Sony (NYSE: SNE) is buying up the developer of LittleBigPlanet, a top seller on its PlayStation3 and PSP. Sony says in a blog post that the deal to acquire parent Media Molecule will “enhance (its) talent pool, protect past and current investment and ensure a solid base for future investment.”…

At the Digital Music Forum East in New York today, Thomas Hesse, President of Global Digital Bus., US Sales & Corp. Strategy at Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment was the keynote interview, and he gave a lot of details on the company, state of the industry, and how he sees…

Two dozen of the world’s largest mobile-phone companies, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T (NYSE: T), NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM), Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT), China Mobile and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), are teaming up to create an “open international applications platform,” which is obviously in direct response to Apple’s success with its own…

When we did the first version of this chart heading into the 2009 holiday sales season, four contenders—including the unexpected Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) Nook—were set to crowd the instant-download e-reader field that Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) had to itself for the last two years. Within weeks it already had…

Sir Philip Green may have declared his hope for a big online element to the planned U.S. X Factor show - but don’t expect that show to be online-only. The Arcadia retail chairman told GQ last month, prior to becoming a shareholder in a new Simon Cowell company that will…

Upendra Shardanand is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Daylife, which helps publishers add content and inventory without additional staff or engineering. He also co-founded Firefly Network, a spinoff from his work at the MIT Media Lab, that he sold to Microsoft. Plenty of holiday shoppers spent hours puzzling…

Just in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where our Staci D. Kramer is headed, Discovery Communications (NSDQ: DISCA), Sony (NYSE: SNE) Corporation and IMAX are starting a joint venture to develop a 24/7, 3D TV network in the U.S. The trio expects to launch the new…

Sony (NYSE: SNE), which had a press event yesterday with Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, Robert Thomson, Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) & Co.‘s EIC, announcing News Corp.‘s exclusive content on Sony e-readers, inexplicably waited a full day to announce other content partners, 19 more, to be exact. Among them,…

Sony (NYSE: SNE) has struck a deal with News Corp (NYSE: NWS). that gives the electronics company the opportunity to sell subscriptions to the WSJ digital edition of the WSJ, as well its Dow Jones sibling MarketWatch, plus exclusive rights the digitized New York Post, on its Daily Edition e-reader.…

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division, faced some sharp questions at the MediaBistro eBook Summit about playing catch up to Amazon’s Kindle. Put on the defensive by both the interviewer, PCMag.com’s Lance Ulanoff, and the audience, Haber was asked point blank: why is Sony (NYSE: SNE) behind…

The glitzy opening at a trendy club in Tribeca—followed by a crashing site when millions of would-be music video viewers tried to sign on and a night of instant scaling—was just the beginning for Vevo. But CEO Rio Caereff is careful not to jump too many chapters ahead when he…

Music labels’ YouTube-powered music video site Vevo may have had a glitzy launch in New York on Tuesday - but on Wednesday many who hit the site for the first time found it crashing under traffic weight, and everyone outside the U.S. and Canada who hits Vevo.com is getting the…

We’ve been writing a lot about e-reader devices, but let’s focus on the content for a moment. Why? Because selling a lifetime of e-book content to consumers is the end game of many companies in this space, especially Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS). The sky’s the…

This has been a breakout year for e-readers and e-books—device sales will have more than tripled by the end of this year, and content sales are up 176% for the year. But next year will be anything but boring. Here are Forrester’s predictions for 2010: 1. E Ink will lose…

*Sony* keeps flip-flopping over adding music downloads to the PlayStation Network (PSN). After scrapping plans to add a music store to the gaming network—complete with the ability for gamers to port tracks to the handheld PSP—comes news that the company will indeed expand the PSN into a full digital download…

Updated: *Sony* and Barnes & *Noble* may be launching two of the most high-profile challengers to Amazon’s Kindle, but supply chain challenges could keep both companies from denting Kindle’s popularity this holiday season. (Then again, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) had its own problems shipping Kindles over the holidays last year).

Functionality aside, one of the biggest differences between Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE gamer network, and Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) has been the cost: If you want to play against other gamers on Xbox LIVE, you need to pay around $50 annually for Gold service (though various retailers offer discount cards); multi-player…

Vevo, the highly anticipated music video site, now has a launch date. It’s set to go live on the evening of Dec. 8, the site said a few minutes ago via Twitter. The announcement comes a day after Hulu said it too would make a foray into the music video…

When Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) introduced the second-gen Kindle earlier this year, it had no competition in the wireless e-reader category. By the holidays, it will be competing head on for consumers with the Daily Edition from Sony (NYSE: SNE), the unfortunately named DR8000SG from IREX Technologies, and a surprise entrant,…