Kiss of Death?

I'm beginning to wonder if my online print and coverage is cursing, versus benefiting, the companies and products I focus on:

• Confirming long-held speculation by various industry analysts, Boeing announced the shutdown of its Connexion satellite Internet-on-airplane service, the subject of my December 25, 2003 Hot Technologies issue writeup, in mid-August. Connexion's fixed expense bleed, estimated at $120M per year, ended up killing the patient; Boeing wasn't able to counterbalance its expenses with sufficient user revenue (although the folks who did use the service were generally quite enthusiastic about it). The inability to sign a major US carrier despite six years' worth of lobbying didn't help, nor did retrofit costs (estimated at several hundreds of thousands of dollars per plane), or recent bans on computer use during flight driven by security and exploding-battery concerns. But don't completely give up hope, folks….Panasonic is considering resurrecting the service (now that the infrastructure is in place and the associated costs are sunk….sounds familiar….anyone remember Iridium?).
• Infinium Labs (which I wrote about in EDN's March 16, 2006 issue), now known as Phantom Entertainment, still hasn't ramped the Lapboard into production. The company has, however, confirmed the suspicions of gamers everywhere by formally putting the final nail in the Phantom Gaming Console's coffin. Instead, Infinium Labs officially announced earlier this month that it was retooling its game content to run in downloadable form on conventional PCs, with a formal launch slated for March of next year. Which isn't too much of a believability stretch, since the Phantom Gaming Console was fundamentally a PC, hardware-wise, and the company planned to run embedded Windows XP on it. Although given Infinium-now-Phantom's track record….
• And what of Duke Nukem Forever, the perennially 'almost here' game title from 3D Realms which I wrote about two weeks after I covered the Phantom products? No surprise, perhaps, but it's also still not here, and recent rumours of staff defections aren't encouraging.

If the 'BD Kiss of Death' really does exist, then it must not be universally potent, judging from the news flowing from the in-progress Photokina show. I covered Foveon's X3 image sensor technology in an article published in EDN's September 14, 2004 edition, and my compatriot Matt Miller followed up with a more recent writeup. I'll be honest; given the weak to-date industry embrace of Foveon's sensors (two generations of Sigma DSLRs, along with a poor-selling, no-longer-available Polaroid point-and-shoot), I figured the company would be in the grave by now. However, Sigma just rolled out two cameras containing a next-generation '14 Mpixel' X3 sensor (strictly speaking, a 3-layer 2652×1768 pixel matrix, i.e. 4,688,736 pixels, each containing a separate red, green and blue-tuned photodetector) . Foveon's investors must have a) deep pockets and b) a great deal of patience.