We love Sony. We really do. And we want them to get back in the game, because competition makes everyone better.

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The Return of Sony [We Miss Sony]

Sony's Engineer Brothers To understand Sony, understand its founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. Even though both are now gone, their executive dynasty and its haphazard, emotional governance established the model for the Sony of today—even as it holds Sony back.

Rice Cookers and Electric Blankets

Sony’s early years are thick with stories of near disaster tempered by last-ditch recovery. After the Second World War, Japan was rebuilding its infrastructure. Electricity, no longer needed for military factories, was in surplus, and Ibuka and Morita wasted no time in putting together an electric rice cooker and an electric blanket for sale to the Japanese market.

They were horrible.

Despite a clever design, the rice cooker—a wooden bucket with electrodes at the bottom which would turn off when water steamed away, breaking the circuit—mostly under- or overcooked the rice. The electric blanket scorched blankets and futons, and there was fear it would eventually set a house on fire.

Sony's Engineer Brothers Ibuka was a tinkerer of the first order, so skilled at inventing that he won the Gold Prize at the 1933 Paris World’s Fair for his patented “dancing neon”. Morita was the scion of a prosperous family who chose a career of science instead of running the Morita sake business, breaking a chain of first-born leadership that stretched back fourteen generations.

They met working for the military, but wasted no time in forming Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, Ltd., which would eventually become Sony—as soon as the war was over.

Ibuka, in his founding prospectus, made it clear that above all else, Sony would exist as a welcoming workplace for the eternally misunderstood engineer: “The first and primary motive for setting up this company was to create a stable work environment where engineers who had a deep and profound appreciation for technology could realize their societal mission and work to their heart’s content.”

Engineers have always been stars at Sony—more so, perhaps, than their creations.

Ibuka Imagined, Morita Manifested
For decades—perhaps even up until this day, depending on who you ask—the key decisions of the company were typically driven by Ibuka, Morita, or one of the relatively small cabal of executives that led the company. This is typical in a Japanese company, where even the board of directors is often comprised mostly of cronies and yes-men, unlike in Western corporations where (in theory) a board of outsiders represent the needs of the public shareholders.

From its very start, Sony has been a wonderworks of invention, with engineers given ample leeway to work on their own projects. Their early inventions were often built on the ideas of other companies, improvements rather than wholly new ideas.

German companies had invented tape recorders in the 1930s, but both the machines and the magnetic tape used for recording was expensive. Sony developed a paper tape that was affordable but with a shabbier sound quality, literally brushing on the shellac by hand onto paper tape with a brush made from badger hair.

When Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, Sony sent an employee to the United States for three months to learn how to manufacturer them. When test runs yielded only five functional transistors out of every one hundred made, Ibuka ordered the company to move ahead with production. He held in his mind a vision of a pocket-sized transistor radio, and although it took a couple of years for everything to click, the TR-55 Transistor Radio was a very profitable product for young Sony.

Sony's Engineer Brothers Consider Ibuka’s biggest success: the development of the Trinitron picture tube, a couple hundred million of which Sony sold over the years. When the project began, Sony had licensed another tube technology, Chromatron, which had such poor production yields that it cost Sony nearly twice as much to produce than the price for which they were actually sold. Chromatron nearly bankrupted the company.

Ibuka himself led the engineering team that created the aperture grill that made Trinitron tubes colorful and clear. It took nearly two years for the first Trinitron tubes to roll off the assembly line. Years later, Ibuka considered it the high point of his career at Sony.

But if Ibuka had failed—and there were many failures before his team made the breakthrough—Sony probably wouldn’t be around today. It was a legendary success—a legend that now allows Sony to rush headlong into engineering-led disasters.

“I’ve always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio.”

Morita was less an impassioned engineer and more a dabbler, although make no mistake: Morita loved his gadgetry. It’s just that he also loved business, good food, the arts. Like his successor, Norio Ohga, Morita was concerned as much with the media that would play on Sony products as he was with the gadgets themselves.

It was this thinking that lead Sony into the content space, having first made considerable profits by selling recording media like audio or video tape alongside its tape recorders, as well as the extremely profitable acquisition of Columbia Records.

Eventually, having made a fortune selling both CD players and manufacturing a large percentage of compact discs, Sony made a play for a Hollywood Studio. Although Sony had looked at most of the major studios, it happened that Columbia Pictures had the right combination of a potentially profitable film archive, a vast television library, and promising upcoming film projects.

The problem? Sony had no idea how to negotiate the deal properly, led on by typical Los Angeles entertainment tricksters, and soon had decided the only practical choice was to abandon its hopes of acquiring Columbia.

Until Morita said one evening over tea, “It’s really too bad. I’ve always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio.”

And that was that.

Sony ended up paying an outrageous premium to acquire Columbia, only to write down billions of debt just a few years later. The same sally-forth qualities that had served Sony’s founders so well at the beginning of their careers were still in play thirty years later, only now they were in control of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees.

Echoes Not of Dreams, But of Dreaming

There are countless examples of Ibuka and Morita’s successors following in their footsteps, taking up the mantle of the brash engineer, forging ahead despite warnings of overambition or even unprofitable results, all in pursuit of a now-mythical Better Way. It’s hard to blame them. Sony’s founders brought fantastic success through their ideas and their tenacity, creating a corporate juggernaut big enough and diversified to withstand failures that would be catastrophic to smaller organizations.

Gadgets are not simply single-purpose electronic tools these days. They are platforms for software, for interaction, for media consumption.

I can’t help but wonder if Ibuka and Morita would look at the Sony of today and see any similarity to the company they founded, a place where engineers can work in peace to create the future, or if they would realize that sometimes the dreams of engineers are best when united towards a unifying vision—a vision that must adapt to the landscape of its time.

For this piece and others, I am indebted to the authoritative work of John Nathan and his book, “Sony: The Private Life”, as well as Sony’s own history page which, perhaps tellingly, only goes up to 1995.

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Sony’s Engineer Brothers [We Miss Sony]

How about some solar sound to cheer your soul up? These black and white speakers are built just to do that…to cheer you up with the power of sunlight…Their lithium-ion batteries are charged with solar power using the solar panels on their bodies. And no need to worry as to what to do on the gloomy, sun-less days as they also feature a USB terminal.

What’s more, it is possible to connect your iPod or other portable music devices through their stereo mini input. They measure 19.5 × 11.2 × 5cm (width × depth × height) , weigh 290g, and offer 2W x 2ch audio output. Full battery charge provides you with 5-8 hours of continuous music playback.

As to their design, well, I don’t know about you but their look reminds me of Wall-e…so I can’t help calling them “Mr. and Mrs.Wall-e” and these pictures rather look like tiny glimpses into their ordinary life….

Anyways, they will be available in Japan this year as of late March for about 5, 250 yen.

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Landport is proud to offer Japan’s First Solar Powered Active Speakers

Wireless Air Keyboard was first introduced by Cideko last June so this mini QWERTY keyboard is actually rebranding of the Cideko model or rather co-branding (cideko & msi) for German market. It can work from a range of up to 50 mt. It measures 14.2 × 8.8 × 3.3 inches (WxDxH), weighs just 200 g, uses two AA batteries for power supply that provide up to 50 hrs of use. It is compatible with Windows and Mac OS X (10.2 and later).

Scheduled to be available in March and only in Germany (for now) coming for €79.

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Msi motion-sensing wireless Air Keyboard

The official genre of this slick device from Sanho is portable storage and viewer, and that is that is what it does with its features that deserve your attention. Above all, it is equipped with a 640 GB of HD, capable of 2GB per minute with full data verification, full speed support for CompactFlash UDMA 300x and SD Class 10 memory card and 32 MB/s of USB transfer speed . Furthermore, it sports 4.8-inch widescreen VGA (800?480)LCD display where you can even view RAW images.

Also available empty and 160/250/320/500GB versions, this top 640 GB version comes at $ 599.99 either online at hyperdrive shop or at retailers in the US.

SUNNYVALE, California USA – Sanho Corporation (PMA 2010 Booth 1314), the maker of the award winning HyperMac batteries, HyperDrive range of storage devices, introduces HyperDrive Album, a portable photo backup device designed with the viewing of high resolution photos in mind, for professional and casual digital photographers alike. With a whooping 640GB storage capacity, it is capable of downloading 2GB per minute with full data verification. It is also the only storage device in the market that can decode and display true RAW images from any camera on its 4.8″ high resolution widescreen VGA (800 x 480 pixels), 16 million colors LCD screen. New data management, security and advance image viewing features round up what is arguably the most advanced portable photo storage on the market.

Designed for digital photographers on the move who require huge storage space or redundancy backup for their photos and the ability to view them anytime but do not wish to carry a laptop computer, the HyperDrive Album offers a very fast, reliable, yet compact and affordable solution. Travel Photographer of the Year, Lorne Resnick have this to say, “Reliability is naturally vital. I found the HyperDrives in use to be flawless. I shot more than 5,000 images and downloaded all of them without a hitch. The actual speed of the drives was by far the most impressive. The difference it makes in the quality of your travel cannot be discounted.”

With lower dollar per GB costs than even the most affordable memory cards, HyperDrive Album presents an attractive alternative to buying additional memory cards to meet the massive storage demands of high definition RAW image and video files.

While similar devices exist, HyperDrive Album is undoubtedly the most well featured and specified storage device. Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape said, “I have surveyed just about all of the devices currently available and spoke with quite a few photographers who own different ones, and to my mind the HyperDrive is the current king of the hill.”

The HyperDrive Album sports a brilliant high resolution widescreen VGA (800 x 480 pixels) LCD screen capable of a wide color gamut of 16 million colors to display every photo with amazing clarity and color accuracy. It is currently the only photo storage device in the world that can display true RAW images from virtually any digital camera, even medium format digital backs. It is capable of UDMA 40MB/s transfer speed, backing up 2GB in 1 minute with full data verification. Incremental Backup allows the download of only new data on the card or USB device, skipping previously saved data. The faster speed coupled with a new higher capacity rechargeable lithium ion battery now allows up to 200GB of backups per battery charge.

Data integrity and security is of utmost importance in the HyperDrive Album. Real-time CRC copy verification ensures data integrity of the backup without increasing the download time. S.M.A.R.T. monitors the hard drive status and look out for potential problems. Built-in data recovery tools recover formatted, deleted, lost or corrupted files from the memory card. Password protection at startup prevents unauthorized access to the contents.

Previously the domain of computers and specialized software, HyperDrive Album now has the ability to perform advanced file management and speed benchmarks on memory cards and hard drives.

HyperDrive Album is the latest model from a line of successful HyperDrive products that have won consecutive Photoforum Product of the Year awards in 2007 and 2008 as well as prestigious international awards from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and Photo Marketing Association (PMA).

Features and Benefits
• Fast UDMA 40MB/s download speed – backup & verify 2GB memory card in 1 minute

• Huge 640GB high capacity SATA hard drive with built-in multiple partition format support. User upgradeable hard drive.

• Long lasting rechargeable lithium-ion battery performance – up to 200GB of downloads per battery charge. Rechargeable via AC adapter, USB and 12V car charger.

• Brilliant 4.8″ high resolution widescreen VGA (800 x 480 pixels) LCD with a wide color gamut supporting 16 million colors.

• Support for all types of photo/RAW image formats. Fast real RAW image decoder displays photos up to pixel level with the ability to use actual camera CCD/CMOS sensor data to find dead pixels.

• Photo display tools like gamma and color temperature correction

• R/G/B/L histogram, slideshow, EXIF information display.

• Real time CRC data verification during the backup process with zero overhead on copy speed and time.

• S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) monitors internal hard drive for potential problems

• Memory card data recovery tools

• Supports incremental backup – backup only new data on memory card, skipping data that was copied previously

• High-speed USB 2.0 interface with fast (32MB/s) connectivity to computer

• Advanced file manager with copy/cut/paste/delete, create new folder and sort file directory by name/date/type.

• Hard drive and memory card speed benchmark tools

• CF/SD slots with full speed support for CompfactFlash UDMA 300X and Secure Digital (SDHC) Class 10.

• Tiny and compact at just 6″ x 3.5″ x 1.2″ (153 x 88 x 30 mm) and weighing only 14.1 ounce (400g)

Price and Availability
The HyperDrive Album is available now at the following manufacturer’s suggested retail price (0GB:$299, 160GB:$349, 250GB:$399, 320GB:$449, 500GB:$549, 640GB:$599).

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Shower of Photos: Sanho 640 GB Hyper Drive Album