Kuriko Miyake

Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV is trying to squeeze the size of a CD drive and fit it into portable devices such as mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and digital still cameras.

A new set of 12 server building blocks, including server boards, server chassis, RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) controllers and server management software, was announced Monday by Intel Corp. Designed for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and system integrators, several of these new products are based on its new generation Xeon processors.

Japan and South Korea will use the World Cup as an opportunity to show off their secure voting technology.

Sony Corp. and NEC Corp. are in talks about a possible tie-up of their PDP (plasma display panel) businesses, the two companies said Friday.

NEC Corp. has developed software that can quickly compress audio data at a flexible rate, the company said Friday. This new development will allow mobile-phone users to exchange high-quality audio data, it said.

Seiko Epson Corp. will be the first vendor in Japan to mass produce an LSI (large-scale integrated circuit) chip, which supports the new USB (Universal Serial Bus) On-the-Go (OTG) standard, the company announced Wednesday. The controller chip allows mobile devices to be directly connected to each other without a PC.

Japan and South Korea will use the World Cup as an opportunity to show off their secure voting technology. The two countries will collect votes from soccer fans for the most valuable player (MVP) using an advanced secure Internet voting system, Divyan Konidala, a master's degree student at South Korea's Information and Communications University (ICU), confirmed on Monday.

KDDI Corp., Japan's second largest mobile telecommunication carrier, is planning to start CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) 2000 1X EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) service next year which will offer high-speed wireless Internet access, but no voice service.