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Technology

History of Sony

Sony was founded in 1946 and their first product for consumers was a rice cooking machine. From that, they started to grow and built their first transistor factory in Gotenyama where they created their first portable radios.

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Sony portable radio TR-63 in 1957.

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A shop selling Sony products in the 60s.

Sony was growing very fast, they needed to find a new localization for their next factory. They decided to built it in Astugi, a little rural village near Yokohama. I lived in Atsugi next to that factory during 2005, it was fun to see masses of Sony employees moving around in the morning and afternoon. The Atsugi factory was the biggest semiconductor factory in the world, it was even bigger that the ones that Texas Instruments had in the US.

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Sony factory in 1960.

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I took this picture in 2005, this is how the factory looks like nowadays.

Thanks to this Sony factory, Atsugi became a big city and many big companies decided to place there R&D centers and factories there. For example Nissan, Ricoh, Ntt, Canon or Asahi Kasei have research centers in Atsugi. I worked for Asahi Kasei, building speech recognition systems for car navy devices.

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This is a picture I took from my work place in Atsugi. You can see factories and rice fields mixed with factories and Mount Fuji at the horizon.

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This is another picture showing Atsugi’s south-east area.


This is a video taken near the Atsugi’s Sony factory entrance.

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Main entrance

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Sony from a garden near the factory.

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Sony people lives in those sad buildings, it’s a Sony dormitory.

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Grocery shop next to the Sony factory.

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Ibuka and Morita, the Sony founders as seen in the “History of Sony” website.

More about Sony

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Technology

Virtual humanoid

I liked this pictures from Mainichi.jp

Humanoide virtual

Is a system developed by NTT Docomo. Using special glasses you can see computer generated graphics “mixed/integrated” with reality. Right now, they managed to make a simulation where you see a girl but it’s just a green dummy. Look at this second picture, in the screen you can see what the person with the glasses is seeing.

Humanoide virtual

Of course, one of the first applications of this technologies is gonna be video games πŸ˜‰ It seems that some VC firms are already interested.

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Technology

"Teleport" lockers

Last week I used a “teleport” locker. They are lockers where you put your luggage/bags/whatever and you have the option to enter a post address using a screen interface. After inputing the data you pay with your Suica/Pasmo and a transport company will get your luggage from your locker and send it to wherever you selected. I tried it to send some stuff I bought in Sendai, the presents I put in the locker arrived to my home in Tokyo before me!

There are not many of these “teleport” lockers yet, but it would be nice to have them everywhere in the world.

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