Monday, December 24, 2001		Lens on IT

Toshiba Corp President and CEO Tadashi Okamura bites his lip during a news conference in Tokyo last week. Toshiba Corp, Japan's biggest chipmaker, said it will post a special loss of 40 billion yen ($ 313.6 million) in the current business year to next March to restructure its chipmaking business. Toshiba added that it will cut its chip workforce by 10 per cent to 29,000 by the end of March.

Microsoft Corp President and Chief Operating Officer Richard Belluzzo (R) speaks with Microsoft Japan President Shinichiro Ata at a news conference in Tokyo. Belluzzo told reporters that Microsoft will begin online gaming for its newly launched video game machine Xbox within six months after launch both in Japan and the USA

Japanese Internet investor Softbank Corp President Masayoshi Son prompts reporters' questions at a news conference announcing the launch in spring 2002 of a cut-rate Internet broadband telephone service, BB Phone, by Softbank and subsidiary Yahoo! Japan Corp, in Tokyo. It's an unprecedented, new approach to the telephone business, probably the first in the world to offer complete telephone services over a broadband network, he said. Unlike other Voice over Internet Protocol services, BB Phone works through a special telephone terminal adapter that allows users to connect a normal telephone and dial regular phone numbers, he said.

A fingerprint is detected by an electronic device, a prototype being tested by the German federal printing authority in Berlin. German Interior Minister Otto Schily has proposed that identity cards, compulsory cards, should now include fingerprints as Germany toughens its security in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

— Reuters photos