Hence, Sony’s announcement that it’s making a big bet on…3-D TVs. CEO Howard Stringer is using the IFA Technology Show in Berlin to announce that Sony will make 3-D Bravia sets.

And 3-D Vaio laptops. And 3-D PlayStation3s. And 3-D Blu-ray DVD players.

No plans for a 3-D Walkman, though. (But wait!)

This is a recurring theme for Sony, by the way: Stringer also talked up 3-D in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. I still wonder about the actual demand for this; I sampled some new-fangled 3-D at CES and left underwhelmed. But the stuff I saw–a live broadcast of the college football championship game–was, admittedly, an experiment.

In any case, even if you believe Stringer’s assertion that consumers really love the new 3-D experience, there are some big hurdles before Sony (SNE) or anyone else in home electronics can capitalize on it. For instance:

• A looming format war, the same thing that kept Blu-ray from taking a running start at the DVD market.
• Ginormous prices: Sony hasn’t said how much its 3-D-enabled TV sets will cost, but the ones that rival LG go for something like $5,500.

1. Things are brutal! We’re about to see companies falling like flies this year as they run out of money. And those that are able to get money are getting it on terrible terms.
2. Things are great! We’re about to see companies falling like flies this year as they run out of money. Which means that the remaining ones will be worth investing in–at reasonable valuations.

Put Mark Cuban in the second camp. More or less: The billionaire investor claims he’s never been that interested in valuations, period–just whether or not the companies he’s looking at can make money.

The SEC might argue with that, but Cuban didn’t talk to me about that when I saw him last week at the Consumer Electronics Show, where he was promoting a live 3-D broadcast of the BCS college football championship.

He did explain his start-up investing philosophy, though. Key takeaway–if you’re pitching Cuban for an investment, don’t tell him that you plan on flipping your company.

Bonus advice from Cuban, who prominently posts his email address everywhere he can, and consequently gets 500 to 5,000 emails a day: How to manage a full inbox using Gmail and a Sidekick. He’s got some (off-color) advice for Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, by the way: That kicks in around the 3:30 mark, if you’re interested.

That’s something Sony hasn’t seen since Hollywood producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber managed to incinerate the company’s balance sheet in the mid-90s. Variety:

This contrasts with the $2.2 billion operating profit Sony predicted in October.

The Nikkei said the loss could balloon to $2 billion, depending on how successful Sony is in cutting inventory in the January-March quarter.

If the Nikkei forecast comes to pass, it will be Sony’s first loss in 14 years, when it took a one-time charge for its pictures division.

Black ink has turned red because of lower-than-expected sales of Sony’s flat-panel TVs and other products, primarily in the U.S. market, while the rapid strengthening of the yen has devastated the bottom lines of all Japanese export industries.”

Upside? Sony (SNE) still makes really cool stuff. Last year at All Things Digital, Stringer showed off a super-thin, super-expensive TV that used organic light-emitting diodes. Last week at CES, the company was showing off a different application for OLED: flexible screens.

Here’s a Sony rep telling you about the technology, but not doing a good job of showing it off:

And here’s video from Obsessable, which actually displays the goods:

Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.

No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”

Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.

The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.

It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?

This is also why I’m not sure how long the big cable companies will allow Boxee to operate unfettered. As the recent dispute between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom (VIA) illustrates, the cable operators are increasingly dismayed about paying the cable networks big fees for their content, only to find them giving it away online. And with Boxee providing customers with a real opportunity to drop cable TV in favor of a broadband connection, I worry that it’s a matter of time before they find some way to throttle the company.

Technically, the cable guys (and the telcos, who are also in the TV business) aren’t supposed to be able to do anything about Boxee. They’re just supposed to act as a dumb pipe serving up high-speed Internet access and keep their mouths shut. In the real world, I don’t think that’s going to fly. See: The many bandwidth caps the cable guys are starting to experiment with, which are aimed at heavy Web video users.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen disagrees, of course. He thinks the cable guys will want to work with his company (he plans to make money by licensing his software to gadget makers and extracting fees from content providers like Netflix, but that’s all down the line). And maybe he’s right: When I dropped by his CES booth on Friday, he was being swarmed by emissaries from CableLabs, the cable guys’ tech consortium. They were the third group of cable execs to visit the company that day.

I’ll let Ronen make his case in the video below; and I’ve also included a brief demo video from the company. But that clip doesn’t really do Boxee justice. Ask one of the 100,000 super-early adopters who are using the software themselves. Or any of the nervous cable guys who saw it last week.

At Sony’s keynote presentation yesterday, CEO Howard Stringer devoted a good chunk of his presentation to the wonders of the technology and showed off a 3-D short from Disney’s (DIS) Pixar. And last night a few hundred of us got another demo–a broadcast of the Florida/Oklahoma BCS championship game, on a giant screen, live, in 3-D.

This sounded great in theory. A brace of companies, including Cinedigm, 3ality, Carmike Cinemas (CKEC), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Sony (SNE), partnered up to create a special 3-D broadcast that went out to a handful of movie theaters across the U.S. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.) And they’d like to replicate this a dozen times a year for other special occasions: Other big sports events, concerts and the like.

This stuff is still a bit rough around the edges. The 3-D cameras seem to have a hard time keeping up with high-speed action like a pass, some images didn’t seem to focus that well, and the broadcast, which was created separately from the show everyone else in the country saw, seemed to be several cameras short–not enough overhead shots of the action, etc. But that’s OK: CES is usually stuffed with vaporware that never makes it to market, so we’re willing to cut an actual product some slack.

The bigger question is whether the 3-D experience will be amazing enough to convince people to pay money to watch a big game at a theater instead of their living rooms or at a sports bar. I’m not convinced, but I’m willing to give it another shot.

Here’s some video footage from the event; I can’t show you what the broadcast looked like because my not-so trusty Flip Mino doesn’t have any kind of flash. And there’s not much point in watching a clip of a 3-D broadcast in 2-D anyway, right? Instead, I chatted with Cinedigm CEO Bud Mayo, recent Carmike investor Mark Cuban (more from him later), and Nate Westheimer, a New York-based tech guy around town who filled in as my volunteer cameraman and one-man focus group.

[Image Credit: Life/Google]

I’ll let the gadget pros assess the operating system and the Pre, the first phone that will feature it, once they’ve actually had a chance to play with them. But my first impression is that the phone incorporates a lot of iPhone-like features and flourishes–primarily the multi-touch screen and gesture system for manipulating data–but boasts a keyboard. That’s promising.

I’ll also note that the Palm folks spent very little time on the phone’s audio-visual capabilities, so it doesn’t look like they’re trying to take on Apple (AAPL) there. And there was no talk about corporate email compatibility–they’re clearly not shooting for the hardcore BlackBerry user, either.

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Translation: Bargain hunters are going to be disappointed.

EARLIER Real-time notes from the Palm press conference:

Here’s former Apple exec and current Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein, with the windup pitch: Not enough to just have a good phone. Need good applications, too. Now here’s CEO Ed Colligan explaining why Palm can pull this off: “Mobile is in our DNA. We do mobile. That’s all we do.”

Still in windup mode: Colligan explaining history of the smartphone. Now explaining that today’s smartphone user has lots of stuff on the Web.

This is a new platform, “from the ground up.” It will be cloud-centric, not desktop-centric. Name: “Palm WebOS.”

Built with developers in mind: “If you know HTML, CSS and javascript, you can develop applications for this platform. That’s it.”

Back to Rubinstein, to applause. “It is my pleasure to show you the new Palm Pre.” Big applause as he holds up a gadget with a 3.1-inch touchscreen display with multi-touch capabilities. First impression: Looks like an iPhone with love handles.

For the gearheads: EvDo, Wi-Fi, 8GB, GPS. Bluetooth, 3-megapixel camera with flash. (John Paczkowski chimes in via IM: “Dude, 3 megapixel camera with flash is KILLER. I don’t know why apple hasn’t done that.”) “By popular demand” can remove back and replace battery (knowing applause).

Slide-out QWERTY keyboard. (Applause).

Now for actual demo:

Contacts scroll back and forth with iPhone-like gestures. There’s also a “gesture area” that sits below the screen, so you can manipulate data, photos, etc., without touching screen. So far: This is an iPhone with an extra gesture area. This is a compliment, by the way. More gestures bells and whistles.

Now demoing a new “deck of cards” metaphor that replaces the desktop for getting access to stuff on your phone. “How’s that for some real newness, hmm?” More applause.

Running through email, contacts, IM. All connected via “synergy.” Unclear whether Palm is trying to trademark that term, but they’ve referred to it throughout the demo. One messaging app for all your applications: SMS text and IM threaded together.

More multi-touch, zooming, pinching, etc. Like an iPhone. Screen rotates if you turn device sideways. Like an iPhone. Can use “gesture area” to flick around screen without getting in way of screen. Unlike an iPhone.

Glancing discussion of music player. But not playing up audio-visual à la iPhone. No mention of video at all so far. Real focus has been on UI and playing cards metaphor.

Back to Rubinstein, showing off a very cool gadget: Touchstone, a magnetized conductive charger.

Colligan on how phone fits in marketplace: Not just for work. Not just for play–“can do video and music and its fun to play with.” But again, they haven’t highlighted video and music.

Exclusive launch partner: Sprint (S). I hope the EVDO works better than my Sprint broadband card is performing today. Here’s Sprint CEO Dan Hesse: Stressing how Pre will be comfortable for “first-time users.” You can see where this is going: Palm isn’t trying to convert iPhone (or BlackBerry) users here. It’s trying to nab someone who doesn’t have a smartphone yet.

Hesse citing praise from Gizmodo, a “very well-respected Web site” re download speeds. I’ve seen so many Dan Hesse TV ads that its a little disconcerting to see him live. But he looks pretty much the same in real time as he does in black and white, strolling around Manhattan in an overcoat.

Hesse promises to have Sprint staff available to help users figure out how to use this thing. “We expect that the Palm Pre is going to be an iconic and in-demand device.” Taking pre-registrations now at Sprint.com.

Colligan: Available first half of 2009, “as soon as possible.” Not certified yet.

Here’s a new partner: Facebook. COO Sheryl Sandberg takes the stage. Now this is synergy: Sandberg’s brother-in-law is Marc Bodnick, a top exec at Palm investor Elevation Partners. Unless I’m missing something, there’s nothing exclusive in the Facebook/Palm relationship, though; Sandberg simply promises that Facebook mobile will continue to evolve and that she’s looking forward to working with Palm.

Colligan wrapping up. Praising Rubinstein, whom he brings back on stage. And we’re done. Back in a minute.

(Bear with me as I cover this live–my Sprint broadband card is giving me a very narrow Web connection today. Here’s Palm’s official real-time take on its own product, via its own blog.)

Introduced by an entertainingly giddy and sardonic Tom Hanks, who happens to star in a new Sony (SNE) movie (“Angels and Demons,” a prequel to “The Da Vinci Code”), but still made fun of his employer (“They write the lies, but I tell the truth”), Stringer showed up to show off cool stuff.

Highlights included a superthin and flexible OLED screen, a Chumby-like Internet-connected TV screen, and a series of 3-D clips. (We’ll be seeing a lot of 3-D this week).

We also got appearances from dueling animation kingpins. Disney (DIS) animation guru John Lasseter showed up to sing the praises of Blu-ray and show off a clip of “Up,” the next Pixar movie. And so did Dreamworks Animation’s (DWA) Jeffrey Katzenberg, who came to talk up the possibilities of 3-D (See? Told you. More to come.) and show off a clip of “Monsters vs. Aliens.”

The oddest Sony product: Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed doctor who is about to have his own Sony-produced TV show. He offered health tips and measured Stringer’s waist–40 inches, or 39 if Stringer really sucked in his gut.

But to his credit, Stringer didn’t promise a cure-all for the consumer electronic industry ills: “I wish I could tell you that I’m recession-proof.”

(By the way, the image here is from Stringer’s 2008 appearance at The D Conference, but from what I can see, he’s dropped a few pounds since then. I’ll update with something more current if possible.)

CBS paid $1.8 billion for CNET last summer, and today it is dealing with the consequences: A re-org and layoffs.

CBS execs won’t release specifics on the firings and won’t say how many people were let go altogether. So news will be coming out in piecemeal fashion for some time.

The best that I can tell, though, the cuts came throughout the company’s interactive group, from its London-based last.fm radio service through CBS (CBS) headquarters in New York to CNET’s homebase in San Francisco.

Based on the fact that CBS Interactive boss Quincy Smith flew to the west coast to quarterback the re-org this morning–and the fact that CNET was much, much bigger than the CBS Interactive group–I’m assuming that more CNET employees were let go than anyone else.

Quincy, if I’m wrong, please let me know. And CBS Interactive/CNET employees can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com.

In the meantime, here’s the new structure of Smith’s group, via an internal memo that comes from him and Neil Ashe, his CNET counterpart:

Team,

As we come to the end of 2008, we have a lot to be proud of. CBS Interactive is the best online content network for information and entertainment. Our properties are expanding, advertisers are capitalizing on our properties and their scale, and we are positioned well to continue to grow. As we prepare for 2009 and beyond, we’d like to update you on this progress, announce some organizational changes and comment on the broader market environment and how it impacts CBS Interactive.

Progress

CBS Interactive is the 8th largest Internet network in the world. Our combined traffic is up nearly 30% since we closed the merger this summer. CNET, CBSSports.com, BNET, GameSpot, TV.com, CBS.com, last.fm, and CHOW have each had record traffic within the past three months. Our commitment to our users is paying off.

Advertisers have noticed. We have recently signed and announced deals across several of our properties with Microsoft, AT&T, Intel, Bertolli, EA, and GM. In these challenging economic times, marketers are consolidating their efforts with their best partners. Our properties, our audiences, our ideas and our insights will continue to differentiate us in the marketplace.

Finally, we have contributed to and benefited from the TV and Radio divisions of CBS. We’ve done nearly 1,500 purpose-driven promotions to our properties on Broadcast TV, Radio and local TV Stations; CHOW and GameSpot content is running on the CBS Outernet; and CNET ran a major consumer campaign in markets like New York and San Francisco through CBS Outdoor. CBS Interactive is also a key partner to CBS Television Network for major broadcast events. In just the last week, we featured complementary content for events including The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the Grammy Nominations and the SEC Championship.

Moving forward, we have a lot to look forward to. Events like CES, The Grammys, and March Madness on Demand are all just around the corner. Each represent huge cross-platform opportunities where CBS Interactive will again help complete the experience with coverage on air, online, and on mobile for our audiences.

Organizational Promotions and Changes

As we enter 2009, we are making some changes to our organizational structure to capitalize on audience and advertiser overlaps. We are also making some changes to key functions so that we can realize the benefits of our position in the marketplace. These changes mark another significant milestone in our integration, as we fine-tune our organization to best take advantage of the power of our entire network.

Sports, Games and Music

We are combining our Sports, Games and Music properties into a single group led by Steve Snyder. Steve has tremendous product and leadership experience and an enthusiasm for each of these categories. In addition, Tom Jones will be moving over from CNET to head-up the sales efforts for this group. Within the group, our talented senior leaders including Jason Kint, Rich Calacci, Jaci Hays, Kevin Menard, Felix Miller, Doug Schmidt and others will report to Steve and to Tom.

Entertainment & Lifestyle

We are also moving our Lifestyle properties, CHOW and UrbanBaby, to the Entertainment group (TV.com, CBS.com, The CBS Audience Network and TheInsider.com) to capitalize on the similarities in audience and advertisers. This group will continue to be led by Anthony Soohoo with sales led by Ken Lagana. We’re excited to see the innovation that will come from this group in 2009.

Technology & News

Under the continued leadership of Joe Gillespie, our Technology & News division will bring CBSNews.com and CNET News.com into a single CBS Interactive News Group. Each site will maintain its own brand identity, while benefiting from shared resources in design, product and engineering to deliver deeper and more comprehensive coverage of major stories and events. Led by Mark Larkin, with Dan Farber as Editor-in-Chief, CBS News.com and CNET News.com will also have the opportunity to share content and collaborate on stories for the benefit of their unique audiences.

CBS Interactive Marketing

We are bringing together our key marketing functions into a new group called CBS Interactive Marketing led by Mickey Wilson. The group brings together expertise from across the organization so that we can capitalize on our biggest opportunities, and elevate the company to be a strategic marketing partner whose products, consumer insights, and ad innovations are critical to our clients’ long-term success. They will establish the company as the standard for premium content online, and define and evolve brand strategies to capture the biggest opportunities for audience and revenue growth through market planning, insights and execution.

CBS Interactive Business Development

We are also bringing together all of our business development activities. This group will be led by Mike Marquez. Mike and his team will be responsible for the development of all new partnerships, investments, and acquisitions. They will be charged with taking advantage of knowledge sharing across the whole company to ensure that we are the strategic partner of choice for the industry.

Market Conditions

As you know the general economic environment continues to be a challenge. We have always been very aggressive about managing our costs, and that requirement is even more critical now than it has ever been. We believe this new, more efficient organizational structure will produce better results for CBS Interactive, and also result in lower operating costs. It is always very difficult to make these kinds of reductions, but they come after a thorough review of how we are organized and how we operate, and what best serves our many users, advertisers and employees.

CBS Interactive is a special place because of you, and we thank each of you for what you have done, are doing, and will do to exceed the expectations of the tens of millions of people who come to our properties every day.

Today, we sit in a great position. People seek out our brands because we provide them with the information and entertainment they want and need, and marketers seek us out because of the powerful audiences we attract. We are positioned to grow in 2009 and beyond.

Best,
-q, NA

The difference: Back then, when Stringer fired 10,000 workers, he was trying to restructure Sony (SNE) so that it could focus its diffuse product line and compete with an array of rivals, from Apple (AAPL) to Samsung. But now he’s just cutting because the world’s economy is in miserable shape.

That has to be frustrating for Stringer (and miserable for the people he fires), because not too long ago, it seemed like his turnaround efforts had borne fruit: Sony had won a costly and risky format war over the next-generation DVD format, its PS3 game player was beginning to get some traction, and the company was making encouraging advances in the TV market. But unless people have money to buy those TVs and Blu-ray discs, that won’t matter.

You can ask Sony employees yourself about this at the Consumer Electronics Show next month–if you can find them. I’m told that while Sony, unlike many others, is keeping a large presence at the electronic convention’s show floor, many of the people who used to fly out to Las Vegas for the event are staying put this year. My guess: You won’t hear many of them complaining.

Here’s Stringer speaking with All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg in May at this year’s D6: