Sony

We've kicked off the New Year into full gear with our own Staci Kramer, Tameka Kee and Tricia Duryee covering the giant Consumer Electronics Show. Their coverage can be seen at our CES 2009 channels on both paidContent.org and mocoNews.net.

Our top headlines of the first full week in 2009:

Between Christmas, Hanukah, and New Year's, tons of people went home for the holidays. Including to Sony's Home on the PS3, the virtual world that launched in open beta right before the break.

Mobile ad network AdMob released December figures Thursday, and while our usual caveat that these figures are from only one vendor still stands, they nonetheless highlight some interesting trends. Most notably, AdMob saw a jump in the number of ads it served up to iPod Touch users, which surged from 86 million in November to 292 million in December.

Ninety percent of Sony (NYSE: SNE) products will connect to the internet and to each other by 2011, Sir Howard Stringer promised the 2009 CES crowd in the show's opening keynote.

News that pre-holiday sales of Sony's PS3 console slipped year-over-year (in contrast to sales growth for the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360) led some analysts to conclude that the PS3 is all but defeated in the next-gen console wars. Well advertisers don't think so, according to DoubleFusion CEO Jonathan Epstein.

Last night, Tom Hanks was starring in the Apollo 13 rerun playing in my hotel room. Today, he's stealing the show at CES, starting with a devastating send-up of Gary Shapiro and a riff on how he could have saved the world if he'd only been one of the 600 people to buy a Betamax, not a VHS. Before getting around to the teleprompter: "They write the lies but I tell the truth." A deft reminder that he started in comedy. And as he introduced Sir Howard Singer, a suggestion that if he can only get Bluetooth to work, Stringer will be a Lord.

It's cheerleader time for Gary Shapiro, the president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, pulling out all the stops to rev up the troops at CES before this morning's keynote by Sony's Sir Howard Stringer. Buried in the middle of it all—a projection that the industry will be flat as a pancake in 2009, with a .6 percent drop in revenue growth if all goes well. That compares with 2008, with projected growth of 6 percent and estimated actual 5.4 percent growth. Unit sales are growing but prices are coming down as retailers try to shove product out the door.

Animated e-cards site JibJab has raised a $7.5 million third round funding to promote the company's modest plan to "reinvent the $8 billion greetings industry." New investors Overbrook Entertainment and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Pictures Entertainment joined existing backer Polaris Venture Partners for the round.

During an hour-long panel at the CES Mobile Entertainment event today, a host of executives ranging from Pandora to SanDisk and Motorola to Sony Ericsson talked about the mobile music industry with a couple of themes standing out: thoughts on the news yesterday that iTunes will allow full-track music downloads over-the-air for the same price, and whether negotiations with music labels, which can always be tricky, are finally starting to loosen up.

At the recently concluded Macworld conference, among the not so many highlights of the event was Apple’s announcement that it would start selling songs at its iTunes store withouth the usual Digital Rights Managements software. Apple reported that it has already reached an agreement with three major music labels, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group [...]