What a hit
Activision Blizzard has announced a seven per cent rise in revenues for 2011.
This increase – which translates into a record revenue of $4.76bn (€3.55bn) in 2011 – owes a lot to the Call of Duty franchise. Last November, the latest title from the Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, broke all records to reach the $1bn (€0.75bn) sales faster than any other entertainment franchise ever.
The video game giant’s World of Warcraft also kept its position as the biggest subscription title in the world, despite subscription rates falling from 12m in 2010 to 10.2m in 2011.
Activision’s games for children, such as Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, also proved to be successful in 2011, with sales of more than $20m (€15m).
The picture gone
Following the company’s filing for bankruptcy in the US, Kodak has announced that it will no longer make cameras, including digital cameras, video cameras and digital photo frames.
Kodak, which until the announcement had been making cameras for more than 110 years, is hoping that this move will save the company. Currently, Kodak’s debts stand at $6.8bn (€5bn).
The company, which once controlled more than 90 per cent of the US film market and created the first digital camera (but never released it for production), has already closed 13 factories and cut 47,000 jobs. It is also selling 1,100 patents which are estimated to be worth more than $1bn.
A new chapter
Self-published author Kerry Wilkinson has become Amazon’s top seller, ahead of other more established authors such as Stieg Larsson and James Patterson.
Wilkinson’s detective novels, featuring detective Jessica Daniel, have sold more than 250,000 copies on Kindle.
Independent publishing is on the rise. Another two self-published authors, John Locke and Amanda Hocking, had sold more than one million books on the Kindle before signing up with publishers Simon & Schuster and St Martin’s Press respectively.
Wilkinson is planning to publish another two Jessica Daniel books during 2012.
Losing it
Panasonic has reported record losses for 2011. The Japanese electronics firm says these losses are due to the global economic crisis, financial instability and the company’s restructuring costs, which also included the purchase of Sanyo Electronics in 2009.
Panasonic, however, retained its position as the fourth biggest TV maker in the world.
In parallel, Sony has also warned that 2011 losses could be twice as bad as forecast, also due to lower production following the Thailand floods and a slump in festive period sales by 17 per cent.
Yes, Siri
It may be just a friendly voice, but it is being predicted that sooner rather than later, Siri will disrupt Google’s dominance in search-engine advertising.
This is because as sales of the iPhone 4S increase, more people are using Siri for searching the internet, rather than Google – this breaks the link between searchers and Google’s advertisers.
Google currently captures more than 60 per cent of US internet searches, which translates into billions of dollars in revenue.
Siri does use Google searches, but not exclusively. For restaurant searches, Siri relies on Yelp while for specific and scientific facts, Siri retrieves information from answer-engine Wolfram Alpha.