That, however, is starting to change.

With the market increasingly global — and overseas players impinging on its domestic market, Fujitsu is looking overseas. And when it looks, it sees North America as the place it would most like to be.

“North America is our priority market,” Senior Executive Vice President Hideyuki Saso said in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show. Fujitsu is also in the process of reacquiring full control of a mobile joint venture that had paired it with Toshiba in the phone business.

Fujitsu, which makes both Android and Windows Phone devices in Japan, isn’t quite sure what market niche it will target, but it is sure it doesn’t want to be just one among the smartphone masses.

“If we try to do same thing as how our competitors because of the competition, it is going to be tough,” Saso said via a translator. “We would like to identify the right way of entering the North American market that would make use of our technology and expertise to make a steady landing.”

Timing is also uncertain, though Saso said the company hopes it will be either later this year or next year. The key, he said, is to figure out where it can stand out from the pack.

“We don’t want to be just another mobile phone,” he said, “We want to be special.”

While the U.S. smartphone market is already crowded, Saso said Fujitsu has several strenghts it can draw on, including a wide range of thin, yet durable and waterproof models. Though not yet a player here, Fujitsu boasts it has the thinnest smartphone approved by the FCC for use in the U.S.

In making its phones waterproof, Saso said, the company had to also make them tough.

“For us to achieve this waterproof (capability), we also had to look at durability again, the rigidness and the toughness,” he said, banging a large pen on the phone’s screen for emphasis.

Fujitsu also has the noise cancellation used in a Formula One vehicle it sponsors — a position that explains the presence of the race car in its CES booth.

All of those, Saso says, could form the basis of Fujitsu’s entry, though the company is still evaluating its product options. Another approach would be to offer a phone similar to the Raku Raku (“easy easy”) phone it offers in Japan — a basic phone, aimed at seniors, that mixes in enhanced calling and health diagnostics such as heart rate, calorie and fat intake, and exercise. Fujitsu has sold 20 million of the devices in Japan.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
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• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
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• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
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• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
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• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
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• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
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• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
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Today, Cisco finally laid out a cohesive strategy to become a significant player in the cloud business. It announced an offering called CloudVerse that combines three big elements — its Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network and Cloud Applications — into a big portfolio aimed at companies building out their data centers.

The idea is basically this: If you want to build a cloud, either to resell cloud services of some kind or for your company’s own internal operations, Cisco wants to talk to you. Under the CloudVerse tent are a bunch of offerings including computing, networking, collaboration and software for automating and managing it all.

Cisco named a handful of companies who are already CloudVerse customers, and a few will catch your eye, because they’re big. One is Terremark, the Web-hosting and cloud-services outfit that telecom giant Verizon acquired earlier this year. Others include Telecom Italia, Telefonica Spain and Fujitsu.

Naturally, Cisco is hoping to use its position as the supplier of choice for networking gear as a springboard into selling more stuff inside the data center, and it already has key relationships with many a corporate CIO. A key part of its go-to-market strategy will be convincing those CIOs that it has something unique to offer.

Here’s one such thing: The Network Positioning System and Cloud-to-Cloud connected. Imagine you have a sprawling set of far-flung data centers around the globe. When one center gets starts to get close to reaching its capacity load — maybe it’s Cyber Monday or something — Cisco’s NPS technology allows the routers in one data center to start automatically looking around for capacity elsewhere, to keep things humming along.

There’s a lot more detail to it, but it’s worth pointing out that, as a percentage of Cisco’s business, the cloud business isn’t huge. On an earnings conference call with analysts last month, CEO John Chambers said that the Unified Computing System that forms the backbone of its server business had recorded 116 percent revenue growth year over year; even with that, it’s on run-rate to being a $1 billion annualized business. If it hits that mark in Cisco’s fiscal year 2012, which ends in July, it will amount to about 2 percent of estimated annual sales.

But Cisco expects the cloud business opportunity to grow like crazy. Last week, it issued something called the Cisco Cloud Index, which estimates that more than half of all computing workloads will be running in data centers by 2014, and that the daily traffic conducted on cloud services of various types will amount to 1.6 zettabytes per year. My math may be off a bit, but compare it to the scale of your average hard drive — a zettabyte amounts to a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. Cisco describes it as enough data to amount to four days of high-quality video streaming for every person on Earth.

It’s a serious opportunity, no doubt. The question is whether or not Cisco can exploit it in a manner that moves the needle. Doing so is an important part of the strategy that Chambers set forth as part of the epic restructuring that has been going on at Cisco since last year. Investors seem to like what they see, as Cisco shares are trading at $18.80 today, which is up 41 percent from a recent 52-week low. As turnarounds go, it does look like progress.

In a market that grew overall by more than 5 percent to $12.3 billion in revenues and 2.2 million servers sold, HP and IBM were neck and neck on a revenue basis, each accounting for about $3.8 billion, or about 29 percent of the market, followed by Dell, Oracle and Fujitsu.

On a unit basis, HP was the undisputed king, selling 693,000 servers, which works out to an average price of about $5,500 each. IBM sold 288,000 at an average price north of $13,000. Dell sold 518,000 servers.

For HP, both figures represented year-on-year declines of about 3 percent, and are roughly in line with the results HP reported last week. HP said that sales of industry standard servers, meaning those that run regular Intel chips, were down 4 percent, and business critical servers — the ones that run the exotic Intel Itanium chip — were down 23 percent, thanks in no small part to the ongoing scrap with Oracle.

Generally, the server market was healthy worldwide, except in Western Europe, where sales declined by about 5 percent. Asia, on the other had, made up for that by growing nearly 24 percent. Eastern Europe did even better, growing more than 27 percent.

Demand was strongest for basic x86 servers, running chips from either Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, where growth was north of 9 percent on a revenue basis. Servers running Itanium and RISC chips, which include things like IBM’s Power architecture and Oracle’s SPARC, declined on a per-unit basis, but oddly saw revenue increase a little, meaning that those machines sold are for one reason or another commanding a higher price.

(Image from Treehugger.com)

And while it was Fujitsu, using SPARC chips, that made the top of the list, you couldn’t help noticing how many machines used chips from Intel. Of the 500 supercomputers on the list, 384 of them use chips from the semiconductor giant.

At the SC11 Supercomputing conference in Seattle today, Intel is making some important disclosures about what it is doing to maintain its role as the chip vendor of choice, and also offering its competitive response to a potential threat from the graphics chip specialist Nvidia.

As I’ve explained a few times before, the graphics chips, or GPUs, that Nvidia makes are starting to make some inroads into supercomputing and high-performance computing environments, thanks to their ability to handle floating point computations at a high rate of speed. Sometime next year, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a machine called Titan, using a combination of chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, is expected to break the 20 petaflop barrier when it begins operation.

The narrative that has emerged recently is that GPUs are generally better at the floating point operations that are increasingly used in supercomputing — better in many cases than traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD. Even so, if you add up the number of systems on the Top 500 list using Intel and AMD chips, you’d hit a percentage that’s just shy of 90.

In a presentation today (on what just happens to be the 40th birthday of the Intel microprocessor — hence the two people I saw today outside the “Today” show at Rockefeller Center on my way to work), Rajeeb Hazra, Intel’s general manager of Technical Computing, detailed Intel’s response. First off, Intel is supporting a new technology, called PCI Express 3.0, that will speed up the ability of chips inside a supercomputer to share data. In systems this big, and working on such large amounts of data at once, the processors spend a lot of time tapping their feet and waiting for data to work on. Engineers call this latency, and the point of the new interconnect technology is to cut latency by doubling the bandwidth available. The result is an improvement in the raw FLOPS (floating point operations) available by 2.1 times in lab tests, and a 70 percent improvement in real-world workload tests. In supercomputing terms, that’s real progress, and it effectively means getting answers to big questions faster.

Another advance that Intel talked about today is a chip bearing the codename “Knight’s Corner.” It’s a coprocessor, meaning it’s an additional chip that would be added to a computer to boost its performance. Intel says it can do a full teraflop — a trillion floating point operations a second — and that’s just the result of demonstrations from the first silicon. When in full production, it will probably do even better.

And not only will it do a teraflop on a single chip, it will perform those calculations to what engineers call “double precision,” which is a fancy way of saying the result of each operation will be accurate to a higher level of granularity. As John Hengeveld, Intel’s director of technical computer marketing, told me last week, the rule of thumb in these matters says that moving from single to double precision boosts the amount of time you have to wait by four times.

Why is that important, when an off-the-shelf GPU from Nvidia can do 2 teraflops — though only at the single-point precision? Programming. If you’re a scientist who 10 years ago wrote a program to simulate weather patterns or nuclear explosions or some other classic supercomputing problem to run on systems running Intel chips, there’s nothing new to learn in terms of programming. While the GPUs are great, there are new programming rules to learn.

Finally, Intel is reiterating its plan to keep working on the exascale problem, which is the next great summit in supercomputing. Right now the world’s top supercomputer maxes out at 10.51 petaflops, and a candidate to top the list next year will go north of 20 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating point operations. Sometime this decade — say, about 2018 or so — the hope is that supercomputers will break the exaflop barrier, where machines will run quintillions of FLOPs.

The fundamental problem there isn’t the computing so much as it is power, as in electrical power. Already some of these machines consume as much power as a small city. Getting to exascale will require chips and other components that can run full out at speeds we can as yet only imagine, but doing it consuming a lot less power than they would otherwise be expected to. Think in terms of a Prius that could win the Indy 500 — and not just by a hair, but by a long mile — and do it day after day without really using much more gas than the other cars. It’s kind of like that.

Anyhow, Intel has said that it plans to enable exascale supercomputing that will require only a doubling of the power needed, rather than, say, 10 times as much. To that end, it said today it will open its fourth research lab in Europe. This one is in Barcelona and joins one in Paris; another in Juelich, Germany; and a third in Lueven, Belgium. They’ll all have a lot of work to do between now and 2018.

If you’re a regular AllThingsD reader, you’ve already been introduced to the world’s most power supercomputer: It is the Fujitsu K Computer, which the Japanese computing concern disclosed earlier this month, and it runs in Japan’s quasi-public research institution RIKEN. That’s it in the picture above.

It’s capable of performance as high as 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The same machine had been rated in the top spot on the list before, but was less powerful then, because it was still being assembled, and then capable of only 8.16 petaflops.

The machine is based on SPARC chips — the chips for which Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle, gained such renown. Fujitsu has been building SPARC chips under license and using them in its own servers and supercomputers for years. In this case, there are 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores in action. And if my memory is correct, the chips in question each have four cores on board, meaning there are 176,256 individual processing chips in the machine.

It’s the first machine on the Top 500 list to venture past the 10-petaflop milestone; however, work is underway in the U.S. on a machine known as Titan, which will supposedly break the 20-petaflop mark sometime next year.

In the meantime, the second most powerful machine in the world is in China. The Tianhe-1A system took the top spot on the list a year ago — and in the process, caused President Obama such consternation about the state of American leadership in innovation that he mentioned it in his State of the Union address to Congress. Its performance reaches 2.57 petaflops and it’s powered by a combination of Intel-made Xeon processors and Nvidia graphical processing units.

In fact, the supercomputers in the top 10 spots on the list are otherwise unchanged from the list released in June.

At No. 3 is Jaguar, the system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is being rebuilt into the machine called Titan, which I mentioned before. It’s a system built by Cray primarily around Nvidia GPUs and Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Its current performance is just shy of 1.8 petaflops.

The No. 4 system is in China. It’s called Nebulae and is at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen. Its performance is just short of the 1.3-petaflop mark. No. 5 is called Tsubame 2.0, and is at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

Chip companies in particular like to crow about the use of their products in the systems that wind up on the list. That makes this a banner day for Intel. Of the 500 systems on the list, 384 of them — 77 percent — use Intel chips. Chips from AMD, Intel’s main rival, are in 63 systems.

It’s a banner day for Nvidia, too. Its GPU chips can be found in 35 systems, more than double the number from the previous list. GPUs were invented to make the graphics in computer games more stunning and realistic; as such, it meant they were, from the beginning, pretty good at performing a certain type of math problem known as a floating point operation. It turns out that the people who run supercomputers do a lot of floating point operations — or FLOPs — too. So as GPUs have gotten more powerful, they’re finding their way into an ever-larger number of the world’s top supercomputers. Two supercomputers on the list use GPU chips from AMD’s graphics chip unit, ATI. Two more use IBM’s PowerCell architecture, which is a sibling of the Cell processor chip found in the Sony PlayStation 3.

President Obama shouldn’t feel so bad about the U.S. not being in the top spot. For one thing, practically all of the systems on the list are built on American-made technology. And among the systems that can reach 1 petaflop in performance or more, the U.S. has five, more than any other country. China and Japan have two each, and France has one. And the U.S. has more supercomputers on the list than any other country: 263. European countries have a combined 127; China has 75 and Japan has 30.

Intel may furnish more chips to the Top 500 list than anyone, but the king of the systems vendors on the list is unquestionably IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard. IBM built 223, or more than 44 percent, of the machines on the list; HP built 140 of them. IBM also led the performance pack: Its machines are responsible for more than 27 percent of the total. Fujitsu, which made the list-topping K Computer, was in second place, with 14.7 percent. Cray and HP were in a statistical dead heat, with about 14 percent each.

Here’s a link to the full list, and a bunch of other things related to supercomputing.

Today it was Fujitsu’s turn. The Japanese computing giant teamed up with RIKEN, the quasi-public Japanese research institution, to announce that they had built a machine they call the K Computer, which can perform 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

And while all that may sound very impressive, it’s not quite as muscular as the Titan machine being assembled in the U.S. at the Oak Ridge National Labs, which can — or will — perform 20 petaflops.

The machine (pictured) is made up of 864 racks with 88,128 interconnected CPU chips, all of them based on the SPARC architecture for which Sun Microsystems, and therefore Oracle, are best known, though Fujitsu has long been a SPARC licensee. The new K Computer is basically an improvement and extension to the same K computer that took the top spot on the last Top 500 list in June, supplanting in the process a Chinese machine that had taken the crown last November.

Never mind that it contained all U.S.-made chips, the Chinese feat caused the leader of the free world to kvetch about the apparent sorry state of U.S. supercomputing, thus prompting, perhaps indirectly, the Titan machine at Oak Ridge.

It’s not as though China hasn’t been heard from on the supercomputing front recently. Last week its Sunway BlueLight MPP raised eyebrows not for its performance — a relatively pokey 795 teraflops — but rather for the fact that it’s built using all Chinese-made components.

So what will it be used for? Weather simulations, research into drugs and solar cells, and simulating earthquakes and tsunamis.

Here are the more formal descriptions from the announcement:

–Analyzing the behavior of nanomaterials through simulations and contributing to the early development of such next-generation semiconductor materials, particularly nanowires and carbon nanotubes, that are expected to lead to future fast-response, low-power devices.

–Predicting which compounds, from among a massive number of drug candidate molecules, will prevent illnesses by binding with active regions on the proteins that cause illnesses, as a way to reduce drug development times and costs (pharmaceutical applications).

–Simulating the actions of atoms and electrons in dye-sensitized solar cells to contribute to the development of solar cells with higher energy-conversion efficiency.

–Simulating seismic wave propagation, strong motion, and tsunamis to predict the effects they will have on human-made structures; predicting the extent of earthquake-impact zones for disaster prevention purposes; and contributing to the design of quake-resistant structures.

–Conducting high-resolution (400-m) simulations of atmospheric circulation models to provide detailed predictions of weather phenomena that elucidate localized effects, such as cloudbursts.

So what’s a petaflop anyway? A FLOP is a floating point operation. Its a type of mathematical function that involves decimal points. Adding 5.6 and 11.21 is a floating point operation and is therefore slightly more complicated from a computing standpoint than adding 11 and 5. But in computing, even day-to-day computing, it’s massively more complicated than all that.

A top-of-the-line NVidia GeForce GTX 590 graphics card, which specializes in floating point operations, can run about 2,400 gigaflops. Since a gigaflop is a billion flops, I guess that technically puts the GeForce GTX 590 into the teraflop, or trillion-flop range.

Petaflops are then in the quadrillion-flop territory, which as I noted before makes them fun because they’re among those rare numbers that are larger than the U.S. national debt. So 10.51 quadrillion flops gets written like so: 10,510,000,000,000,000. Didn’t I say this was fun?

All this is leading up to a big supercomputing conference starting in 10 days in Seattle. So expect lots more supercomputing news in the coming days!

Fujitsu has announced plans for a colorful, waterproof Windows Phone to run on the network of KDDI. The device is expected to be formally launched late this month, hitting store shelves a short time later. The launch of Mango also marks Microsoft’s reentry into the Japanese phone market, having skipped the country with the first version of Windows Phone 7.

The Mango release builds on the Windows Phone 7 release from last year, adding improved browsing and multitasking as well as the integration of Twitter into the People Hub, among other features.

But while Japan may soon be able to get a taste of the fruits of Microsoft’s labor, many other countries may have to wait a bit.

Unlike the initial release of Windows Phone 7-based devices — in which Microsoft tightly controlled the launch timing — Redmond appears to be taking a far more laissez-faire approach this time around.

Microsoft finalized the software late last month and appears content to let various device makers and operators launch their products whenever they are ready. Officially, the company says only to expect products in various markets this fall from a host of phone makers, including past partners, such as Samsung, and new partners, including Acer and China’s ZTE. Existing phones are also due to get a free upgrade to Mango, though no details have been released on when consumers here can expect the upgrades.

Although the staggered launch denies Microsoft a big bang for Mango, it allows new products running the operating system to hit the market sooner. That could help maximize sales heading into the back-to-school and holiday seasons, in addition to allowing those device makers that are ready to get out ahead of whatever Apple has up its sleeve on the iPhone front.

Such a strategy is not without its risks, however. In addition to potentially diffusing the buzz, Microsoft faces the risk that some will look at the first product or two and evaluate the whole of its Mango push based on those devices, whether or not they are representative of the products that will follow.

Perhaps the biggest question mark is when and where Nokia’s first products will launch. The company has said it believes it can deliver at least one Windows Phone model this year, but, in an interview last month, Nokia smartphone-unit head Jo Harlow suggested that more than one device remains a possibility.

“I’m committed to one model this year,” Harlow said. “More would be great.”

Nokia has also refused to commit to specifics on which regions will get the products first and when. Chris Weber, head of Nokia’s U.S. subsidiary, maintained that position in an interview with AllThingsD this week, though he stressed that the U.S. is of key importance and promised a huge marketing push in the States.

“It’s a prioritized market,” he said. “In terms of when and how product gets shipped, we haven’t shared details.”

Nokia’s first products, code-named Sea Ray, are being developed in large part at a 600-person Nokia operation in San Diego, Calif. The North American market is a top priority, Weber said, but he refused to confirm that means that the products will launch here first.

Weber made it clear that the company is working to build strong relationships with U.S. wireless operators — something it has not had in the past when it came to smartphones. Weber suggested broad reach, but stopped short of guaranteeing it would be available from the big four U.S. carriers.

“What I would say is it is probably safe to assume our phones will be available through your favorite operators,” Weber said.

As usual, the idea behind the teardown is not only to figure out who Nintendo’s component suppliers are and what parts are being used, but to estimate how much all the components cost to help guess how much of a profit margin Nintendo is making on each unit. And it looks like a decent margin. ISuppli says the cost of all the parts in the device itself plus what’s in the box amount to $103.25 for a device that’s selling at retail for $249. The cost works out to an increase of about $25 over the Nintendo DSi, the most recent Nintendo handheld, released in 2009, which cost about $78, when iSuppli tore it apart that year.

While most of the components come from Japan, it’s not entirely clear if the supply of any of the parts used come from areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami, says Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown. “Many of these component should have a greater risk exposure to supply chain problems, though we don’t know about any specific disruptions at this point,” he said.

The most expensive component, as is often the case with consumer electronics, is the displays. The 3DS uses two Sharp displays that cost a combined $33.80. The headliner is the top screen 3D. It’s a 3.5-inch 800-by-240 pixel display that uses an LCD-based parallax barrier panel sandwiched to the back of the color LCD which alternates between the left and right images at a high rate of speed to produce the 3D effect. “It looks like a conventional LCD from the outside, but when you open the display you see that on one side of the glass is essentially the conventional color element, and on the other side of the glass is a monochrome element,” Rassweiler told me. “It’s a clever bit of display engineering.”

The handheld’s main chip is an applications processor. It’s a custom ARM-based chip manufactured by Sharp, that at a cost of $10.02 is only slightly more expensive than the chip in the previous Nintendo DSi. However, Nintendo has quadrupled the amount of flash memory in the 3DS versus the DSi to 16 gigabytes, and Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash, supplied it. Fujitsu supplied another type of memory known as fast-cycle RAM. Rassweiler says for this particular type of memory, Nintendo has used a type of chip that’s only made by Fujitsu, which is odd because FCRAM is widely available, and its unusual for consumer electronics manufacturers to “single source”–that is, rely upon a single supplier for an important component. The combined cost of memory on the 3DS worked out to $8.36, more than twice the cost of the memory found on the DSi.

Three chips related to the user interface cost a combined $6.81: an accelerometer from STMicroelectroncis, a gyroscope from Invensense, and an audio chip from Texas Instruments. Atheros, the Wi-Fi chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm, supplied a $5 Wi-Fi chip. TI and NEC supplied power management chips that cost $3.63. The 3DS contains three cameras, and though it’s not clear who supplied them–camera suppliers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities in recent years–iSuppli reckons their combined cost at $4.70.

Since I often get asked this question, let me say that iSuppli’s analysis focuses strictly on the materials used and doesn’t account for the cost to develop software or to license any patents. Nor does it account for the cost of any shipping or distribution or marketing. It’s just the raw cost of the hardware.

Japan in 2010 accounted for 35 percent–or $11 billion worth–of the $31.5 billion global market for automotive infotainment electronics, iSuppli says. On top of that, Japan is responsible for about one-third–$7.3 billion–of the $23 billion market for chips used in cars overall. Aside from chips, Japanese companies produce LCD panels and optical sensors used to make in-car systems.

ISuppli says Renesas Electronics, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor and Fujitsu, all of which supply components to the auto industry, have all been affected by shipping problems and difficulty in obtaining raw materials. The problems could last weeks or months.

Problems like this aren’t just hitting infotainment systems. As The Wall Street Journal reported today, shortages of a single electronic part made by Hitachi Automotive that measures airflow in car engines have forced companies like General Motors, Toyota and PSA Peugeot-Citroën to cut their output at auto plants in the U.S. and Europe. The plant that makes the component is located to the north of Tokyo and has been shut down. Hitachi makes about 60 percent of the world’s supply for this type of part. The Journal said Toyota on Wednesday warned employees to expect a production halt at some plants in the U.S. and Canada.

Meanwhile, Japanese automakers have stopped production at several plants in order to conserve electricity following the loss of generating power from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. There has been a 10 percent reduction in electrical capacity, iSuppli says. Additionally, companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Continental and Bosch have removed their expatriate employees from Japan.

Separately, Dow Jones reported yesterday that ZTE Corp., a Chinese maker of networking gear, is suffering quake-related supply problems. A company exec said it expects the problems to last as long as six months.

Manufacturing has stopped at Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd.’s Shirakawa facility, and MEMC Electronic Materials has stopped manufacturing at its plant in Utsunomiya. Together, the two facilities account for a quarter of the global supply of silicon wafers, the basis of building chips.

The Shin-Etsu Chemical plant by itself supplies about 20 percent of the world’s silicon supply, and it specializes in making 300-millimeter wafers, which are the dinner-plate-size discs of silicon used in the more advanced chip factories, commonly referred to as fabs. Shin-Etsu, iSuppli says, supplies several memory chip manufacturers, particularly those that make flash memory, used in everything from iPhones to memory cards, and also DRAM, the main memory used in PCs and servers. ISuppli says the global market is going to be hit hard, which in turn means you can expect prices on both flash and DRAM to soar. Shin-Etsu has said it would set up production at other plants, but it’s hard to know how long that will take.

MEMC’s Utsunomiya facility accounts for five percent of worldwide wafer supply. MEMC said it expects that shipments from this facility will be delayed during the near term.

In a related note, iSuppli has quantified the impact of the shutdown of operations at Mitsubishi Gas and of Hitachi Kasei Polymer. The two companies produce about 70 percent of the world’s supply of the raw materials used to make printed circuit boards. The key material in question is called copper-clad laminate or CCL. The two companies say they’ll be able to ramp production back up within two weeks. The good news is that electronics manufacturers have enough circuit boards in inventory that they can probably keep their operations running without interruption.

ISuppli goes on to check in on a few chip companies in the affected region: Elpida Memory says its fab in Yamagata has been damaged, and the lack of electricity is hurting production. It’s running at about half its normal capacity.

The quake also damaged about 40 percent of the production capacity of Renesas Electronics. Production has stopped at its Tsugaru fabs where it makes analog and discrete chips, at its Naka fab where it makes system-on-chip and microcontrollers, and at its Takasaki and Kofu fabs, which also making analog and discrete parts.

Half of Fujitsu’s production capacity has been damaged. While its fabs and wafer equipment are intact, the lack of power, gas and wafers have slowed things down considerably, and it expects to recover in about three to four weeks.

One company that is holding up well: AKM Semiconductor, notable for the compass chips it produces for Apple that are used in the iPhone and iPad 2. Its main production fab in Nobeoka is well out of the quake zone and hasn’t suffered any loss of power.

Those are difficult questions to answer. Whenever traffic authorities plan to build new roads or implement new rules, they gather all types of data to measure the impact and predict the consequences. But even if you know how many cars usually drive in the area at certain hours of the day, it’s difficult to predict how the changes to the road will affect individual drivers–and even harder to predict how individual drivers will react.

But that may become easier if new technology from Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd is successful. The research arm of Japanese technology firm Fujitsu Ltd. said this week that it has developed a new traffic simulation system that virtually creates an environment very similar to real streets of a real city, be it Tokyo, Los Angeles or New York.

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In a statement released Tuesday, Kuniaki Nozoe’s lawyers said Fujitsu made false accusations of links to organized crime against Mr. Nozoe and pressured him to resign without giving him a chance to defend himself. As well as seeking compensation, Mr. Nozoe is demanding that Fujitsu place an apology advertisement in national newspapers.

Mr. Nozoe, who resigned as president last September, filed the lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday morning, the lawyers said.

A Fujitsu spokesman declined to comment, saying the company has yet to receive notification of the lawsuit.
The case is a rare example in Japan’s usually staid business world of a top executive engaging in a public fight with his former employer. Mr. Nozoe first went public in March with his claim that he was forced out of the company.

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During his keynote address at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., this morning, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer said the company will soon introduce a number of Windows 7-based slates, targeted at both consumers and enterprises.

“This year one of the most important things that we will do in the smart device category is really push forward with Windows 7-based slates and Windows 7 phones,” he said. “We want to give you a great consumer-oriented device, but a device that fits and is manageable with today’s enterprise IT solutions. They’ll come with keyboards. They’ll come without keyboards….They’ll be dockable. And they will be in many form factors, many price points and many sizes. But they will all run Windows 7….They will run Windows 7 applications. They will run Office.”

And they will be built by 21 manufacturers, including Asus, Sony (SNE), Dell (DELL), Fujitsu, Lenovo, Panasonic and, yes, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) too. Though HP is developing a tablet based on Palm’s webOS, its work on that Windows 7 tablet Ballmer showed off at CES in January evidently continues.

“Over the course of the next several months you will see a range of Windows 7-based slates that I think you’ll find quite impressive,” Ballmer said. “This is a terribly important area for us. We are hardcore about this.”

Hardcore, eh? So I guess your approach to the mobile market would be softcore, then?

[Image credit: JavierGC]

The alliance between the U.S. software giant and the major Japanese technology service firm comes as IT industry players world-wide are pinning their hopes on the expected diffusion of next-generation computing services that are accessed online. Cloud computing is Internet-based and provides resources, software, and information to computers and other devices on demand.

The tie-up would allow Microsoft to take advantage of Fujitsu’s data centers and customer base, with Fujitsu offering Microsoft’s Windows Azure, which gives Internet-based access to Windows software stored at data centers, the person said. Fujitsu plans to set up platforms for cloud computing at its existing data centers in the U.K., Australia, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. by the end of the current fiscal year.

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Management said it gave false information about the president’s dismissal, and apologized.

The meeting was shareholders’ first chance to voice opinions about the way the technology company handled the controversy over the departure of former President Kuniaki Nozoe.

Shareholders criticized managers for initially saying in September that Mr. Nozoe was stepping down because of illness. After Mr. Nozoe went public with a claim of wrongful dismissal, Fujitsu changed its explanation, saying he had associated with an investment fund with suspected ties to organized crime–claims that he denies.

“If the media hadn’t found out, would you have just kept the whole thing secret and kept sticking to illness as an explanation?” one investor demanded.

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Before 56-year-old Mr. Yamamoto took the reins of the Japanese technology company in April, a scandal erupted over his predecessor’s departure. When former President Kuniaki Nozoe abruptly resigned last year, the company initially said he was ill. But in March, Mr. Nozoe said Fujitsu had forced him out over allegations of ties to organized crime–claims that he denies.

Last week, the battle seemed to turn in the company’s favor when a local district court rejected Mr. Nozoe’s petition to be reinstated as a director.

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Taking office amid the turmoil stemming from the departure last year of its former president, new president Masami Yamamoto said restructuring had run its course and the company has finished reorganizing its unprofitable businesses.

“I’m not saying restructuring is all over. But as for drastic measures, we’ve already done most of what we need to do,” said Mr. Yamamoto, who took over April 1, succeeding current chairman and interim president Michiyoshi Mazuka, and who comes from the company’s computer-server business.

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In case you are not yet worked up into enough of a lather, let Weekend Update help out. iPad apps are hitting the App Store, Jobs and Schmidt are brunching together and Apple (AAPL) has run out of iPads for Day One. Developers are leaking screenshots of their latest “HD” apps, and the whole of Silicon Valley is about to explode in a sonorous collective oh yeahhh, as if everyone in a 100-mile radius were dipping into a hot tub simultaneously.

But before we can report on pad-rapture oh-10, AllThingsD has one more week of hard-hitting tech news to bring right to your humorously ancient laptop screen.

Here we go.

BoomTown started off the week meeting with VC Kevin Efrusy. Efrusy, who is at Accel Parteners (best known as the Facebook VC), is a tech geek of the highest order. You don’t get a masters degree in electrical engineering from Stanford without having some chops. Kara coaxed the typically behind-the-curtains Efrusy into one of her signature Flip video interviews. She then covered Amit Singh’s move away from Oracle (ORCL) to head up Google’s (GOOG) international sales team. Kara rounded out the week with one of her reliably awesome viral video posts, this time about TED presenter, TV Chef and owner of the world’s largest tongue, Jamie Oliver. We dare you to watch the video and not stare at it.

This just in (Weekend Update is holding our finger to our ear for no reason): In a rare Saturday post, Digital Daily is reporting that launch day iPads are sold out. We’ve heard a rumor that AllThingsD interns will be dispatched, in lieu of staff writers, to wait in overnight lines for customers waiting waiting to buy iPads at Apple stores. More to come. In an awesome techno-geopolitical twist, John wrote about China’s Unicom dumping the Google search engine from it’s Android smartphones. This confirms Weekend Update’s suspicion about the coming robo-pocalypse. Even if you cut the head off an Android, the body lives on. And in final preparation for the big launch, John reported that Apple has finally taken possession of the iPad trademark, which had previously belonged to Fujitsu. No word on what that little chestnut cost, but we’ll bet it was more than Fujitsu had been making on the original iPad, an eight-year-old point-of-sale device that runs Windows.

MediaMemo dipped below the murky surface of Internet fame this week to try to tease out the identity of Merton, the Chatroulette improv piano guy. Turns out “Merton” is not Ben Folds as some suspected, but we’re glad there is someone left out there with a sense of humor. Peter went back to school later in the week to visit with the most recent graduates of Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator start-up school. He talked with NewsLabs creator Paul Biggar, who hopes to save journalism by supplying freelancers with the kind of support they might have gotten at, say, a newspaper. He wasn’t too clear on specifics, but he did say that revenue wasn’t going to be all about the ads.

Out in Mossberg Land, Walt and Katie had a full week of reviews of the stuff you care about. Katie gave readers a much needed roundup of a half-dozen sites that bring power (and discounts) to the people through group buying. She helps even the most un-savvy deal-hunter figure things out by breaking down sites like Groupon and Woot. Walt unboxed a new Tivo (TIVO) this week to have a peek at what the DVR company has been cooking. This iteration of the popular television-recording device was billed as mixing Web and TV content in new ways. Walt reported that the new device doesn’t actually have additional Web features compared previous models. The company did change the user interface, however, but Walt wasn’t entirely sold on the new version. Finally, Mossberg’s Mailbox had hints of mountains of mail to come, leading off this week with an iPad question. Walt answered as completely as he could, but for now, the iPad questions are based on Apple’s claims, not actual product testing. Walt went into detail over a question about a Lenovo Thinkpad he tested, and gave some more details to a reader who wanted to rid her browser of unwanted cookies.

Weekend Update wishes everyone a glorious first full week of spring, and asks that readers keep pleasant thoughts in their mind about the weather in Palo Alto this Friday night. We’ll probably be out there, rain or shine, but no one likes wet geeks.

The mechanics of the transfer aren’t entirely clear. As Patent Authority, which first spotted the new assignment, notes, Apple (AAPL) challenged the validity of the mark last September. The company then requested a trio of 60-day extensions, presumably to negotiate its purchase from Fujitsu, which had been using “iPad” as the name for a Windows CE point-of-sale device it has been peddling since 2002.

FURTHER READING:

Launch Day iPads Sold Out

iPad Available at “Most Best Buy Stores” This Saturday

Apple Grabs iPad Trademark From Fujitsu

Apple Now Accepting iPad App Submissions

Early Supplies of iPad Accessories Dwindling?

Initial iPad Demand Greater Than Initial iPhone Demand

iPad TV?

Apple’s Tablet: Read Different?

Rumored Apple Netbook Actually an E-book?

Coming Soon From Apple: Big Touch?

iTablet: Apple’s Killer App for Higher Ed

COMPLETE IPAD COVERAGE

[Image credit: Bitolithic]

All right, it was a cafeteria packed with Yahoo (YHOO) employees, but still. Check out Kara’s write-up and video of the experience, but be warned: no embed of the official Yahoo video so far, so those of us who weren’t there have no idea (yet) about what sort of profanity ensued. We’ll keep you posted. Kara also took a look this week at the serialized drama that is MySpace. The latest episode, of course, is the firing of brand new CEO Owen Van Natta, who may or may not have wanted to leave anyway. An insider described the company to BoomTown as a hot mess, since it’s both “impossible to save and hard to give up on.” BoomTown started off the week with a couple of the more amusing takes on Google’s Super Bowl ad, “Paris Love”–now its own meme–which includes the search history of Tiger Woods and a different kind of Parisian story.

Walt recently fired up Windows 7 on a late-model Apple (AAPL) MacBook Pro, using both Parallels Desktop 5 and VMware Fusion 3. Not at the same time, although both have been updated to get the most out of Snow Leopard and Windows 7 and will run the two operating systems simultaneously on an Intel-powered Mac. The quick version is that Walt thinks Parallels is the better product. The version with all the logic and details is in this week’s Personal Technology. He also took time to answer some readers’ questions in Mossberg’s Mailbox about iPad batteries, zooming on text in Firefox, locating the calendar in the latest version of Windows Live Mail and feeling stuck between a Kindle and a Nook. In this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret tested some stylishly small scanners and desktop printers: the Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1300 and PlanOn System Solution’s PrintStik PS905ME. Not surprisingly, she found that style comes at a price with both gadgets.

In Digital Daily this week, John Paczkowski quoted Bill Gates’s underwhelming response to Apple’s iPad hoopla: “It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.” Then he quoted Gates on his initial reaction to the iPod in 2004: “There’s nothing that the iPod does that I say, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t think we can do that.’” Apparently, Gates was much more forthcoming–with his own Microsoft (MSFT) execs, anyway–about iTunes in 2003 when he wrote in a memo that “Jobs has us a bit flat footed again….” Maybe admitting you have a problem really is the first step toward overcoming it. But then again, Zune as a second step is pretty much three steps back. John also dissected the buzz around Google Buzz this week, which, admittedly, wasn’t overwhelming, but it could still dovetail nicely with the search giant’s mobile strategies.

Jeff Bronikowski, formerly of Universal Music Group–the world’s biggest label–explained in a Billboard interview this week that the business of Big Music is doomed. But Peter Kafka is reserving judgment, at least until a few more music industry vets leave their jobs and weigh in publicly on the matter. Which is not at all the same thing as being optimistic; it’s just being realistic. It’s important to point out, though, that Google (GOOG) made Peter feel better this week about having Time Warner Cable (TWC) as his ISP, which could signal optimism, realism or something else entirely. Back on the music front, MediaMemo spoke with Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro and found that although it’s tempting to blame music behemoth Universal Music Group for the company’s demise, the Web start-up dug its own hole.

Here’s hoping for good sound bites for next weekend’s update and no need for mention of the weather. Stay tuned.