Pity the poor electronics retailer: with Amazon and others offering low prices and fast shipping in locations all over the world, it's getting harder for old-fashioned brick-and-mortar locations to turn a dime. In North America the only electronics store that seems to be surviving is Best Buy (often by renting out the inside of its own stores to the likes of Samsung and Apple). Today the big-box giant announced that it would be either closing or re-branding all the remaining locations of Future Shop, a Canadian electronics store that's been around since 1982. Read More
The time has come for America's most patriotic phone to remove its ten-gallon hat and hop down from its saddle, because Motorola Mobility has announced that it's closing down the high-end phone's assembly plant in Fort Worth, TX. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the facility will close its doors before the end of the year.
"What we found was that the North American market was exceptionally tough,"
- Motorola President Rick Osterloh
The reason is simple, the Moto X simply did not sell enough units for Motorola to achieve economies of scale. Read More
You'd be forgiven for not knowing exactly what Color is or does. The sordid history of this app, and its parent company Color Labs, is a complicated one. Headed by Bill Nguyen, famous for founding Lala, the incredible music streaming service that was purchased by Apple and promptly closed down, Color Labs received $41 million in funding for its initial app Color for Facebook. Several fundamental changes and a year and a half later, the company is reportedly going to close the books on itself. Read More
Update 4: OnLive has finally issued the following statement:
We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive's apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.'s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees.
In an e-mail to its customers today, the team at TekTrak (an app we reviewed back in August) officially announced that the service has shut down and that users will no longer be able to utilize its features. In the heartfelt message the team explains that, as with many startup ventures, it has come time for the service to shutter its windows and call it quits.
TekTrak's official website has also been updated to reflect the end of the service. Read More