Sony said it would promote Kazuo Hirai as the head of the company’s biggest division, a realignment that signals he could be a successor to the CEO.
The only thing we can rely on in the world of tech is the next leap forward. <b>Faranaaz Parker</b> gives a roundup of 2010’s big tech events.
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/ 5 September 2010
I remember a time when Sony dominated the gadgetry business, when it was a synonym for elegant design and advanced functionality.
In an event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced plans to start beaming 3D gigs directly into living rooms.
Manufacturers are banking on 3D TVs for their next sales boost, with sets expected to hit US shelves in force by the middle of 2010.
Publishers are learning from music labels’ struggle to make online music profitable and combat piracy, but e-books will add value to the industry.
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/ 22 January 2009
Sony warned it would post a bigger than expected ,9-billion operating loss this business year due to sliding demand.
The wall between televisions and computers is crumbling and internet pioneer Yahoo! is swinging a virtual hammer.
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/ 24 October 2008
World stock markets plunged deep into negative territory on Friday as gloom gathered over the global economy.
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/ 4 September 2008
Sales are improving in Japan for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, and a beefed-up version with a clearer display is expected to add momentum.
Sony will launch a new PSP in October with a high-resolution screen and a built-in microphone that enables it to be used as a telephone.
Sony is trying a new tack in the e-books market: untethering the latest model of its e-book reading device from its own online bookstore.
American journeyman Paul Goydos held his nerve in testing conditions to edge one shot clear in the Players Championship third round on Saturday. A stroke off the pace overnight, Goydos delivered another superb putting display on the slick greens at the TPC at Sawgrass to stay on track for his third PGA Tour title.
Sony is reportedly negotiating licensing deals with studios to distribute videos online through a long-promised service for the PlayStation 3. Citing studio executives, the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported on Monday that Sony could launch the service as early as summer.
Fictional robots always have a personality: Marvin was paranoid, C-3PO was fussy and HAL 9000 was murderous. But reality is disappointingly different. Sophisticated enough to assemble cars and assist during complex surgery, modern robots are dumb automatons, incapable of striking up relationships with humans. But that could soon change.
”Martyrdom” videos glorying in alleged planned bomb attacks on aircraft leaving from Heathrow were shown in court on Friday in the trial of eight alleged members of a British terror cell. The jury at Woolwich Crown Court also heard transcripts of videos in which the men talked of body parts ”decorating the streets”.
Once-unstoppable Roger Federer finds himself without a title entering the clay-court portion of the ATP season, a situation that has the world number one looking for reasons why and finding few answers. The Swiss superstar was upset by Andy Roddick in the quarterfinals of the Sony Ericsson Open on Thursday.
Champion Serena Williams made world number one Justine Henin look like a mere novice as she pulled off a stunning 6-2 6-0 victory to reach the semifinals of the Sony Ericsson Open on Tuesday. Williams barely put a foot wrong and reeled off the last nine games to book a last-four date with either her sister Venus or third seed Svetlana Kuznetsova.
It seems that the £200 (about R3 150) ultraportable Asus Eee PC can do no wrong. The size of a paperback, weighing less than a kilogram, with built-in Wi-Fi and using Flash memory instead of a hard drive for storage, the Eee PC has been winning positive comments from both reviewers and users.
Sony said this week it will soon sell a record deck that plugs into a computer to let vinyl collectors convert their analogue recordings into digital form. The turntable hooks up with a USB cable to a computer, where special software turns the sound into MP3 or ATRAC format.
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/ 29 February 2008
Popular Afrikaans singer Jurie Els, now living in New Zealand with his athlete wife Hestrie Cloete, has broken the silence around accusations of sexual abuse levelled against him by another, younger singer, Robbie Klay, media reports said on Friday. Klay has alleged that he was for seven years sexually molested as a child.
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/ 28 February 2008
Microsoft is to stop making HD DVD players for its Xbox 360 video game system after Toshiba ceded the high-definition video-format battle to Sony’s Blu-ray. Microsoft said on Saturday it will continue to provide standard warranty support for its HD DVD players.
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/ 21 February 2008
The British media are under the spotlight, accused of encouraging a flurry of apparent suicides by impressionable teenagers in and around the small town of Bridgend in the south Wales valleys. In little more than a year, 17 young people have been found dead, 16 of them hanged.
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/ 21 February 2008
Microsoft says it will make Xbox 360 video games developed by players available for download through the console’s online service. The new service will double the size of the Xbox 360 game library, to 1 000 games within a year of its launch, scheduled for this holiday season, the company said on Wednesday.
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/ 19 February 2008
Japan’s Toshiba conceded defeat on Tuesday to rival Sony in a long-running DVD format war, ending consumer confusion but leaving about one million people with expensive machines doomed to become obsolete. Toshiba said it will stop selling its HD DVD machines by the end of March.
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/ 18 February 2008
Investors cheered an impending end to a format war for next-generation DVDs on Monday, pushing up shares of both Toshiba, on the verge of abandoning its HD DVD discs, and Sony, the leader of the rival Blu-ray camp. Toshiba shares jumped 5,1% as analysts praised its decision to cut its losses.
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/ 13 February 2008
A 29-year-old man is accused of breaking into a Rhodes University residence and raping a woman — while he was out on bail on a previous rape charge. The man appeared in the Grahamstown High Court on Tuesday.
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/ 12 February 2008
By mid-century, getting it on with an electronic femme fatale or a superstud sexbot will become an accepted part of the human landscape, predicts David Levy, a PhD in gender studies and artificial intelligence and author of <i>Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations</i>.
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/ 11 February 2008
Two years ago, Kanye West’s Grammy afterparty was a booze-filled, late-night affair with 3 000 screaming guests, bikini-clad women — and his mother, Donda, in the house. He was more subdued at this year’s party, celebrating four Grammy wins on Sunday night in tribute to Donda West, but it was still a boozy, celeb-filled event.
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/ 16 January 2008
Apple has already made waves with its iPod, iPhone and trendy desktop computers, but on Tuesday night the company threw out a new challenge to its competitors, the world’s thinnest laptop. The secretive Silicon Valley company confirmed the launch of the  352 (R16 061) Macbook Air, which measures just 2cm deep.
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/ 14 January 2008
The Indian cricket board’s official Twenty20 League has secured a 10-year rights contract worth more than -billion ahead of its launch in April, organisers said on Monday. Sony Entertainment and the Asia-based World Sports Group are behind the deal.
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/ 10 January 2008
What’s in store for tech fans in 2008? Plenty. If the stirrings of the present are any indication of what’s on the horizon, technology buffs can look forward to products that are better, faster, and less expensive than those we rely on today. The best news of all is that some of the most exciting products should appear earlier in 2008 rather than later on.