Based in Osaka, Japan, Panasonic Corp. (PC) is a leading manufacturer of electronic and electrical parts component. To grow market shares in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC), Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America and increase customer base in these countries, Panasonic plans to develop a line of low-priced consumer-electronics products which has limited features.

In order to tap consumers in the emerging market, Panasonic will launch TVs for $50, air conditioners for $100 and washing machines for $200, which are expected to hit markets after October this year. Panasonic plans to use "lifestyle research" for the designing of these products.

Don't be fooled by reports that the partnership between Best Buy Co. Inc. (BBY) and TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO) announced today is nothing more than a marketing alliance through which the big box retailer will more heavily promote a dying product in its stores.

The tie-up is actually about Best Buy being able to sell digital content directly to high-definition televisions (HDTVs) and other broadband-connected products -- and now it has all the pieces in place to do so.

The June 18 report for RIM’s first fiscal quarter cited a 33% jump in earnings. RIM said it earned $643 million, or $1.12 a share, compared to earnings of $482.5 million, or 84 cents a share, for the same period the previous year. Revenue jumped 53% to $3.42 billion for the quarter. It was RIM’s forward looking guidance that pushed shares down; the company is expecting lower revenue and earnings in the coming quarter.

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Recent channel checks with global carriers and partners suggesting that Research in Motion (RIMM) had a healthy June, as well as a share price that has lost nearly a quarter of its value since last month, has prompted Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek to upgrade Research In Motion Ltd. to Buy from Hold.

“It appears that recent launches of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre have done little to disrupt RIM’s momentum and may have in fact benefited the company as competing carriers aggressively position BlackBerry as an alternative,” he told clients.

From the standpoint of the US free markets, we have the most interventionist government regime of any point in the past 60 years — if not ever. There have also been some spectacularly bad government interventions in the past year, as well as profligate deficit spending.

Many have these been justified (or rationalized) as being necessitated by the economic mess — or, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put it back in November, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Some of the micromanagement has bordered on the banal — meddling just because — which brings us to this week’s news.

By Leena Rao

It looks like Amazon (AMZN) had dropped the price of the latest generation Kindle 2, the 6-inch reading wireless reading device, from $359 to $299. I’m actually kicking myself right now because I just purchased the same one for the higher price a few days ago.

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry sales had a rough June at AT&T (T) and Sprint (S) as those wireless carriers talked up the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, respectively.

Those findings come courtesy of Piper Jaffray’s Michael Walkley. In a research note, Walkley writes:

The technicals started to break down three weeks ago. Now the "panic" has begun to set in (nightmares of early March - do we revisit those lows?) Now, everyone has decided what was great in early June is surely going bankrupt. We're seeing a run to Treasuries (oh, those wonderful safe yields. Would anyone really like to hold 20 year Treasuries to maturity at those rates?).

Jean Crumrine co-wrote this article

Overall smart phone ownership continues to rise, according to a June 9-15 survey by ChangeWave research, with 37% of respondents now reporting they own a smart phone.

1. Highly competitive markets

Motorola (MOT)—along with a bevy of other wireless carriers—has gone gaga for Android, the mobile operating system hatched by Google (GOOG). For Motorola, a big Android bet boils down to saving the company’s handset business. The nagging question: If everyone—Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony Ericsson and Motorola—go Android happy does anyone really have an advantage?

As Forbes reports, Motorola has been courting Android developers aggressively in hopes that they can differentiate their handsets from the rest of the field. Indeed, one stop at the MotoDev blog tells the tale. You can find information on meetups for developers, scripting tips and a bunch of other developer information.

My, how time flies in the tech world. It was only one month ago today that the Palm Pre launched to the public, giving users their first chance to try out WebOS first hand. Critical response to the device was generally positive, though much of this stemmed from the phone’s impressive operating system rather than the hardware itself. Still, it was exciting to see a genuinely compelling product come out of Palm for the first time in years, and many of us viewed it as one of the first worthwhile competitors to the iPhone. And then the iPhone 3GS came out, selling 1 million devices in a single weekend.

Since then, the Pre has largely fallen under Apple’s (AAPL) shadow. But there have been murmurs that Palm (PALM) has still managed to sell far more devices than most analysts were expecting — a recent report from Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder suggests that Palm is still unable to meet demand, and that the company will ship one million phones to Sprint during the device’s first quarter in production. Today we’ve gotten a report that indicates that this may be pretty far from reality.

Well, this would be a weird twist in the smart phone wars.

Citing “industry insiders,” the Guardian is reporting that Nokia (NOK) is developing a phone that runs on Google’s (GOOG) Android software platform, rather than its own Symbian software.

Like most people who’ve had an iPhone 3GS in their hands, we’ve been extremely impressed with the video capabilities of this little device. Not only Does it take near-HD video, it has excellent basic editing software and video can be uploaded to YouTube over Wifi or the cell networks. Among other things, it is the most useful video camera in the world today. No wonder the video camera market is shaking in its collective boots.

Thank God those iPhones are so expensive, and Apple will only sell 20 million or so of them in 2009. If Apple added cameras to its line of iPods, there would be another 3+million of them hitting the market per month, and the low end of the digital video camera market could be crushed.