 construction jobs will be needed to build the plant, where 1,200 people will be employed.

With the introduction of software designed to protect sensitive personal information, security authority Symantec hopes to provide some peace of mind to shoppers who might be hesitating about the final click that seals the deal when buying a book, a CD, or an airline ticket online.

The new application, called Norton Confidential, is designed to keep watch on a PC and any visited Web pages for fraudulent activity, providing feedback so that users can know whether they should complete a transaction online.

“Today’s increasingly sophisticated Internet threats target passwords, account numbers, and other confidential information,” said Jonathan Singer, a Yankee Group analyst. “Consumers are looking for protection from identity theft and fraud so they can transact safely online.”

Whether Norton Confidential will fit the bill remains to be seen. The software will be released as an initial trial later this summer. Currently, Symantec is describing the features of the software to whet the appetite of those looking for a robust program to help protect against identity theft.

According to Symantec, the software will consist of several modules that will combine traditional “block lists” with heuristics technology that looks for patterns of malicious activity. Symantec is calling Norton Confidential “zero-hour protection” because it is designed to react to threats even before they are widely known and added to a block list.

In addition to monitoring Web sites, Norton Confidential will use a combination of definition-based and heuristics technologies to protect users from both known and unknown crimeware installed on a PC. According to Symantec, this extra layer of security will help stop programs like keystroke loggers and Trojan horse applications that target consumers’ passwords and other confidential information.

The software also will come with a password module that stores and encrypts login information, alerting users when they send their credentials to unknown or unauthorized sites and providing feedback on the strength of the passwords used.

The final part of the software will be a Web site authentication component that will help verify the validity of most heavily trafficked banking and shopping Web sites. The software will produce a visual cue to proceed when users are on secure, encrypted sites.

As a result, he said, consumers have become increasingly wary of identity theft, even if they are not sure how to prevent it. In fact, according to a Symantec poll conducted by Harris Interactive, 71 percent of consumers are uneasy about providing personal information online and more than half are concerned about online identity theft.

He also noted that the new software will complement existing Norton antivirus and Internet security products and will be a primary component of the forthcoming Norton 360 product, an all-in-one PC application designed to compete with Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare.

The Windows XP version of Confidential will be introduced in September, with the Mac OS X edition to follow in October. Those interested in signing on to test the software when it is made available as a beta later this summer can visit www.symantec.com/transactsafely.

If you believe the results of one survey this spring, Apple’s iPods are now more popular than beer on college campuses.

But for Clayton Hunniford, that beer has gone flat. The Vancouver, British Columbia, college student is working on his fifth iPod Shuffle. The four previous ones all died. Two failed with one very conspicuous symptom–what he calls “the flashing orange and green lights of death.” Often when that happens, the Shuffle never plays again.

And Hunniford is not alone. A single topic on Apple’s iPod Shuffle support forum has garnered more than 36,000 visits since late October, according to statistics posted on the forum index page. Dubbed “Green and Orange flashing lights,” the thread stretches on for more than 550 posts.

Flashing green and amber lights on the popular gum-pack-size music player indicate that a generic “error” has occurred, according to Apple’s documentation. But most of the problem-related posts on the Apple forum are from people whose Shuffles have suddenly died with the same symptoms as Hunniford’s.

“It just happened out of nowhere,” says Hunniford, a physics student at Simon Fraser University. Instead of his favorite songs, he got the alternating green and amber LEDs flashing on the front of his Shuffle when he pressed any button. The unit had worked the moment before, he says.

Some users, like Ron Mellum of Minneapolis, have successfully revived their Shuffles by downloading the latest iPod Updater software and following Apple’s reset instructions. But for Hunniford and others, neither the updater nor iTunes recognizes the docked Shuffle, so resetting or restoring is not an option.

Since the Shuffle has no display, the owner can’t read an error message or troubleshoot easily. As a result, users of dead Shuffles generally are left with warranty coverage or nothing. Rose Ferri’s 15-year-old son saw his Shuffle fail, with the telltale lights, on June 16, three months after the one-year hardware warranty had expired.

“He had just finished updating a podcast and went to play it when [the lights] started,” says Ferri, who lives in Olympia, Washington. Because it was out of warranty, “[Apple support] couldn’t do anything.”

Apple officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and have not released any numbers relating to total owner-reported problems. But those users who do have trouble are growing increasingly frustrated–and mobilized. Denis Heraud of Quebec has started his own blog called Shufflers Unite.

People should not use mobile phones outdoors during thunderstorms because of the risk of being struck by lightning, doctors said Friday.

They reported the case of a 15-year-old girl who was using her phone in a park when she was hit during a storm. Although she was revived, she suffered persistent health problems and was using a wheelchair a year after the accident.

“This rare phenomenon is a public health issue, and education is necessary to highlight the risk of using mobile phones outdoors during stormy weather to prevent future fatal consequences from lighting strike injuries,” said Swinda Esprit, a doctor at Northwick Park Hospital in England.

Esprit and other doctors at the hospital added in a letter to the British Medical Journal that usually when someone is struck by lightning, the high resistance of the skin conducts the flash over the body in what is known as a flashover.

But if a metal object, such as a phone, is in contact with the skin it disrupts the flashover and increases the odds of internal injuries and death.

The central mystery of the new movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?” is why General Motors created a dynamic battery-powered auto that drivers loved, only to crush it to smithereens.

The mystery, meantime, at the National Museum of American History is why a rare surviving example of that car — a silvery-blue 1997 EV1 sedan — would be removed from display yesterday just as interest in the innovative vehicle seems bound to grow.

In the movie, which premieres June 30 and goes into wide release July 21, writer-director Chris Paine celebrates the creation of the EV1, a nonpolluting car that generated so much passion among its fans that drivers staged a public funeral to say goodbye. Paine also excoriates GM for halting an experiment in gasoline independence under pressure from Big Oil in “one of the biggest blunders in the history of the automotive industry.”

GM, which donated the EV1, happens to be one of the Smithsonian Institution’s biggest contributors. A $10 million gift in 2001 paid half the cost of the history museum’s new transportation exhibition hall, which was renamed to honor the benefactor. But museum and automaker say the EV1 was removed from view with no thoughts of public reaction to the movie or the display.

“There was no pressure from GM to remove the car from display,” spokeswoman Michelle J. Werts said. The museum, which closes for renovation in September, simply needed the space for another vehicle, she said.

“It’s not that I picked up the phone,” said GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss, who defends the company in the film. “There is no conspiracy to do away with the EV1 at the Smithsonian. There is no Oliver Stone-esque conspiracy at GM to do away with the EV1.”

Paine, who was on his way to a screening in Detroit last night, was not happy that the EV1 was in the museum in the first place.

“It’s so sad that EV1 is being portrayed as history,” he said by phone. “It’s not an example of ‘failed’ technology. It’s an example of what the 21st century can be in this country, if we had the willpower to do it. The Smithsonian should take the car out of the museum and put it back on the road.”

The story of the EV1 is a classic 1990s tale of government regulation, corporate innovation, brilliant engineering and consumer lust for the Next New Thing.

The film chronicles how GM developed and launched a fleet of silent, aerodynamic electric vehicles to meet California’s zero-emissions mandate. The shapely two-seaters with a GM logo enjoyed a brief ride in California and Arizona from 1996 until 2003, when they were taken off the market and destroyed. (GM says it was concerned about safety; others say the company wanted to head off the loss of proprietary secrets.)