We here in Japan have to wait until next month for the iPad. For reasons unknown, that didn’t stop a doctor living in Fukuoka (Southern Japan) from X-raying one he apparently imported from the US and posting the picture on his blog [JP]. See the result above.
Via Gigazine [JP]
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).
The company seems to believe there’s still a lot of room for flat TV sales and has big plans for the near future. Its new plasma panel plant will begin full-scale operation next month, producing 120,000 42-inch plasma panels per month.
Panasonic aims at offering a total of 30 million plasma and LCD TVs in fiscal 2012, double the amount for fiscal 2009. Another new plant is scheduled to begin producing LCD TVs in July 2010.
There can be no doubt “green” energy is becoming more and more important in Japan. And just like the many other inventions in this area, I am sure this newest invention that’s potentially beneficial for the environment can one day make its way outside Japan, too: A floating wind turbine that’s currently in prototype mode and is 12.5m tall (5.5m are above the surface).
The turbine is being jointly developed by researchers from Sasebo Heavy Industries, Toda, and Kyoto University. The big idea it is to avoid the high costs involved in fixing wind turbines to the seabed. One area where the turbines could be put to good use according to the researchers is out in the ocean, simply because of the strong winds to be found there.
The current version of the turbine is being tested in Sasebo in Southern Japan, with the researchers hoping to achieve 2,000kW for the finished version. It will be ten times larger, too, and the technology is supposed to be commercially available by 2012 or 2013. (As no picture of the floating turbine is available yet, the picture shows a conventional model.)
Via Moneyzine [JP]
It’s no secret Japan is totally obsessed with robots, rolling out awesome humanoids, robotic cars, pets and toys on a regular basis. But robo-plants, such as the newly developed Himawari (sunflower in Japanese), can be considered quite unique, even by Japanese standards.
The robotic sunflower was created by researchers from Kyushu University in Southern Japan and recently presented to the general public as a prototype (which works pretty well already). Himawari features an infrared camera in its center and is also equipped with white and red LEDs.
Built as a piece of “interactive art”, Himawari is able to detect the presence of a human being. Wave your hand in front of it and it will react by turning towards you and switching on its LEDs. The makers plan to showcase Himawari outside Japan in the near future.
In the meantime, you can watch how the robo-sunflower works in the short video below.
Via Robot Watch [JP]
The consolidation process in the Japanese home electronics business goes on and on. Today former rivals Sharp and Sony said [JP] they reached a final agreement to launch an LCD panel joint venture in Osaka, after having failed to ink the deal last month. In March already, Sharp said it wants Sony as a partner for its plans to boost the production of LCD TVs.
Sharp will start operating a plant for the production of LCDs on its own in October. The subsidiary is to be turned into a joint venture by March 2010. Sony is expected to take a 34% stake and cover 34% of the $4 billion total cost. In return, the company will get some of the LCDs produced in the Sharp plant in Osaka (and another one in Southern Japan).
The deal is focused on midsize-LCD screens, particularly 32-inch models. So far, Sony bought its panels from AU Optronics in Taiwan and from a joint venture company it established with Samsung.
Sharp is also expected to merge its Blu-ray business with Pioneer’s Blu-ray division on October 1 this year. In addition, the company is in talks with Toshiba to step up the production of solar panels.
We covered them all: Teaching robots, kissing robots, space robots, modeling robots and even sensitive robots. But Ninomiya-kun, a book-reading robot, is a new one. He might get along well with Booktime, a page-turning robot (just saying). And needless to say, all of these robots are Japanese.
Ninomiya-kun doesn’t read e-books, but those physical, paper-printed books. Standing 1m tall (weight: 25kg), he was showcased yesterday for the first time at a robot show in Southern Japan. The robot was jointly developed by two Japanese and one Chinese university.
Ninomiya-kun is able to read through a character recognition software installed on a PC that he carries in his backpack. His two camera eyes look at a book page and a voice synthesizer turns the text he “reads” into spoken language.
The robot is able to distinguish about 2,300 Japanese characters, which is the minimum amount the national school system expects Japanese people to learn at school.
Via Yomiuri Online [JP]