May 13th, 2009

Intel said the current quarter is slightly better than the company’s expectation as the economy which has hit personal computer (PC) industry is likely to have ended, and today the company has higher confidence that the company’s full-year sales will be similar to historical pattern.

Intel is keen to become an indicator of PC and server market trend considering that it has the position as the key chip supplier to large hardware manufacturers, and every good cheer from Intel will be hailed by Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Seagate and others.

The company has gathered most recent financial data, which is approximately the half of the way to the second quarter, and the data supports the company’s confidence. Intel also said that industry forecasts that PC sales will drop sharply in 2009 could be too pessimistic.

While the news reports say the European Commission fined Intel a record 1.06 billion euros on Wednesday for abusing its dominance in the computer chip market to exclude its only serious rival, Advanced Micro Devices.

The European Union (EU) is fining Intel a record €1.06 billion or $1.45 billion due to violations of antitrust rules in Europe. The record fine surpasses that of the €497 million fine originally levied against Microsoft.

“Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years,” European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said to media in a statement.

Intel was ordered to cease the illegal practices immediately and has three months from the notification of the decision to pay up, and ordered it halt illegal rebates also other practices to squeeze out rival AMD. As we see may be Intel will appeal and this will drag the litigation on for years as did Microsoft.

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Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS will show two new project results during the Plastic Electronics Asia 2009 exhibition that will be held on June 8-10 in Taipei (Taiwan).

The two project results were realized inside the German OLED research association CARO which stands for “Car OLED” that indicates the focus of this research and development project with target of developing highly efficient and highly reliable OLED devices for customer specific automotive applications.

Two project partners of the CARO project partners, Optrex Europe GmbH and Fraunhofer IPMS, along with the styling-studio Pollmann GmbH, recently developed a study based on a commercial steering-wheel with a car manufacturer neutral functional representation. In the center of this steering-wheel a white-emitting circular OLED signage device is integrated.

In vehicles today, liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are widely used in the instrument cluster, the central infotainment, and the climate control unit. The study of the CARO partners and the company Pollmann GmbH represents a potentially new area of application for displays.

In nearly every vehicle the emblem of the corresponding car manufacturer is integrated in the central position of the steering-wheel. Here an OLED display opens up a variety of new ideas and concepts for interior designers. Due to the thin construction depth of OLED displays the integration of other components into the steering-wheel will not be influenced, in particular for the airbag enough installation space will be remaining, of instance under the display.

In addition, OLEDs have the advantage that they potentially could be completely built on the basis of plastics. Already by opening the car doors the OLED could be activated and light up the emblem of the car manufacturer. Is the ignition switched on the emblem will be dimmed or completely switched off. Furthermore the display could be used to show warning instructions during the drive or take over further functions of today’s instrument clusters.

Toyota Motor will launch new Prius in the next several weeks and today the company has begun to launch green-advertising campaigns for this best-selling hybrid vehicle with new slogan “Harmony between man, nature and machine.”

The world’s largest car manufacturer is persuading consumers to buy a new car in today’s economic environment after the company’s sales collapsed and suffered US$7.8 billion loss in January-March 2009, which is bigger even than General Motors’.

Besides, the appeal of hybrid cars has diminished along with oil price fall. Prius sales have fallen about 50% from January 1 to April 30, and for hybrid cars represent only 2% of the light-vehicle market.

The campaign also will include some outdoor-marketing publicity stunts as well as transforming certain bus shelters in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles into cooling stations that use solar panels to power fans.