Sony’s Next Step Is Innovation

(AP) - Planned networking services for the PlayStation 3 video game console are a key part of Sony’s new drive for innovation, Chief Executive Howard Stringer said Tuesday.

Stringer, who took over as Sony Corp.’s chief executive in 2005, also said TVs using new panels called OLED and the Rolly music player with robotics technology were also products that showed Sony is back after its the company’s restructuring effort.

Such products “bring back some of the wow factor” that is a Sony trademark, he said.

Stringer said the massive three-year cost-cutting drive he began to turn around the electronics and entertainment company had gone well, and the company’s immediate financial problems had been solved.

“The next cycle is actual innovation,” he said, referring especially to software and other networking products that he said will deliver growth for Sony.

One of the problems for Sony is that it has so many difference products that skeptics have questioned its ability to connect all the devices to the Internet, Stringer told reporters at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters.

The PlayStation Network, now used to download video games for the PlayStation 3, will be expanded to offer other kinds of content. He did not give details or a timetable.

Besides its core electronics business, Sony owns a Hollywood movie studio that made the “Spider-Man” series. Sony also has a joint venture in music with Bertelsmann AG that has signed with Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters.

Stringer talked proudly about the OLED TV and Rolly.

Sony began selling this month in Japan the world’s first television for the commercial market with an organic light-emitting diode display, or OLED. The 11-inch display on the TV called XEL-1 measures just 3 millimeters, or 0.12 inches, thick, and delivers clear vivid images.

Rolly, which went on sale earlier this year, is a rolling dancing, egg-shaped music player that flaps its lidlike ends and flashes lights.