NEC said it will cut 10,000 jobs, including 3,000 outside of Japan, and it now forecasts a US$1.3 billion loss in the current fiscal year through March.

IBM and NEC have partnered to offer OpenFlow-based networking products to joint customers.

The Japanese government is planning to develop a farm where all labor is carried out by robots, according to AFP. The initiative, dubbed the Dream Project, will use robotic tractors to plant and harvest the crops, and other robots for tasks such as packaging the produce for shipping.

NTT DoCoMo said Tuesday it will form a joint venture with Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC and two other Japanese companies to design and sell chips for high-speed mobile networks based on the LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard.

Using concepts from IT and networking, a Japanese consortium plans to develop large-scale energy grids that will handle power the way the Internet handles data, using "routers" and "service providers" to efficiently manage and direct the flow of electricity.

NEC said Tuesday it will sell a wearable mini computer with a head-mounted display that projects its screen onto the naked eye.

NEC said Monday that it has developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that doubles the life span of conventional models.

Chalk up another big partnership win for Microsoft's Hyper-V from the world of virtual, programmable switching. NEC's OpenFlow-based network fabric, ProgrammableFlow, will be integrated with Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V when Windows Server 8 becomes available, NEC says. 

With so much chatter about tablets this year, you might think that the handheld, rectangular devices being unveiled represent a significant innovation. The reality is that so much of what we're seeing is not a whole lot different than what we saw in previous years; these products offer only a few new twists. But those new twists could make the difference between tablets' remaining a niche item and their finally busting out to the mass market in a meaningful way.

It seems as if we've been writing about USB 3.0 forever, but it has really been only about two years since Intel and other parties formed a promotional group for USB 3.0 in 2007. The spec was completed in November 2008, at which time the standard's backers said that a glut of devices would hit the market late this year. Well, that statement turned out to be almost right: Devices are coming very soon, but the glut won't be until next year.

There are few people in the IT industry that would gloat about servicing a company of less than 50 people to their global peers. There are even fewer that would do it for a 10-seat operation. But in reality, the SMB market is the backbone of the Australian economy and deserves its time in the spotlight.