xbox 360

With 2012's first earnings season well under way, let's go over some of the items that will help shape the week that lies ahead: Here's why you should be watching one major mall owner, two tech giants, three homebuilders and a couple of old media behemoths.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a a keynote address that set the tone for the exposition where tech companies showcase their latest wares. But Microsoft is announcing that next month's show will be its last.

The holiday season has been strong for retail sales overall, but some chains have still found lumps of coal in their stockings. And as the holiday season winds down, what's bad for retailers may be good for you.

At a time when the music industry is Auto-Tuning its own eulogy and Hollywood has all but given up on DVDs, 1.5 million people lined up at midnight events to score copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, proving that even in an era when more of us want our entertainment for free, some things are still considered worth their price.

The Netflix Goliath was seriously weakened this week when Starz said it will pull its content from the company's streaming feed in February: Is it time for the industry Davids such as Redbox, Blockbuster and Amazon to pull out their slingshots?

Sending a new college student off to school with a computer is so time-honored, I myself -- some 20 summers ago -- was gifted with a new computer (a Tandy desktop). I think it cost about $1,000 in 1991 dollars and stayed with me through four years of school, a double major and a 72-page honors...

Under pressure to respond to competitors offering souped-up features for their video game systems, Nintendo announced Monday that it will offer a sneak peak of the Wii's successor in June. While consumers may love the shiny new system, the real question is how much it will cost.

Microsoft soundly beat its 2010 sales forecast for the Kinect, a motion-sensor device that enables players to use body movements -- instead of controllers -- to play games on the Xbox console.

Microsoft sold out of its Xbox video-game console in late December thanks to strong holiday-season demand, and may have product shortages in January and February as well, as the company's Kinect motion-sensor device has boosted the popularity of the system, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

How long can Nintendo Wii maintain its position as the reigning video-game console? Microsoft shipped an astronomical 8 million Kinect game systems in the past two months, undermining Wii's leadership -- already weakened by competition from the Xbox and PlayStation 3.