Forrester Forecasts Continued Growth for Online Retail

Online retail in both the US and Western Europe will grow at a 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015, according to new forecasts from Forrester. Despite the economy, online business-to-consumer sales in the U.S. (excluding travel and financial services) grew 12.6% in 2010 over the previous year, says the research firm. New business models such as group buying are driving the growth, along with improved merchandising to provide a broader selection of products. Online retail’s gain is brick-and-mortar stores’ loss, however: Forrester notes consumers increasingly favor the Web during critical shopping periods such as Cyber Monday.

AT&T Stores to Sell Amazon’s Kindle

AT&T is adding to its retail offering of connected devices, with its company-owned stores planning to market Amazon’s Kindle 3G e-reader beginning March 6. AT&T continues to be the exclusive U.S. network provider for the $189 device. Although Amazon does not disclose Kindle sales, Bloomberg quotes analysts as estimating that 2010 sales of the e-reader may have topped 8 million units.

Report: Apple Looks to Lockers for Digital Music

Apple’s long-anticipated complement to its iTunes digital music store will not be a stand-alone subscription streaming service like Spotify, but rather a cloud-based rights locker for iTunes customers to access their music purchases from any Apple device, the Financial Times reports. The service could debut as early as this summer, the paper reports. Meanwhile, Spotify is still reportedly negotiating with major record labels to launch a U.S. version of its European subscription music service. Google also is fixing to enter the space with a cloud-based locker service of its own. More at Ars Technica, which spotted the FT report late last week.

More of Today’s News Headlines from CDSA

Lionsgate Weighs Spin-Off of Digital, TV Assets (New York Post) News Corp. Stealthily Deepens Investment in Social Gaming (Los Angeles Times) Analyst Refutes Coinstar Earnings Estimate (Home Media Magazine) Motorola Gets Cloud Fever, Invests in Catch Media (Billboard) PSP Gets Fresh Price Cut (MCV) HarperCollins Limits E-Book Lending by Libraries (The New York Times)

Corrections

• A clarification regarding Thunderbolt, the new connection standard announced last week by Intel: the technology’s touted 10-gigabit-per-second spec is a data transfer rate (e.g., for moving video files from a Macbook Pro to an external storage device). Thunderbolt is not an Internet video download technology. • Last week we reported that Amazon’s new video streaming service launched with nearly 5,000 titles “out of the shoot.” The correct phrase is “out of the chute.” The expression is borrowed from bull riding. Thanks to Roger Baker at Giant Interactive for the catch.

Feature: Lord British wants to take you to space, and he’s closer than you think

It is very easy to fall asleep in space. When you're at your desk at home and you've been working for hours and you nod off, your chin bumps your chest and you wake up with a start. In space, your head doesn't fall—you simply fade into sleep, and then if you're unattached you begin to float away. This is the sort of thing you hear when you speak with Richard Garriott, a man you may know better as Lord British. He made millions of dollars creating and selling video games, and then spent most of that money trying to get into space.

He says that there is no ground on the International Space Station, nor is there a ceiling. There are instruments and items and all sorts of things connected to the walls, and you can tell the people who are new to space flight by how they bump into things, which sends them spinning in zero gravity. They zoom around, followed by a mess of items and benign, space-faring shrapnel. It collects by the air vents if no one picks it up. Sleeping bodies find their way there as well.

This is where Richard Garriott wants to take you, and he is much closer than you think.

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Weird Science only throws beanballs on cold nights

Throwing heat in the heat: Say you're a baseball pitcher. Want to get away with beaning an opposing batter? Do it on a cool night if you wish to avoid retaliation, according to a bunch of Duke's business school faculty. "Controlling for a number of other variables," they write, "we conducted analyses showing that the probability of a pitcher hitting a batter increases sharply at high temperatures when more of the pitcher’s teammates have been hit by the opposing team earlier in the game."

Capuchins get the girls by rubbing themselves with their own urine: Lots of animals mark their territory or advertise for a mate using pheromones in their urine (even fish do this). Capuchin monkeys, however, take an extra step to ensure that there's no doubt which individual was the source of the pheromones: they urinate onto their hands and rub it all over their fur. To confirm that this has its desired effect on the ladies, researchers put some female capuchins in an MRI tube, and then exposed them to urine from adult and juvenile males. The responses in the females' brains were significantly larger when the urine came from an adult. I suspect the same habit might get an equally large response from a human female brain, but perhaps not for the same reasons.

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Centris Taps High

Market research firm Centris has named John C. High SVP of marketing and sales.

Hollywood Studios lose Australia piracy appeal

The Wrap has reported that three leading Hollywood studios have lost a piracy appeal in Australia yesterday. The Federal Court of Australia voted to uphold a lower court’s decision earlier this month in favor of iiNet, an Internet service provider, which said that the company is not responsible for customers who illegally download copyrighted films. [...]

News Corp begins to say goodbye to Myspace

Reuters reports that News Corp.has begun efforts to unload the troubled social networking website.  The news service reported that News Corp. and the investment bank Allen & Co., which the company brought on board earlier this month to assist with the sale, will begin negotiations with interested buyers in the second week of March. Approximately [...]

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Cinema Production Complex, Ukraine

ENS, Sweden

Sony DADC, Austria

Sony DADC, UK

New CPS Applicants as of Feb. 17, 2012

Arvato, Wednesbury, UK

LaserVideo, Russia

Sony DADC,  Shizouoka, Japan

Sony DADC, Ibaraki, Japan

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