As expected, Panasonic on Wednesday announced job cuts, plant closures and a third-quarter loss of ¥380 billion ($709 million) due to onerous currency-exchange rates, higher raw materials costs, and the continuing consumer paralysis.

Operating profit for the Osaka-based company declined to ¥26.4 billion ($297 million), a drop of 84% from the same period last year.

Continue reading →

A Brazilian mobile-software company with an eye on worldwide expansion announced this week that it'll set up its US headquarters in downtown Seattle. The advent of Spring Wireless could mean 35 new jobs for Rain City.

TechFlash reports that the company, which focuses on the enterprise space and counts Coca-Cola, McDonald's, ExxonMobil, Visa and Motorola among its customers, will add mainly marketing and sales jobs to the region. It has already picked up several former Microsoft folk to get things rolling.

Continue reading →

Carol Bartz was a surprise pick for the top spot at Yahoo, and three weeks after the announcement the invigorating effect appears to be ongoing as she deals with both the leaking and the listing aspects of her metaphorical ship.

The leaks appear to be a genuine vexation for the former head of (quieter, stabler) Autodesk, but the battle's delightful for spectators. Bartz on arrival said that she wanted to get Yahoo's rampant memo-leaking tendencies under control, and she appears to be serious: All Things D has reported that Bartz is calling for bounties on the heads of anyone leaking internal business to the press... and she's offered to pony up $1000 to start the fund. (Naturally, that offer was leaked. Multiple times.) The Wall Street Journal's also got a bucket out, and their Digits blog

Continue reading →

Call it a femtocell, call it an Access Point Base Station -- look, maybe the industry should instead try calling it something that clicks with consumers, because according to a recent study by In-Stat, the niche needs some help.

The femtocell, in case you haven't got one hanging off your own home network, is a cell base station sized down to cover a dwelling or an office. It can bring coverage into areas of a building where coverage is weak (eg., an interior office), and depending on your mobile service provider it may save you money by connecting your mobile phone to your provider's network over whatever broadband you've got at home. They can combine multiple kinds of access (eg., Wi-Fi and cellular).

Continue reading →

10:30 am EST February 4, 2009: Given the House's current schedule, it appears likely that the House Resolution will pass, and debate on the delay, will begin at 11:30 am. Betanews will cover the debate live.

What a vote of the entire US House failed to accomplish a few days ago, the House Rules Committee did Tuesday evening: enabling a delay of the DTV transition date to be debated without spending time in markup.

Continue reading →

Fans of the Sidekick, who have fretted over the smartphone's fate since the purchase of manufacturer Danger, Inc. by Microsoft, apparently don't have Windows CE in their favorite handset's future. Instead, Microsoft's looking for... NetBSD programmers?

Danger had been rumored for years to be reworking their product line to run OpenBSD, but the status of that effort had been unclear since Microsoft's purchase of the company a year ago.

Continue reading →

After an earnings spanking in its 2009 Q3, games publisher Electronic Arts announced plans to go Wii-Wii-Wii all the way home, refocusing much of its development effort to build for the console on which they're currently the #3 developer.

If anyone still doubted that the Wii is the pre-eminent console on the market, EA's clearly refurbished attitude to the former Nintendo Revolution should set her straight. In the wider marketplace, Nintendo outsold the competitive consoles from Sony and Microsoft, and EA now finds itself hustling to make headway on a platform where it holds about 5% of market share.

Continue reading →

The Treasury Department bureau responsible for watching for money laundering isn't watching its security closely enough, according to GAO auditors. Worse, much of FinCEN's problems lie with the notoriously security-poor IRS.

FinCEN needs to step up its documentation efforts and its implementation of security control, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office.

Continue reading →

1:45 pm ET February 4, 2009 - Verizon Wireless spokesperson Brenda Raney contacted Betanews this afternoon with a clarification: A Sony Vaio-P rebate for Verizon Wireless service does exist, she told us, for some customers, at Sony's discretion. That rebate is nationwide, but it's up to Sony to decide whether to issue those VZW-supported coupons.

Raney reiterated that since VZW does not sell netbooks in its stores, and because it leaves rebates up to resellers and partners to promote, Verizon Wireless would not be the one announcing any rebate of this nature.

Continue reading →

From February 5 to February 15, G1 users will be receiving an over-the-air update to the Android operating system. This release, known as RC33, adds a number of new features, including Google Voice Search.

In November, Google made its Voice Search available to iPhone users, leaving some G1 owners scratching their heads and asking "Why?!"

Continue reading →

For major UK-based record label EMI, digital music revenues rose 38% for a recent six-month period over the same six months the year before. But despite job cuts, lowered royalty payments to musicians, and other big cost savings measures, the gains on the digital side didn't offset sliding CD sales and large interest on a $2.7 billion bank loan.

EMI's share of global CD sales dropped to 9.8% from a prior level of 10.6%. Still, in results reported Friday, EMI did better on the whole during the six-month stint ended September 30, 2008 than for the earlier six-month period. The music company reported a loss of only $221.3 million, in contrast to a loss of $462.5 million before, and operating profits of $8.6 million this time around, in contrast to a loss of $285 million previously. EMI cut 1,500 jobs after a recent acquisition by privaty equity firm Terra Firma.

Continue reading →

An article in this morning's Electronic Pulp shows what turns up to be a patent application filed early last month for a kind of laptop computer assembly where the logo is etched on panes of translucent plastic, such that it's invisible when turned off but illuminated eerily below when turned on. The publication talks about it as a possible application for a tablet PC or MID computer design, and speculates that it could represent a future tablet PC design.

The presence of the Apple logo, the writer went on, suggests that the company's design is "near complete." Well, unfortunately, he's quite right.

Continue reading →

Following a rollout last year in the US and UK markets, the highly rated, Android-based Shazam mobile music application is now available throughout Europe. Countries added to Shazam's availability list today include Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Could Shazam give Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune some real rivalry whenever more Android devices come to market? Shazam's Android-accessible database contains more than 8 million tracks, including pre-release tunes and music from various eras and parts of the world. Shazam was the third most popular app when the Android Marketplace launched last fall, and it now holds a rating of "4.5 stars out of 5 stars" among more than 6,000 Android Marketplace reviewers, according to Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher.

Continue reading →

Download Skype for Windows 4.0.0.206 from Fileforum now.

Today, the "gold version" of Skype 4.0 for Windows is available. The latest version of the popular voice chat client has been in development since 2006, and is the team's "most distinctive new release in Skype's five year history."

Continue reading →

Sony today unveiled a new finger vein authentication technology called "mofiria." In comparison to other biometric authentication techniques, vein authentication is more accurate and harder to forge, Sony contended in a statement, explaining that finger veins are different in each person and each finger, and that veins don't change over the years.

The new "mofiria" technology uses a CMOS sensor to "diagonally capture scattered light inside the finger veins, making a plane layout possible." After the vein pattern is extracted from the captured image of the finger vein, data from the pattern is compressed, enabling storage of the biometric identifier on a mobile device or gateway security system, for example. Sony is looking to commercialize the new biometric technology within the 2009 fiscal year.

Continue reading →