From Yahoo Finance: Apple's proud announcement that its new iPhone could be used to buy goods in a single swipe left customers non-plussed in Japan, where mobile contactless payments have been normal fare for a decade. A type of Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, known in Japan as FeliCa, was introduced to the Japanese mobile market in June 2004 and has been been implanted in almost all phones sold in the country since. Ten years ago the charismatic Takeshi Natsuno, who was then multimedia services director of Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, extolled the benefits of swapping cash for cell phones. FeliCa was conceived by Sony way back in 1989 and first used in the Hong Kong underground railway system in 1997 -- in a card known as Octopus -- inspiring cities around the world to use similar technology in their own contactless transport cards.
Sony Music will, dass die Gema seine Musikvideos auf Youtube nicht mehr sperrt. Der Chef von Sony Music International sieht für die Musikindustrie großes Potenzial im Internet: „Das Internet ist für uns ein Segen.“
Am Sonntag feiert sich die Musikindustrie bei den Grammy Awards selbst. Noch nie wurde die Branche so sehr von nur zwei Unternehmen dominiert wie heute.
The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.