hitachi Archive

  • Daily Crunch: Unboxing Dots Edition

    Daily Crunch: Unboxing Dots Edition

    Why software costs so much: It’s the packaging! Corduroy: not just on your trousers any more Nippon Oil and Hitachi aim at mass-producing microbe-derived biofuel Magnetic quantum dots Steam for Mac: 100 percent official. Try to act surprised. (But still, yay!)

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  • Nippon Oil and Hitachi aim at mass-producing microbe-derived biofuel

    Nippon Oil and Hitachi aim at mass-producing microbe-derived biofuel

    Major Japanese oil wholesaler Nippon Oil and Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Plant Technologies are developing a technology that's supposed to make it possible to mass-produce eco-friendly jet fuel from Euglena, single-celled organisms that live in ponds and lakes. To be more exact, both companies are cooperating with and acquired shares in a Tokyo-based venture called Euglena, Inc., which is trying to find a way to extract oil from these organisms to produce fuel.

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  • New polarizer film to boost contrast of LCDs more than 10-fold

    New polarizer film to boost contrast of LCDs more than 10-fold

    A Japanese company called Zeon claims it has developed a film for the polarizing plates of LCD screens that boosts picture contrast by more than an order of magnitude. The company is already selling films for those plates to LCD TV makers like Samsung whose screens are based on vertical alignment technology. It produces films for OLED screens, too. Zeon's new, so-called phase difference film, however, is made from Cyclo Olefin Polymer, which makes it suitable for LCD TVs based on in-plane-switching (IPS) technology. Makers relying on IPS technology are Panasonic or Hitachi, for example. The new Zeon film inhibits the diffusion of light from the backlight. As a result, viewers get to see clearer pictures.

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  • Daily Crunch: Into the White Edition

    Daily Crunch: Into the White Edition

    Parkour flip book-style Beam me up, Scotty: Some weird wristband lets to you talk to the hand Star Trek wetsuit lets you boldly go where few have gone before

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  • Hitachi’s develops brain signal-powered remote control

    Hitachi’s develops brain signal-powered remote control

    We all knew this would come one day, especially since the basic technology has been around for some time, and now we have it: A brain activity-powered remote control that can be used without you having to lift a finger. The Hitachi device is unfortunately a prototype, but at least they're planning to commercialize it within three to four years. The technology is being developed not for lazy couch potatoes but for something that actually makes a lot of sense: Hitachi says they would like to see physically handicapped people to use the remote control in the future (think about how many times a day you push buttons on your remote when watching TV).

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  • Panasonic officially owns Sanyo and boasts the world’s largest plasma panel plant now

    Panasonic officially owns Sanyo and boasts the world’s largest plasma panel plant now

    Good news for Panasonic in the last 48 hours. The company announced yesterday that it now officially turned Sanyo into a subsidiary after acquiring a 50.27% stake in its smaller rival. The merger was in the making for several months, and Panasonic paid a whopping $4.4 billion to make it happen. So we now have Japan's second largest electronics maker in terms of sales (Hitachi is still the biggest). And one day later, Tuesday morning Japanese time, Panasonic announced another accomplishment: The company has completed the world's largest plant for plasma panels. It's located in Amagasaki in Southern Japan and is ready to produce the largest PDPs in the industry (Panasonic says panels sized at 330 centimeters by 190 cm can now be mass-produced).

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  • New Japanese cell phone maker NEC-Casio to go America in 2010

    New Japanese cell phone maker NEC-Casio to go America in 2010

    As MobileCrunch reported back in August, three of Japan's eight top cell phone makers, namely NEC, Casio and Hitachi are going to merge their cell phone businesses next year. Under the agreement, NEC plans to integrate its handset division into a tie-up that already existed between Hitachi and Casio starting April 2010 (the begin of the new fiscal year under the Japanese business calendar). In the meantime, the companies involved decided on a name for the new venture: NEC Casio Mobile. The company's capitalization stands at a relatively modest $55 million, with NEC holding a 71% stake, Casio 20% and Hitachi 9%. And as I speculated in my previous article, that new company plans to enter the global market in a (relatively) aggressive way.

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  • New cell phone maker NEC-Casio goes America, targets 200% international sales boost

    New cell phone maker NEC-Casio goes America, targets 200% international sales boost

    As MobileCrunch reported back in August, three of Japan's eight top cell phone makers, namely NEC, Casio and Hitachi are going to merge their cell phone businesses next year. Under the agreement, NEC plans to integrate its handset division into a tie-up that already existed between Hitachi and Casio starting April 2010 (the begin of the new fiscal year under the Japanese business calendar). In the meantime, the companies involved decided on a name for the new venture: NEC Casio Mobile. The company's capitalization stands at a relatively modest $55 million, with NEC holding a 71% stake, Casio 20% and Hitachi 9%. And as I speculated in my previous article, that new company plans to enter the global market in a (relatively) aggressive way.

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  • Review: 2TB G-Drive External Hard Drive

    Review: 2TB G-Drive External Hard Drive

    The G-Drive external hard drive line has been out for a bit now. But the latest model is loaded with the Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM 3.5-inch hard drive, which means I had to check it out. Let’s just say, this boy is big, bad, and fast. Features 2TB 7200RPM SATA II hard drive eSATA, FW800, FW400, USB 2.0 interfaces White [...]

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  • Hitachi redesigns the SimpleDrive and ups the capacity to 2TB

    Hitachi redesigns the SimpleDrive and ups the capacity to 2TB

    Folks, 2TB external drives are now coming out from everyone. Isn't it grand? Hitachi has revised the look of the SimpleDrive external hard drive and it's now available in a 2TB option. In fact, the rest of the SimpleTech lineup can now be had with a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 hard drive.

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  • Finally: Panasonic to convert Sanyo into 100% subsidiary next month

    Finally: Panasonic to convert Sanyo into 100% subsidiary next month

    The deal has been in the making for months now, but yesterday Panasonic finally announced a tender offer for Sanyo Electric, paving the way to convert Sanyo into a wholly owned subsidiary as early as the middle of next month.

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  • Hitachi Japan to roll out four new projectors

    Hitachi Japan to roll out four new projectors

    Hitachi Japan has announced a total of four new video projectors [JP] specifically aimed at businesses today. The devices will hit Japanese stores on December 21, but Hitachi hasn’t said yet if the projectors will be sold outside this country as well.

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  • Japan’s No. 1 company regarding patents is Panasonic, research company says

    Japan’s No. 1 company regarding patents is Panasonic, research company says

    Japan is the world's second biggest nation in terms of patent application filing, but which company is leading the race in the country that's home to world class tech firms like Sony, Toshiba and Thanko? Tokyo-based Patent Result thinks it has the answer: According to them [JP], the quality and quantity of Panasonic's patents (filed in the past fiscal year) is unparalleled in this country.

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  • T-Mobile offers Sidekick users olive branch, $100 (update: not for everyone)

    T-Mobile offers Sidekick users olive branch, $100 (update: not for everyone)

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    We'd heard T-Mo was thinking about doing more for Sidekick customers who've had their data wiped by Microsoft / Danger / Hitachi's botched server upgrade, and we just got a statement confirming that any affected customers will be getting a $100 gift card for their troubles in addition to that free month of service. T-Mobile also says that recovery of "some" lost content may be possible, but we're not holding out hope -- and if we'd just been shafted like this, we're not sure we'd want to buy even more stuff from Team Magenta. Full statement after the break.

    Update: It looks like T-Mobile's having some success recovering data on certain accounts after all, and we're hearing that the carrier's official policy here is that only folks who still don't have their data recovered after two weeks will be eligible for the $100 -- everyone else will have to make do with the free month of data alone. It's a bummer, but if you read the verbiage on the statement closely, you'll notice that they give themselves the wiggle room they need to pull this off. Thanks, David C.!

    Continue reading T-Mobile offers Sidekick users olive branch, $100 (update: not for everyone)

    T-Mobile offers Sidekick users olive branch, $100 (update: not for everyone) originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups

    Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups

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    Backing up your personal PC to external media might still be a novel concept for some, but any IT manager fresh out of school can tell you that regularly backing up mission-critical servers -- and storing those backups in multiple physical locations -- isn't merely important, it's practically non-negotiable, and it only becomes that much more critical before undertaking hardware maintenance. Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger's doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which -- for reasons unknown -- fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

    The coming weeks are going to be trying times for both Microsoft and T-Mobile, a sideline player in this carnage that ultimately still shoulders responsibility for taking users' cash month after month and keeping tabs on the robustness of its partners' workflows. We're betting that heads are going to roll at both of these companies, formal investigations are going to be waged, users are going to be compensated in big ways, lawsuits are going to be filed, and textbooks could very well be modified to make sure that lessons are learned for the next generation of college grads tasked with keeping clouds running. Why there weren't any backups -- even older ones -- that could've been used as a restore point is totally unclear, so we're hoping Microsoft has the stones to come clean for the benefit of an entire industry that wants to understand how to make sure this never happens again.

    Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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