Fujitsu, NTT DoCoMo, and NEC to form smartphone chip venture
Japanese electronics heavyweights Fujitsu and NEC, together with the country's largest mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo, said Wednesday they will form a new joint venture to build and sell wireless chips for smartphones.
The venture, Access Network Technology, will focus on creating chips that combine wireless modems with other functions, cutting the number of chips needed to make a phone and reducing reliance on outside vendors. The companies will initially develop products for their own use, but will target international sales in the quickly growing smartphone market.
In Japan, mobile operators have long dictated what specifications and functionality manufacturers build into the phones that run on their networks, although their control has loosened somewhat with the recent influx of foreign smartphones. Fujitsu and NEC currently work with NTT DoCoMo on a contractual basis to develop the chips for their handsets, and the deal formalizes the long-standing arrangement. Read more...
NEC launches software to quickly find video clips in large archives
NEC has begun sales of new software to quickly find video clips in large archives, which is well-suited for finding illegal content on video sharing websites, it said Tuesday.
The company's "Media-Serpla" software makes digital signatures for each frame in a video and stores them in a searchable database. NEC says it allows for 1,000 hours of video to be searched for a five-second clip in about a second on a standard desktop computer.
Quickly finding the source of a single video clip within a large archive has long been a problem for broadcasters and video producers. It has also become a major legal issue for video sharing sites like YouTube, which have faced lawsuits from copyright holders who feel their content has been posted online without permission. Read more...
NEC develops 0.3mm thick organic battery
Organic batteries are an exciting area of research at the moment due to the benefits and potential they have to power our gadgets in the future. One of the companies at the forefront of organic battery development is NEC, which has been working on these polymer-based batteries since 2001 and had its first major release in 2005. Read more...