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Ken Kutaragi, 56, an icon among gamers, will resign as Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s chairman and group chief executive, Tokyo-based Sony said Thursday. He will be replaced by Kazuo Hirai, who is now president and chief operating officer of the division.

Kutaragi's most new brainchild, the PlayStation 3 console, came out in November but was marred by embarrassing production shortages and a $600 price tag that some Sony fans said was too precipitous. For the past some months, Sony has resorted to giving away free game titles and other marketing gimmicks to stimulate sales.

Sony has also struggled to enlarge beyond the young, male demographic of so-called "hardcore" gamers. Investors have been upset for several quarters that Sony has unsuccessful to magnetize women, young children and older gamers to its products, and its market share has shrunk as a result.

Problems connected to Sony's limited demographic came into sharp focus late last year, when Nintendo Co. launched a rival game console, the Wii, for about $250. The device which includes a diminutive, wrist-mounted controller and a console that's skimpy on realistic graphics has grow to be a surprise hit among girls, suburban mothers, senior citizens and other people who have never considered themselves gamers.

Sony shipped 1.84 million PS3s worldwide through Dec. 31. In the same time, Nintendo sold 3.19 million Wiis.

The defeat to competitor Nintendo prompted Sony Corp. Chief Executive Howard Stringer to rocket his turnaround effort. In November, the Welsh-born executive — the first foreign-born CEO of a major Japanese electronics company — demoted Kutaragi by stripping him of day-to-day management tasks.

The leaving of Kutaragi — dubbed the "Gutenberg of Video Games" by Time Magazine in 2004 — will be effective June 19. After that, he'll be honorary chairman of the entertainment division and will serve as Stringer's senior technology adviser.

Although Kutaragi will stay an adviser, some U.S. gaming experts said the leaving may have been a face-saving firing and an effort by Stringer to recover from the failed PS3 launch.

AP

Mattel revealed Barbie Girls, a doll-shaped MP3 player that turns into a live character at BarbieGirls.com, a Web site where girls can relate with each other in a style reminiscent of Second Life, the virtual world for adults.

The company expects the new toy, which takes together Web surfing, shopping and music downloads, will cool require for rival MGA Entertainment's sassy Bratz dolls -- a line of big-headed, skinny dolls with scant, trendy clothing.

The world's major toy maker is also taking aim at Apple Inc.'s iPod music players and Ganz's Webkinz, wooly animal toys that come alive online.

The official launch of BarbieGirls.com came a week after the company gave it a public test run.

Toy analysts say this latest addition to the 48-year-old Barbie line should be a hot seller, helping the brand overturn nearly five years of declining sales.

MUSIC AND FASHION ONLINE

Revitalizing the Barbie brand has been a most important priority for Mattel, who has seen her former target audience defect not only to Bratz, but also to flashier, modern items such as iPods and video games.

The Barbie Girls music players, which can hold up to 120 MP3 or 240 WMA-file songs, come up to market in July and will cost $59.99, Mattel said.

At BarbieGirls.com, users can modify their characters' looks and styles. They can also go to the online mall and shop for clothes, accessories and furniture for their online room. Users can even adopt a pet.

But further importantly, Rice added: "I think parents are going to like the safe online portal."

To ensure girls' security in public chats, Mattel planed a limited vocabulary of 2,000 words the girls can use on the site, designed to prevent use of sexual language, vulgarity or upsetting words such as "stupid" or "hate."

Filters also stop users from giving out private information including names, phone numbers or even the cities where they live. Only in private chats with a "best friend" can a girl tell personal information.

reuters

What has not received much attention is the graphical user interface — the software that will be the face of the machine for the millions of children who will own it. In fact, the user interface, called Sugar, may turn out to be one of the more innovative aspects of a project that has already made breakthroughs in mesh networking and battery charging since Negroponte unveiled the concept two years ago.

Sugar offers a brand new approach to computing. Ever since the first Apple Macintosh was launched in 1984, the user interfaces of personal computers have been designed based on the same visual metaphor: the desktop. Sugar tosses out all of that like so much tattered baggage. Instead, an icon representing the individual occupies the center of the screen; "zoom" out like a telephoto lens and you see the user in relation to friends, and finally to all of the people in the village who are also on the network.

Child-centric

It's the first complete rethinking of the computer user interface in more than 30 years. "We're building something that's right for the audience," says Chris Blizzard, the engineering project leader for Sugar. "We don't just take what's already there and say it's good enough. You can do better."

The audience he and his colleagues have in mind is the hundreds of millions of poor kids all over the world. Negroponte came up with the nonprofit "one laptop per child" idea when he was chairman of the MIT Media Lab and observed the failure of standard attempts to use computers in education to improve the lives of underprivileged children.

Typically, a handful of computers, designed for business applications, are installed in schools; students only use them in special computer classes and are forced to share. Negroponte's idea was to give a laptop to each student that he or she could take to every class and bring home at the end of the day. "OLPC is child-centric, designed to be a seamless part of their lives at home, at school, and in play," he says.

Nearly a dozen countries, including Brazil and Thailand, have committed to buying the computer, now officially called XO. The UN Development Program will administer the program locally. About 2,500 beta test machines ran off assembly lines in Taiwan in February and are now being shipped to participating countries so they can kick the tires on the technology. The final version is supposed to be ready by August.

'You just do it right'

While XO has been greeted warmly by many, some technologists criticize Negroponte and his colleagues for not testing out their new ideas on underprivileged school children earlier in the process. And that goes for the user interface as well. Jakob Nielsen, a user interface designer and principal in the consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, falls into the critical group. While familiar with the design of Sugar, Nielsen’s criticisms focus on the process. It’s only in the coming weeks that they’ll begin to get feedback from kids.

“It’s always dangerous to release any product without the safeguard of user testing,” says Nielsen. “But it’s outright reckless in a case like this.”

But XO developers defend their approach, which grew out of a core philosophy of the MIT Media Lab known as "demo or die." Researchers are encouraged to build new things, critique them, and then make improvements—rather than doing a lot of concept-testing up front. They're backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. "They're using the Steve Jobs method," he says, referring to Apple's famous chief executive and design whiz. "You don't use focus groups. You just do it right."

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Ever since, she has insisted her kids walk with a group of other children to and from school, and carry a security buzzer alarm the school supplied even before the dreadful incident in 2005. "It is scary because the murderer hasn't been arrested," says Fukami, adding that she feels there have been so many murder cases involving children in the last few years in Japan that "I can't even remember all of them."

The need to supply kids with security gadgets and mobile handsets with global positioning systems is a sad reality of contemporary Japan, though the country remains one of the safest in the world. Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. and Europe, Japanese kids often walk or commute to school on public transportation systems at a very tender age. That makes them vulnerable to predators—and makes their parents eager to keep tabs by whatever means possible.

So perhaps it isn't surprising that a sizable market has emerged for security firms and major Japanese handset makers such as NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and Softbank. Japan's birthrate may be falling, but not the market for personal security gadgets and services aimed at children.

This market has more than tripled since the start of the decade and sales last year hit $212 million, according to figures compiled by Tokyo-based Yano Research Institute. "This trend suggests a changing consciousness in Japanese society about safety and security," the research group concluded in a recent report.

Though no system is foolproof, companies have come up with creative approaches for parents to track their children's whereabouts—and sound the alarm if they encounter any serious trouble. For instance, Japanese school-bag maker Kyowa sells one model equipped with a GPS terminal that costs about $330. The company has sold 10,000 of the GPS-enabled bags in the last two years, and the product now represents about 5 percent of its total annual sales.

For a $60 start-up fee, plus about $7 per month, parents can then contract out for a service called Coco-Secom, developed by leading Japanese security firm Secom, that will track the school bag using a network of GPS satellites and cellular-telephone base stations that will pinpoint a child's exact location.

If the little one is running late, a parent can either call the Coco-Secom operation center or send an e-mail to trace the child. Within 30 to 40 seconds, a subscriber will get a map marking the location of the child. For an additional cost of $82 per request, security guards can be dispatched to the location to retrieve the child. So far, the Coco-Secom service has attracted 135,000 subscribers.

Wireless handset companies are also trying to develop products that appeal to security-anxious parents with a lineup of mobile phones—keitai in Japanese—aimed at kids.

Last month, KDDI's "au" unit released its Junior Keitai and Sweets Cute phones. The company has sold a mobile phone for children under the name of Junior Keitai since January 2006, but this third model is equipped with a movement tracking system.

When a child hits a crime-prevention buzzer attached to the phone or the mobile phone is turned off by somebody, the handset's camera will turn on, take photos, and store the images for later use, and GPS will track the location of the phone and relay that data to a parent's mobile phone or PC. At the end of this month, Softbank will launch its own youth-oriented handsets, called Kodomobile, that have an alarm function to transmit the child's location to parents.

NTT DoCoMo has sold its Kids Keitai since March 2006. When a warning buzzer is triggered, a recorded emergency phone message will be automatically directed to parents. The parents are then patched into their child's mobile phone to talk—or if they can't get through, they can immediately notify police.

One challenge is coming up with cool phone designs that motivate the kids to use them regularly and keep them within easy reach, rather than buried deep down in a school bag or left at home. DoCoMo recently held a contest that drew 13,000 participants to suggest appealing new colors for its Kids Keitai lineup, and introduced cherry- and lime-hued ones as a result.

GPS tracking systems are practically a standard feature on these phones. However, Secom also provides additional security services. "Cell phones equipped with GPS merely provide alarm and location functions," says Minoru Yasuda, head of public relations at Secom. "With our Coco-Secom service, as we have 2,100 emergency takeoff bases around the country, we can dispatch security guards almost everywhere around the clock," says Yasuda.

Secom also developed a tracking service in December that connects to integrated circuit tags using radio frequency identification technology as well as GPS. One private elementary school in Tokyo recently instituted a program in which kids were given handheld devices that work with scanners at the entrance of the school. That way, there was a record of when kids checked in and out of the school's property. That data was then transmitted to the school's internal computer network and e-mailed to the parents.

Of course, nobody is kidding themselves that any of these products or services can truly prevent something awful from happening. "There is no perfect device," realizes homemaker Fukami. Yet in an uncertain world, such gadgetry can provide parents with a modicum of comfort.

Hiroko Tashiro
bussinesweekonline

For these bucks you can be darn sure Oakley didn’t skimp on the optics, which are of the high-impact, 100%-UV-filtering variety.

Oakley says the 1GB model holds 280 songs, and shuffling from one track to the next is merely a matter of tapping the soft buttons this way and that.

Not so easy when you’re fingers are staying warm in gloves, but then again, at these prices, you’ve probably got a personal valet riding shotgun to wipe your running nose and change tracks for you.

— Joe Hutsko

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percent at the current set of retail prices, iSuppli Corp. said in an analysis of presumed component and manufacturing costs.

The 4-gigabyte version of the iPhone, with a retail price of $499, will cost Apple $245.83 to make, iSuppli estimated. The 8-gigabyte version, priced at $599, will cost Apple $280.83.

"With a 50 percent gross margin, Apple is setting itself up for aggressive price declines going forward," said Jagdish Rebello, a director and principal analyst with iSuppli.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Since Apple will face stiff competition in the cell phone market, the company may need to cut into its margins to reduce pricing in the future, he said.

The Apple iPhone, which was announced by CEO
Steve Jobs last week, will be available starting in June exclusively through AT&T's Cingular Wireless. Apple has said it hopes to sell 10 million units in 2008, or about 1 percent of the market.

That goal "seems attainable," Rebello said.

www.ap.org

As a media player, the N800 handles MP3 and Windows Media files and other common audio and video formats, displaying images on a 4.1-inch color screen and playing audio through built-in stereo speakers or a headphone. Content can be loaded from SD or MMC memory cards, streamed from the Web or downloaded through a U.S.B. connection from another computer. The tablet uses Wi-Fi networking, but it can also connect to a compatible Nokia phone via Bluetooth and use it as a wireless modem.

The tablet, available from retailers and www.nokiausa.com for $400, has an on-screen keyboard. It will recognize text written with a stylus, which can also be used for doodling.

ivan berger
nytimes.com