Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Nokia

What is known today as Nokia (pronounced /nok-iɑ/ in IPA) was established in 1865 as a pulp mill by Knut Fredrik Idestam on the banks of Nokia rapids. Finnish Rubber Works established its factories in the beginning of 20th century nearby and began using Nokia as its brand. Shortly after World War I Finnish Rubber Works acquired Nokia wood mills as well as Finnish Cable Works, a producer of telephone and telegraph cables. All these three companies were merged into the Nokia Corporation in 1967.

The Nokia Corporation that was created in the 1967 fusion was involved in many sectors, producing at one time or another paper products, bicycle and car tyres, footwear (including Wellington boots), personal computers, communications cables, televisions, electricity production, etc.

The seeds of the current incarnation of Nokia were planted with the founding of the electronics section of the cable division in the 1960s. In the 1967 fusion, that section was separated into its own division, and began manufacturing telecommunications equipment.

Since 1964 Nokia had developed VHF-radio simultaneously with Salora Oy, which later in 1971 also developed the ARP-phone. Fusion of these two companies resulted in 1979 as Mobira Oy and in three years it launched the NMT phone. Nokia bought Salora Oy in 1984 and now owning 100% of the company, changed the company's name to Nokia-Mobira Oy. In 1988 Jorma Nieminen and others started a spin-off company; Benefon Oy. One year later, Nokia Mobira Oy became Nokia Mobile Phones and in 1991 the first GSM phone was launched.

In the 1970s, Nokia became more involved in the telecommunications industry by developing the Nokia DX200, a digital switch for telephone exchanges. In 1982, a DX200 switch became the world's first digital telephone switch to be put into operational use. The DX200 became the workhorse of the network equipment division. Its modular and flexible architecture enabled it to be developed into various switching products.

For a while in the 1970s, Nokia's network equipment production was separated into Telefenno, a company jointly owned by the parent corporation and by a company owned by the Finnish state. In 1987 the state sold its shares to Nokia and in 1992 the name was changed to Nokia Telecommunications.

In the 1980s, Nokia produced a series of personal computers called MikroMikko.[6] However, the PC division was sold to ICL, which later became part of Fujitsu. That company later transferred its personal computer operations to Fujitsu Siemens Computers, which shut down its only factory in Finland (in the town of Espoo, where computers had been produced since the 1960s) at the end of March 2000[7], thus ending large-scale PC manufacturing in the country.

Nokia had been producing commercial and military mobile radio communications technology since the 1960s and later began developing mobile phones for the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) network standard that went online in the 1980s.

Nokia introduced its first car phone, the Mobira Senator, in 1982 and the world's first hand-held NMT mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman, in 1987. NMT was the world's first mobile telephony standard that enabled international roaming, and provided valuable experience for Nokia for its close participation in developing Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). It is a digital standard which came to dominate the world of mobile telephony in the 1980s and 1990s, in mid-2006 accounting for about two billion mobile telephone subscribers in the world, or about 80% percent of the total, in more than 200 countries. The world's first commercial GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki over a Nokia-supplied network, by Prime Minister of Finland Harri Holkeri, using a Nokia phone.

In the 1980s, during the era of its CEO Kari Kairamo, Nokia expanded into new fields, mostly by acquisitions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the corporation ran into serious financial problems, a major reason being its heavily loss-making television division. (These problems probably contributed to Kairamo taking his own life in 1988.) Nokia responded by streamlining its telecommunications divisions, and by divesting itself of the television and PC divisions. Jorma Ollila, who became the CEO in 1992, made a strategic decision to concentrate solely on telecommunications. Thus, during the rest of the 1990s, Nokia continued to divest itself of all of its non-telecommunications divisions.

The exploding worldwide popularity of mobile telephones, beyond even Nokia's most optimistic predictions, caused a logistics crisis in the mid-1990s. This prompted Nokia to overhaul its entire logistics operation. Logistics continues to be one of Nokia's major advantages over its rivals, along with greater economies of scale.

In 2004, the troubles of the networks equipment division caused the corporation to resort to similar streamlining practices on that side, with layoffs and organizational restructuring. This, however, diminished Nokia's public image in Finland, and produced a number of court cases along with an episode of a documentary television show critical towards Nokia.[8]

Despite these occasional crises, Nokia has been phenomenally successful in its chosen field. This growth has come mostly during the era of Jorma Ollila and his team of about half a dozen close colleagues. In June 2006, this era came to an end with Ollila leaving the CEO position to become the chairman of Shell. The new CEO of Nokia is Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

On February 2006 Nokia and Sanyo announced a MOU to create a joint venture addressing the CDMA handset business. A few months later, in June, both companies announced ending their negotiations without agreement. Nokia also stated their decision to pull out of CDMA R&D, with the intention to continue CDMA business in selected markets.[9]

On 19 June 2006 Nokia and Siemens AG announced the companies are to merge their mobile and fixed-line phone network equipment businesses to create one of the world's largest network firms. Both companies will have a 50% stake in the infrastructure company, to be headquartered in the Helsinki area, and to be called Nokia Siemens Networks. The companies predict annual sales of €16 billion and cost savings of €1.5 billion a year by 2010. About 20,000 Nokia employees will be transferred to this new company.

Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation

In 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo. The next year he was joined by his colleague Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G.

In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled in the United States and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor. He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. While most American companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka looked to apply it to communications. While the American companies Regency and Texas Instruments built transistor radios first, it was Ibuka's company that made the first commercially successful transistor radios.

In August 1955, Sony produced its first coat-pocket sized transistor radio they registered as the TR-55 model. In 1956, Sony reportedly manufactured about 40,000 of its Model TR-72 box-like portable transistor radios and exported the model to North America, the Netherlands and Germany.

That same year they made the TR-6, a coat pocket radio which was used by the company to create its "SONY boy" advertising character. The following year, 1957, Sony came out with the TR-63 model, then the smallest (112 × 71 × 32 mm) transistor radio in commercial production. It was a worldwide commercial success.

University of Arizona professor Michael Brian Schiffer, Ph.D., says, "Sony was not first, but its transistor radio was the most successful. The TR-63 of 1957 cracked open the U.S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid 1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5,000,000 units by the end of 1958. However, this huge growth in portable transistor radio sales that saw Sony rise to be the dominant player in the consumer electronics field was not because of the consumers who had bought the earlier generation of tube radio consoles, but was driven by a distinctly new American phenomenon at the time called Rock and Roll.

When Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not, is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TKK. The company occasionally used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name, during his visit to the United States. Another early name that was tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word sonus, which is the root of sonic and sound, the English word "sunny", and from the word Sonny-boys which is Japanese slang for "whiz kids". However "Sonny" was thought to sound too much like the Japanese saying soh-nee which means business goes bad. Morita pushed for a word that does not exist in any language so that they could claim the word "Sony" as their own (which paid off when they sued a candy producer who also used the name who claimed that "Sony" was just an existing word in some language).

At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of Kanji to spell its name. The move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.

As a result of this persistence, Sony has now developed into a leading international manufacturer producing a variety of products throughout the electronics market, music and gaming industries, film, finance and many more besides.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Difference between men and women when getting cash from an ATM

Men

  1. Drive to the bank, park, go to the cash dispenser
  2. Insert card
  3. Dial code and desired amount
  4. Take the cash, the card and the slip

Women

  1. Drive to the bank
  2. Engine stalled
  3. Check make-up in the mirror
  4. Apply perfume
  5. Manually check haircut
  6. Park the car - failure
  7. Park the car - failure
  8. Park the car - success
  9. Search for the card in the handbag
  10. Insert card, rejected by the machine
  11. Throw phonecard back in handbag
  12. Look for bank card
  13. Insert card
  14. Look for the chit (where secret code written) in handbag
  15. Enter code
  16. Study instructions for 2 minutes
  17. #Cancel#
  18. Re-enter code
  19. #Cancel#
  20. Call Boyfriend/husband to get correct code
  21. Enter huge amount
  22. #Error#
  23. Enter large amount
  24. #Error#
  25. Enter smaller amount
  26. Cross fingers
  27. Take cash
  28. Go back to the car
  29. Check make up in rear mirror
  30. Look for keys in handbag
  31. Start car
  32. Drive 50 meters
  33. STOP
  34. Drive back to bank machine
  35. Get out of the car
  36. Take card and ticket back from machine
  37. Go back to the car
  38. Throw card on passenger seat
  39. Throw slip on the floor
  40. Check make up in rear mirror
  41. Manually check haircut
  42. Go into roundabout - wrong way
  43. BRAKE!!
  44. Go into roundabout - right way
  45. Drive 5 kilometers
  46. Remove hand brake
  47. Stop at mall
  48. Spend money
  49. Go back to step 1

It happens only in India-Funny signboard