Are Weak Wii U Sales a Bellwether of Shifting Game Demographics?

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Nintendo expects to sell fewer Wii U and 3DS units than originally claimed, according to reports this morning. The company says it sold three million Wii U units through December, but slashed its forecast of 5.5 million Wii U units sold by the end of March to just four million in all. On the Wii U software side, Nintendo is now forecasting 16 million units in the same timeframe, a number that’s down by roughly a third from original expectations.


The 3DS takes a similar hit in the standings: down from 17.5 million units predicted through March to just 15 million units and a commensurate drop in 3DS software sales.






(MORE: Apple to Sell 128GB iPad Starting Next Tuesday)


You can look at this any number of ways. From a numbers standpoint, there’s no doubt that the Wii U lags behind its predecessor in raw sales when you contrast launch windows. But the Wii arrived at just the right time: It was the world’s first fully motion-control-driven game system — a system that went on to capture the imaginations of consumers who’d never really engaged with a game console before. Whatever you thought of the Wii, however much you actually played it in the years that followed, it did more to popularize gaming as a mainstream pastime than any gaming-related device in history.


The Wii U, by contrast, is an evolutionary step forward designed to appeal more to traditional gamers. Though even lacking the Wii’s novelty, the Wii U GamePad is a far more intrepid technological concoction than, say, either Microsoft or Sony’s imitative motion-control approaches. And suggestions that Nintendo’s just mining Apple territory with the Wii U’s tablet-style controller seem shortsighted: With its two-screen dynamic and hybrid haptic/deterministic controls, the Wii U GamePad couldn’t be less like an iPad. Or, put another way, the Wii U is as much a riff on the iPad as the iPad is just a riff on Nintendo’s original dual-screen DS — a handheld that predated Apple’s tablet by six years.


Another explanation for the Wii U’s slow start could be pricing. The Wii U hardly seems a bargain by Nintendo’s own standards. The GameCube sold for $ 200 at rollout in 2001 (no pack-in), while the Wii cost $ 250 at launch and included a game. The Wii U, by comparison, starts at $ 300 for the stripped down model sans game, then jumps $ 50 if you want a decent amount of storage and something to play — a pack-in (Nintendoland) that frankly lacks the distinctive “so that’s what all the hype’s about” flair of Wii Sports.


But let’s cut to the chase: Whither mobile gaming? Isn’t the Wii U’s sluggish start because, well, hello smartphones and tablets? Not so fast: The data we have on this is inconclusive and potentially misleading.


According to NPD research, of the roughly 212 million people playing games in the United States last year, mobile gamers only slightly outranked core gamers. The number of core gamers shrank slightly in 2012 (NPD attributes this in part to the extra-long life cycle of the current consoles) while the number of mobile gamers was up a tick, it’s true. But how many people bought a Wii U because they needed a phone? An Xbox 360 to sync with their computer’s day-planner? Conversely, how many people bought a smartphone or tablet because all they wanted was to play games like Angry Birds or Temple Run 2?


(MORE: Nintendo Wii U Review: A Tale of Two Screens)


How many mobile gamers are buying souped up phones or tablets just to play games, in other words? Anyone? Or is the mobile gaming angle more of a perk, like the Philips head or mini-scissors in a Swiss Army Knife?


I’m not saying mobile gaming isn’t big — because it is. But just as sales of a game like Wii Sports were deceptively high because you couldn’t not buy it when picking up a Wii, talking about the prevalence of mobile gaming in a pre-fab market gets tricky. Is playing games on phones or tablets siphoning gamers from PCs and consoles? It’s impossible to say at this point because we lack the data.


Nintendo can’t be all things to all people any more than Apple’s been to gamers with its iPhone or iPad. If I want to play a game like Ni No Kuni or Guild Wars 2 or Devil May Cry, I wouldn’t look to my smartphone or tablet. Likewise, I have no interest in playing stuff like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja or Cut the Rope – the same old increasingly tiresome mobile top-sellers for years — on a console or PC. I don’t want to sell the mobile/tablet gaming market short, not with titles like Battle of the Bulge and Radiant Defense or others like Space Hulk, Shadowrun Returns and Warhammer Quest on the horizon, but concluding that the Wii U or 3DS’s slightly-lower-than-expected sales can be attributed to a shift in gamer tastes — from core to mobile/tablet gaming — oversimplifies things in my view.


What we may be looking at in these reduced Nintendo sales numbers — and what I’d expect to continue to see with the launch of new systems from Microsoft and Sony — is segmentation of a market that experienced a kind of cross-demographic boom in the mid-to-late 2000s. Before iPhones and iPads, casual gamers had the PC. The Wii was essentially a way to bring that sort of gamer into the living room. But we’d be torturing indulgence to claim the shift that occurred after 2006 was tantamount to a conversion. Casual gamers, if you’ll pardon that label, are by definition uncommitted gamers. And with buyers already spending considerably more for something like the iPad (and considerably less on that platform for games), would it be such a surprise to find a much pickier audience for a system like the Wii U in 2013 than existed in 2006?


I have no idea what sorts of devices the kind of more core-oriented games I like to play are going to live on a decade from now. All it’d take, for instance, is for Apple to flip a few switches and double down on gaming to shake up the market in ways that could make what happened with the Wii seem tame. But that won’t mean the demise of traditional gamers any more than the rise of touchscreens entails the downfall of deterministic interfaces like keyboards, mice and gamepads. Core gamers aren’t this tiny minority on the verge of extinction, after all.


Far from it, in fact: Revenue contributions from core gamers still outpace all others, reports NPD, which calls the core gaming demographic “vital to the future of the industry.” From a financial standpoint, in other words, whatever the reasons for the Wii U’s lower-than-expected sales, the ball remains clearly in core gaming’s court.


MORE: Murfie Converts Your CDs into a Lossless Online Library, Lets You Sell and Trade Your Music


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Lewis says he's 'agitated,' not angry about story

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Smiling, even laughing, at questions about a report linking him to a company that purports to make performance-enhancers, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis said Wednesday he "never, ever took" the stuff.


Lewis described himself as "agitated," not angry, that the story has become part of the Super Bowl-week prelude to Baltimore's game against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.


He added that he's certain his teammates won't be distracted by the report in Sports Illustrated. The magazine said Lewis sought help from a company that says its deer-antler spray and pills contain a banned product connected to human growth hormone. The 37-year-old Lewis is the leading tackler in the NFL postseason after returning from a torn right triceps that sidelined him for 10 games.


In a private conversation with Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, and later in the public setting of a news conference, Lewis distanced himself from Sports With Alternatives To Steroids (SWATS). SI reported that company owner Mitch Ross recorded a call with Lewis hours after the player hurt his arm in an October game against Dallas. According to the report, Lewis asked Ross to send him deer-antler spray and pills, along with other items made by the company.


"It's so funny of a story because I never, ever took what he says or whatever I was supposed to do. And it's just sad once again that someone can have this much attention on a stage this big, where the dreams are really real," Lewis said Wednesday, wearing his white No. 52 Ravens jersey, gray sweat pants and a black hat with the team's purple logo. "I don't need it. My teammates don't need it. The 49ers don't need it. Nobody needs it."


The magazine reported that when it spoke to Lewis for its story, he acknowledged asking Ross for "some more of the regular stuff" on the night of the injury and that he has been associated with the company "for a couple years."


Lewis' stance Wednesday was different.


"He told me there's nothing to it. ... He's told us in the past, he's told us now, that he's never taken any of that stuff, ever. And I believe Ray. I trust Ray completely. We have a relationship. I know this man. And I know what he's all about," Harbaugh said. "It's just too bad it has to be something that gets so much play."


Christopher Key, a co-owner of SWATS, said in a telephone interview that the company removed from its website NFL players' endorsements because "all the players were given letters by the NFL two years ago saying they had to cease and desist and could not continue to do business with us anymore."


NFL spokesman Greg Aiello confirmed that, but did not respond to other requests for comment about the company or Lewis' involvement.


Key said the deer-antler products made by SWATS "helped the body repair, regrow and rejuvenate" and that "you will never fail a drug test from taking our product."


He added that SWATS has sold its products to more than 20 college football players each at Southeastern Conference schools Alabama, Auburn, Mississippi, LSU and Georgia.


Alabama has sent two cease and desist letters to the company, university spokeswoman Debbie Lane said, adding: "UA has been aware of this situation for some time, and we have monitored this company for several years."


Auburn spokesman Kirk Sampson said that school sent a cease-and-desist letter in 2011.


In an emailed statement, Ross said: "It is the view of SWATS and Mitch Ross that the timing of information was unfortunate and misleading and was in no way intended to harm any athlete. We have always been about aiding athletes to heal faster and participate at an optimum level of play in a lawful and healthy manner. We never encourage the use of harmful supplements and/or dangerous drugs."


Harbaugh didn't think his players would be bothered a bit by the subject this week, dismissively waving his left hand while saying: "As a football team, it's not even a factor for us."


Known for his frequent references to God and faith, 2001 Super Bowl MVP Lewis called the whole episode a "joke" and a "trick of the devil," adding that he told teammates: "Don't let people from the outside ever come and try to disturb what's inside."


Faced with a handful of questions about SWATS, and on-field topics, Lewis never had to deal with a single reference to a dark chapter in his life: He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with a double murder after a Super Bowl party at an Atlanta nightclub in 2000.


"We all in here have a past. You know? But how many people actually dwell into it? You know? Nah, it ain't about your past. It's about your future," Lewis said in response to a question about the Ravens keeping focused on Sunday's game.


"And for me and my teammates, I promise you, we have a strong group of men that we don't bend too much," he said, raising a clenched right fist, "and we keep pushing forward. So it's not a distraction at all for us."


Asked about deer-antler spray, San Francisco's tight end Vernon Davis' take was, "I don't think Ray would take any substance."


Carlos Rogers, a 49ers cornerback, chuckled when asked about it and what effect the headlines could have on the Ravens.


"I don't think they'll get a distraction. I don't know what to make of that. I heard it was something that can't be detected. They can't test (for) it, anyway," Rogers said. "Him saying that he's never failed a test, he probably hasn't failed a test for what they test for."


___


AP Sports Writer John Zenor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., contributed to this report.


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Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich


___


Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL


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Illness Walks the Runway

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A top fashion designer quarantines a sneezing underling, forcing her to work in a closet. An industry P.R. executive makes colleagues douse their hands with Purell. Germ-phobic magazine editors are powerblasting offices with antiseptic wipes and Lysol.




Such is the dread gripping the fashion world as it prepares for New York Fashion Week, beginning Feb. 7, with a killer flu and a stomach-bug norovirus on the loose.


The eight-day event, when fashionistas from around the world pack into small spaces to attend runway shows and parties — only to cram onto the same flights and repeat the process in London, Milan and Paris — is always an occasion for sickness paranoia. In past years, sniffles in the front row could prompt icy stares and social ostracism.


But with this season’s flu panic, the fear is approaching hysteria. Stressed-out designers recoil in horror if someone coughs within earshot. Frail models shiver their way between fittings, terrified someone will spy their runny noses. And frenemies everywhere are reconsidering the wisdom of the double-cheek kiss, the standard greeting of the global fashion tribe. Air kissing seems safe for now.


“This will be the season where everyone in fashion becomes mysteriously nonaffectionate,” said Laura Brown, executive editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Staff members in her West 57th Street offices, she added, have been scouring doorknobs with sanitizing wipes. “We can give a nudge and a wink instead.”


To be fair, much of the paranoia is founded. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths from the current flu season reached “epidemic” levels, in part because of an unusually severe flu strain. Adding to the flulike epidemic is a surging new strain of norovirus, which can cause sudden diarrhea and projectile vomiting, and the worst whooping cough outbreak in 60 years.


And while there is some evidence that the flu season has peaked almost everywhere in the country, except for the West Coast, flu activity continued to be high in New York through the week ending Jan. 19, as tracked by the C.D.C., and on the rise in parts of Europe including Italy. (Milan hosts a fashion week starting Feb. 20.)


Norovirus also seems to be surging abroad; it has reached epidemic levels in France, according to the latest report from the country’s doctor network Réseau Sentinelles, with more than one million French people visiting doctors for it in the past five weeks.


Yet even as flu season appears to be ebbing in New York, it remains a worry inside the fashion bubble. With sleep-deprived colleagues huddled in close quarters day and night, things can go viral quickly, especially in the petri dish that is Fashion Week.


“Fashion people are at risk for a variety of viral syndromes because they work long hours and they move in a pack,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, known in fashion circles for making house (or studio) calls.


Dr. Barry Cohen, whose primary-care office on Spring Street faces Marc Jacobs’s studios, says he has been bombarded with rheumy-eyed industry divas begging for quick fixes. “Fashion people touch each other all day, so they get exposed over and over,” he said.


And when the pack is moving fast and furious, it can’t slow down for the weak. “Fashion Week season is a nonstop assault on the immune system,” said Derek Blasberg, an editor at large for Harper’s Bazaar. “Early shows, late dinners, crammed into tents and airplanes: you don’t want to sit next to anyone coughing, because if you get sick, you’re screwed.”


The viral assault does not end with New York. “By the time we finish the New York shows, we’re already a wreck, because New York simply has too many shows,” said Mickey Boardman, editorial director of Paper magazine. “Then you get on a plane and hit the ground running in London, where there’s always fun parties. You’re eating French fries for dinner and drinking Cokes from your minibar, and your sleep patterns are messed up.”


“You’re putting your life at risk,” he added.


WHILE KEEPING THE WORLD trendy has its hazards, fashionistas have developed stylish tactics to avoid getting the bug. Many have dutifully gotten their flu shots. (It’s not too late, though it takes about two weeks to build up immunity — just in time for London Fashion Week.)


Others follow variations of what could be called the standard fashion-world starvation diet, whether it’s drinking large quantities of SmartWater fortified with packets of the vitamin supplement Emergen-C, or force-feeding themselves nothing but raw greens, like koalas munching eucalyptus leaves. Dr. Glatter says he has even treated some fashion people for diarrhea from eating too much kale.


Then there are the juicers. The designer Cynthia Rowley swears by Juice Press, the three-year-old Manhattan chain popular with fashion insiders for its 17-ounce $10 bottles of cold-pressed fruits and vegetables. “I’m addicted,” said Ms. Rowley, who added that she chugged the stuff with staff members when they were not taking spin classes en masse at SoulCycle.


“Nobody’s sick at my office,” she bragged dangerously. “We work in one room, so if one person drops, they take down the whole team.”


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DealBook: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Resigns

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1:42 p.m. | Updated with formal announcement

Lanny A. Breuer, the federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s response to corporate crime in the wake of the financial crisis, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down after nearly four years in the post.

As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, one of the most senior roles at the agency, Mr. Breuer tackled corporate bribery and public corruption. But it was his focus on Wall Street that received the most attention, from supporters and critics alike.

While he has come under fire for a dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crisis, Mr. Breuer also oversaw an aggressive crackdown on money-laundering and interest-rate manipulation at some of the world’s biggest banks. In two weeks last month, he joined a nearly $2 billion case against HSBC for money-laundering and a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS for rate-rigging. Next week, he is expected to take a similar rate-rigging action against the Royal Bank of Scotland.

“I think the criminal division is a fundamentally different place than it was four years ago,” Mr. Breuer said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s the highlight of my professional career.”

His departure, effective March 1, was widely expected. Mr. Breuer had told friends for weeks that he was ready to leave the public sector. While he has not announced his next step, it is expected that he will return to private practice. He was previously a partner at Covington & Burling, a white-shoe law firm.

By virtue of his perch at the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Breuer became the face of Wall Street prosecutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But when few such cases materialized, critics like the Occupy Wall Street protesters turned on him, portraying him as an apologist for banks at the center of the mortgage mess.

In contrast, he drew praise for the sweeping crackdown on rate-rigging in the banking industry, which has largely involved international benchmark rates.

In a rate manipulation case last month, Mr. Breuer’s team secured a major payout from UBS and a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, making UBS the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud. Mr. Breuer, who announced the action after rejecting a last-minute plea from the bank’s chairman, also filed criminal charges against two former employees at the bank.

The deal sent a strong signal that the authorities wanted to hold banks responsible for their wrongdoing.

Following the UBS model, the Justice Department is now pursuing a guilty plea from a Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary in Asia over its role in the interest rate manipulation scandal, people briefed on the matter said. That settlement, which could come as soon as next week, is likely to include more than $650 million in fines imposed by American and British authorities, two other people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In an interview, Mr. Breuer said the rate-rigging case amounted to “egregious criminal conduct.” He struck a similar tone about two other major financial cases — the convictions of executives from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a now-defunct mortgage lender, and the 110-year prison term imposed on R. Allen Stanford for his Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Breuer has also focused on money-laundering, creating a task force in 2010 that has levied more than $3 billion in fines from banks, including the record fine against HSBC. He stopped short of indicting HSBC after some regulators warned that doing so could destabilize the global financial system.

Mr. Breuer argued that the charges he did not bring — for example, against Goldman Sachs and other banks suspected of fraud after selling toxic mortgage securities to investors — could not have been proved. It was not for a lack of trying, he said, noting that United States attorneys across the country, after reviewing the same evidence he did, also declined to act.

“It’s important for me to hold the financial institutions accountable,” he said. “There’s never been a time that a prosecutor said we should bring a securitization case and I said no.”

Under Mr. Breuer, the division has also increasingly used a 1977 law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to prosecute corporate bribery.

He also helped run the Justice Department’s investigation of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the company paying $4.5 billion in fines and other penalties and pleading guilty to 14 criminal charges related to the rig explosion in 2010.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. praised Mr. Breuer. “Lanny has led one of the most successful and aggressive criminal divisions in the history of the Department of Justice,” he said.

Mr. Holder stood behind Mr. Breuer when questions arose about his involvement in the botched gun-trafficking case known as Operation Fast and Furious. The pair, who were both largely cleared after an inspector general investigation, worked together at Covington.

For years, Mr. Breuer moved in and out of government. The son of Holocaust survivors who fled Europe and settled in Queens, he landed at the Manhattan district attorney’s office after graduating from Columbia Law School. In between stints at Covington, he worked as a White House special counsel, defending President Bill Clinton amid federal investigations and impeachment proceedings.

In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Breuer reflected on his unusual path to the Justice Department.

“The fact that I got to go from Elmhurst, Queens, to the criminal division is remarkable,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/30/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign.
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The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Tweets an S O S

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Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel was shown live on Egypt’s ONTV early on Tuesday.

Last Updated, 5:57 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, shown live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff members had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

An unnamed hotel manager in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Ignace Bauwens, an executive with the luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, said in a statement e-mailed to The Lede: “The safety of our guests and colleagues is paramount and we have a responsibility to do everything we can to look after them. With the recent escalation of the situation near Tahrir Square we have decided to temporarily close the hotel for security reasons. Our guests have been relocated to other hotels further away from the demonstrations and we’re not taking any new bookings for the coming week.”

Late Tuesday, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter.

The latest message prompted some alarm, but, as the journalist and blogger Mosa’ab Elshamy observed, the hotel’s staff, like other Egyptians, appeared to be getting used to “the daily chaos.”

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.

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RIM faces its day of reckoning with BlackBerry 10 launch

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The innovative line of BlackBerry smartphones that Research In Motion Ltd will formally unveil on Wednesday has already succeeded on one crucial count – getting RIM back in the conversation.


The new BlackBerry 10 has created a buzz among technology watchers and financial analysts, thanks to nifty features that may set it apart in an overcrowded smartphone market. RIM stock has almost tripled over the past four months on hopes the devices can restore RIM to sustained prosperity.






Reviewers like the browser speed and the intuitive keyboard on RIM’s new touchscreen. A feature called BlackBerry Balance, which keeps corporate and personal data separate, could help RIM rebuild its traditional base of big business customers.


It’s a welcome start for RIM, the smartphone pioneer that has teetered on the brink of irrelevance. But success will come only if consumer and business customers embrace the new technology in the weeks and months after CEO Thorsten Heins takes the wraps off the phone at a glitzy New York launch.


RIM is gambling its survival on the much-delayed BlackBerry 10, hoping to claw its way back into an industry now dominated by Apple Inc’s iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s Galaxy.


The timing may be just right. The new phone hits the market just as the iPhone’s remarkable run is showing some signs of slowing.


“I really do believe that the consumer market as a whole is ready for something new,” said Kevin Burden, head of mobility at Strategy Analytics, an industry consulting firm.


“I have to believe that there is some level of user fatigue that plays into the longevity of some of these platforms,” he added, referring to Google Inc’s Android and Apple’s iOS, which are both more than five years old. “RIM is probably timing it right.”


U.S. BATTLEGROUND


To be sure, RIM shares are about 90 percent below a 2008 peak near $ 150 a share and the company still has a tough fight ahead. It may take investors some time to determine whether RIM’s big gamble on an untested technology has paid off.


RIM’s market share collapsed in the three years ahead of the launch. Strategy Analytics data shows RIM’s global share of the smartphone market was about 3.4 percent in the fourth quarter, down from around 20 percent just three years ago.


While RIM has done well in developing markets, it has hemorrhaged customers in the United States, a market that sets technology trends. RIM’s fourth-quarter North American market share fell to 2 percent from more than 40 percent three years ago.


Acknowledging that it is crucial to win back U.S. customers, RIM will hold its main BlackBerry 10 launch in New York, although there are simultaneous events in six cities across the globe.


Underscoring the point, RIM is splurging on a costly Super Bowl ad to tout its new devices and attempt to brighten its faded image in the U.S. market.


BIG QUESTIONS


Over 150 carriers already have tested the new devices and RIM has said the launch will be the largest ever global rollout of a new platform.


The two big questions the market expects RIM to answer on Wednesday are when the phones – a full touch-screen device and one with a traditional physical keyboard – will hit store shelves, and how much they will cost.


The company is expected to unveil specifics on pricing and availability in different regions at the launch.


“The Street is expecting mid-February for a launch. Anything earlier than that is a positive, anything later will be viewed as negative,” said RBC Dominion Securities analyst Paul Treiber.


That said, there are few mysteries to be cleared up on Wednesday. Leaked photos and specifications of the devices have been splashed across the tech world.


“We’ve had the beta devices for a few weeks and in terms of the devices, they are right up there with the competition,” said Andy Ambrozic, head of IT Infrastructure at Ricoh Canada. “The Balance feature is crucial for corporations that are becoming increasingly concerned about data security.”


Scotiabank analyst Gus Papageorgiou feels RIM has a good chance of a comeback. He says the new BB10 operating system outpaces Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s market-leading Android system in every category except app selection and content.


“There is, we believe, huge potential for the platform and devices to bring people back to BlackBerry or draw entirely new users into the platform,” said Papageorgiou, who has a “sector outperform” rating on the stock.


BlackBerry 10 will not be able to compete on the number of apps, but RIM says its operating system will have the largest application library for any new platform at launch, with more than 70,000 apps available.


It has already gathered big-name music and video partners for its BlackBerry 10 storefront, including Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, Universal Music and Warner Music Group.


Wireless carriers already report strong demand for the new devices. Rogers Communications Inc, Canada’s top wireless carrier and the first globally to take pre-orders for the new devices, said orders are already in the thousands.


“Our customers are excited,” said John Boynton, Rogers’ head of marketing, adding that some users are holding off on upgrades in anticipation of the BB10 launch.


(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp and Allison Martell in Toronto; Editing by Frank McGurty, Janet Guttsman and Andre Grenon)


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Ray Lewis avoids talk of report on deer spray

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Of all the topics Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis might have been prepared to talk about at Super Bowl media day, deer-antler spray probably was not among them.


He declined to directly address a Sports Illustrated report that he sought help from a company that makes the unorthodox product to speed up his recovery from a torn right triceps. Lewis was the NFL's leading tackler in the playoffs after missing 10 regular-season games with the injury.


The company says its deer-antler substance contains a byproduct of human growth hormone.


Lewis dismissed the report Tuesday as "stupidity." He said: "There's never been a question of if I ever even thought about using" a banned substance.


The 37-year-old Lewis plans to retire after Sunday's Super Bowl. He was the MVP of the 2001 title game.


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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

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You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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Economic Scene: Energy Tax Is Underused Tool in Climate Change Fight

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To understand the complicated politics of climate change in the United States, you may want to talk to Pamela Johnson, president of the National Corn Growers Association’s Corn Board.


She is concerned about the weather. The drought that parched the lower 48 states cut the harvest at her northern Iowa farm by about 40 bushels an acre. For the first time in memory, she says, she had to rely on the federally subsidized crop insurance program to stay afloat.


And yet Ms. Johnson’s main concern, and that of most other growers in the association, is not about how to deal with a changing climate — how to slow the pace of warming and how to adapt to a warmer world with more erratic weather.


Rather, growers worry that political support for crop insurance might flag after a year in which taxpayers paid billions in subsidies to farmers while virtually everybody else faced deep budget cuts.


“We are Americans before we are farmers,” Ms. Johnson said. “We know we have budget problems.” Still, she added: “For our farmers, crop insurance is the main concern. It helps keep us in business.”


The erratic weather across the country in the last couple of years seems to be softening Americans’ skepticism about global warming. Most New Yorkers say they believe big storms like Sandy and Irene were the result of a warming climate. Whether climate change is directly responsible or not, the odd weather patterns have underscored the risk that it poses to all of us.


What’s yet to be seen is whether this growing awareness of the risks will translate into sufficient political support to address climate change, especially after we figure out the costs we will have to bear to do so.


In his inaugural address, President Obama wove Hurricane Sandy and last year’s drought into a stirring plea to address climate change. “The failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” the president said.


But even as he put global warming at the top of his agenda, he avoided dwelling on how much it would cost to address. And nowhere in his speech did he allude to the most powerful tool to address the problem: a tax on the use of energy.


Dealing with global warming will be expensive. The price tag last year for the drought was about $35 billion, according to the reinsurer Aon Benfield. Hurricane Sandy cost a further $65 billion. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that last year ranked as the second-costliest in terms of natural disasters since 1980 — lagging only 2005 when Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.


And yet this is nothing compared with what the future will bring.


“The impact to date has been pretty small,” said William Nordhaus of Yale, one of the leading economists studying the impact of climate change.


Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, another expert on the costs of climate change, said: “What we are seeing is on the back of warming of only 0.8 degrees centigrade” since the second half of the 19th century. “What we risk is 4, 5, 6 degrees even by the end of this century.”


For all the damage wrought by Sandy and Katrina, weather disasters in recent years have cost us probably less than a tenth of 1 percent of our economic product. Yet, according to Professor Nordhaus, “Damages will rise more sharply than the temperature curve.”


The president’s speech notwithstanding, the cost of dealing with these looming disasters is not to be found in the budgets discussed by the White House and Congressional Republicans, which would shrink much of the government to its smallest share of the economy since the early 1960s.


Neither is the cost of steering the economy away from the fossil fuels that are to blame for a warming atmosphere. A report from the World Economic Forum estimated that would cost $700 billion a year in public and private investment.


The reluctance is not because we have no idea of how to finance these efforts. We do. Top economists agree a tax on fuels and the carbon they spew into the atmosphere would be the cheapest way to combat climate change. Most advanced countries rely on some variant of this tax. The question is whether the prospect of more droughts and more powerful hurricanes push Americans to embrace it, too.


Among the 34 industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, these taxes average about $68.4 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. The United States, by contrast, has a gas tax to pay for highway improvement, and that’s about it. Total federal taxes on energy amount to $6.30 per ton.


Some states add excise taxes — California has a gas tax equivalent to about $46.50 per ton of carbon dioxide and a $2.33-per-ton tax on jet kerosene. But, according to a review by the O.E.C.D., the federal government is unique in imposing no taxes on other energy use, from residential heating to power generation.


A tax on energy could single-handedly take on climate change. For starters, it would encourage people and businesses to burn less, reducing emissions at a stroke. One study found that a carbon tax of $15 per ton would reduce greenhouse emissions by 14 percent as people sought to save energy by driving less, insulating their homes and switching to renewable fuels, among other things.


What’s more, it would raise lots of money. Estimates reviewed in a report by the Tax Policy Center ranged from 0.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — for a tax of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide — to 1.6 percent of G.D.P. for a tax of $41 per ton. Consider this: 1.6 percent of G.D.P. is $240 billion a year. And $41 per ton amounts to an extra 35 cents a gallon of gas.


By way of comparison, the Swiss economy does fairly well even while shouldering an effective carbon tax rate of more than $140 per ton.


Some of the money raised through more taxes on energy could be spent steeling communities to cope with more intense hurricanes and moving others out of harm’s way. It could even help ease the fiscal squeeze that so consumes our elected officials.


There are drawbacks. A carbon tax would fall more heavily on the poor — the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the poorest fifth of Americans spend 21.4 percent of their income on gas and utilities while the richest 20 percent spend only 6.8 percent. But economists at the budget office have pointed out that there are several ways to compensate lower-income Americans.


For all the merits of an energy tax, the United States seems a long way from embracing one. It was only three years ago that the corn growers and the rest of the farm lobby allied with energy producers and other corporations to derail President Obama’s first shot at climate change legislation, which would have set a limit on carbon emissions and required businesses to buy permits to emit.


As things stand, drought is unlikely to change their minds. Farmers are still covered by crop insurance, and they have powerful allies in Congress who will fight to keep subsidies in place. They may see little reason to support legislation that would make energy or fertilizer more expensive.


“Farmers would be deeply affected by an energy tax,” Ms. Johnson said.


As things stand for them, it is probably cheaper to deal with the occasional drought.


E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;


Twitter: @portereduardo



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Yemen Seizes Boat Suspected of Smuggling Iranian Arms

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WASHINGTON – Authorities in Yemen last week seized a boat in their territorial waters filled with a large quantity of explosives, weapons and money, according to American officials briefed on the interdiction. The officials said Monday that there were indications that Iran was smuggling the military contraband to insurgents inside Yemen, although they declined to provide details.




Yemeni security forces halted and searched the boat, a 130-foot dhow, last Tuesday and found the weapons in three large cargo rooms in the hold, according to reports on the mission reaching Washington. There was American support for the interdiction, officials said.


The government of Yemen confirmed the seizure Monday in an official statement. The captured weapons included surface-to-air missiles used to shoot down civilian and military aircraft, C4 military-grade explosives, 122-millimeter shells, rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making equipment, including electronic circuits, remote triggers and other hand-held explosives, the statement said. If the weapons turn out to be the Iranian-made Misagh-2, as cited in the reports from Yemen, it would reflect a significant increase in lethality for the insurgents.


Yemen is already awash with small arms and explosives acquired over years of war and insurgency, much of it brought in from a number of foreign sources through its poorly controlled ports. There has been little effort to regulate the supply – one governor of a northern province is also a major arms dealer – and insurgents have often raided the stores of Yemen’s corrupt and divided military. Many of Yemen’s unruly tribes command powerful arsenals.


The United States has a publicly acknowledged security assistance effort under way with Yemen. At the same time, the American military and the C.I.A. are engaged in a clandestine program of using drones to strike militants associated with a terrorist organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen. With the United States and Saudi Arabia providing both public and secret security assistance there, and with Iran also said to be arming militant forces, Yemen has become the battlefield for a major proxy war by outside powers.


American officials said the weapons on board were made in Iran, and that the pattern of shipment aboard the boat matched past instances of suspected Iranian smuggling into Yemen. Officials described the smuggling as part of a plan by Iran to increase its political outreach to rebels and other political figures in Yemen. To identify with greater certainty the source of the seized weapons, the boat’s navigation instruments will most likely be examined to determine its origin and route, and the crew will be questioned.


For years, Yemen has accused Iran of supporting the Houthi rebels, who fought an intermittent guerrilla war against the Yemeni government from 2004 to 2010. Those accusations – including claims of intercepted weapons shipments – often lacked evidence and, up until about a year ago, routinely were dismissed as propaganda.


But after the uprising in Yemen in 2011, the Houthi movement expanded from its base in the northwest — now a de facto Houthi statelet — across the country. It has benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with both Yemen’s government and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, known as Islah.


By last spring, American military and intelligence officials described what they viewed as a widening effort to extend Iranian influence across the greater Middle East.


Iranian smugglers backed by the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had begun shipping AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other arms to replace older weapons used by the rebels, American officials said early last year.


Using intercepted cellphone conversations between the smugglers and Quds Force operatives provided by the Americans, Yemeni and Indian coastal authorities seized some smaller shipments, according to American and Indian officials.


Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Sana, Yemen. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.



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