The red ink for the year ended March 31 brings the company’s losses for the past two bruising business years to about $15 billion. Like its Japanese rivals, Panasonic is reeling from a consumer electronics industry in rapid decline.

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The legal department for Panasonic Avionics Corp., a subsidiary based in Lake Forest, Calif., that makes in-flight entertainment and communications systems for airlines, has instructed certain executives and employees to preserve documents that may be relevant to the U.S. government’s investigation.

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IBM said today that it was granted 6,478 patents in 2012, which is also a record. The company has about 8,000 researchers and inventors working in 46 states in the U.S. and 35 countries around the world. The full tally of patents over 20 years amounts to nearly 67,000.

The next nine companies in the Top 10 list of patent recipients are:

• Samsung, which received 5,081 patents
• Canon: 3,174
• Sony: 3,032
• Panasonic: 2,769
• Microsoft: 2,613
• Toshiba: 2,447
• Hon Hai : 2,013
• General Electric: 1,652
• LG Electronics: 1,624

So what does IBM do that other companies don’t? I had a quick conversation with Katherine Frase, IBM’s VP for Industry Solutions and Emerging Business. “The process of getting to so many patents means that inside the company there’s a mindset that’s geared toward writing down what you do when do something that’s original and that has business value. There’s a tangible focus on writing things down. And you’ll write down five to 10 times the number of things that actually pass muster toward getting a patent. But that process keeps the notion of innovation at the front of your mind, not at the back of the mind,” she says. “It shows up in patents, and that’s an indicator, but the cultural assumption that innovation isn’t an accident but is made up of lots of little things that you remembered to capture along the way is more important than the patents themselves.”

So, what sorts of things did IBM receive patents for in 2012? Here’s a sampling:

U.S. Patent #8,275,803: System and method for providing answers to questions. Remember Watson? The talking supercomputer that cleaned humanity’s clock on the TV game show “Jeopardy,” and then followed it up by going to medical school and becoming a big-shot doctor working on treating cancer? This would be the patent on how Watson takes in questions expressed in natural language and returns an answer.

U.S. Patent #8,250,010: Electronic learning synapse with spike-timing dependent plasticity using unipolar memory-switching elements. If Watson weren’t enough for you at mimicking and improving upon humanity, IBM is working on something even more complex: Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics, or SyNAPSE. It’s a project focused on cognitive computing aimed at emulating the workings of the human brain.

U.S. Patent #8,185,480: System and method for optimizing pattern recognition of non-Gaussian parameters. I don’t have the slightest idea what a non-Gaussian parameter is, so I’m not going to even try to explain this one, beyond saying that it has to do with recognizing patterns in data as the volume of information grows. One example IBM gives is traffic data: If you’re measuring traffic patterns, every day you get more data, and thus the patterns change and evolve, or existing ones become more pronounced and predictable.

There are 6,475 more or these patents from 2012 and, no, I won’t even try to list any more. Here’s a short video that IBM produced on the subject:

But this newfound pragmatism, necessitated by a sobering reality of multibillion-dollar losses in recent years and strained finances, may be hindered by a mismatch of what they are willing to sell and what potential buyers want.

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The European Commission said LG Electronics Inc. along with Philips and Samsung participated in both cartels, while Panasonic, Toshiba Corp., MTP — a Panasonic subsidiary — and Technicolor, formerly Thomson, participated in the cartel for television tubes.

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For the full year through March, the Japanese maker of Viera television sets and various other home appliances now expects to post — for the second straight year — an annual net loss close to $10 billion.

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The profit boost, which beat analysts’ expectations, comes as Osaka-based Panasonic is in the midst of shifting the focus of its business from low-margin consumer electronics products such as televisions to more industrial goods such as solar panels and rechargeable batteries for automobiles.

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I was just learning to read, but I remember that it had a label on it that said “National.” It stood for the National Cash Register Company, which today is known as NCR. As it happens, I had a meeting on Tuesday with NCR’s CEO Bill Nuti at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference being held here in Aspen, Colo.

The memory about my grandpa’s cash register came up at the start of the meeting, when I admitted rather sheepishly that I knew next to nothing about the modern NCR. He listened politely as I described this machine that loomed so large in my childhood memories, as he must have done a thousand times before. Things like that happen when you run a 128-year-old company, though it wasn’t exactly the reason he had called me.

You probably encounter NCR’s gear every day, several times a day, as you go about your business: Buying coffee and groceries, getting cash, confirming your seat on a flight. NCR does business with all the biggest retailers, restaurants, hotels, banks and airlines, building ATMs, point-of-sale systems, and self-service kiosks of every stripe.

But NCR wants a new relationship with small and medium businesses, and today it’s about to start. And it’s going to do it via Apple’s iPad.

Today, NCR will launch Silver, a combination of hardware and an app that will turn an iPad or iPhone into a sophisticated point-of-sale system that, among other functions, is tied to critical business functions like inventory tracking, loyalty marketing, profit tracking, and a lot of other things.

Other than the app that gets installed on the iPad itself, the software does its heavy lifting in the cloud. Nuti told me that NCR built a new data center just for this effort. The point is to bring the kind of point-of-sale technology that is typically available only to larger businesses in an affordable package.

And there’s something to be said for the power of the NCR brand. It processes some 110 billion transactions around the world every year. It has a dedicated on-the-ground sales force, but also sells its gear through channel partners like banks and payment processors.

Historically, NCR was all about small business. It practically owned the business of selling cash registers to all those neighborhood shops that were — and still are — a critical backbone of the U.S. economy. “We had something like 100 percent market share in 1925,” Nuti told me. By 1968, electronic cash registers from companies like Sanyo and Panasonic were in favor, replacing the clunky, noisy, electromechanical models that NCR still made. “NCR missed the transition to digital,” Nuti said, “and it hasn’t been engaged with small business owners since 1971.”

NCR is now a $5.4 billion (2011 sales) concern that caters mostly to the biggest household names in retail, banking, travel and hospitality. That makes today’s announcement all the more weighty: Today marks the launch of NCR’s first new division aimed at small businesses in 50 years.

Right now, the NCR business unit responsible for Silver is smallish, on track to bring in $30 million in revenue. Within three year, Nuti wants it generating $1 billion in revenue. The target is simple: Sign up a million small-business customers. (He defines a small business as one bringing in annual revenue of anywhere from $50,000 a year to about $2 million.)

And we’re not just talking about mom-and-pop coffee shops, but also mobile-business owners, like the guy who cleans the pool and the guy who cuts the grass. The application works as readily on an iPhone or iPod touch.

It wasn’t long before Nuti brought up at least one competitive target he has in mind: Square, the upstart mobile payment service started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Square is very different from Silver, Nuti says. Business owners who use it don’t get access to the information they generate over time. “The bill you get from Square doesn’t tell you how profitable a customer is, or how to get them back in the store.”

The first thousand customers who sign up for Silver will pay $39 a month, for as long as they use the service. For everyone else, the going rate will be $79 a month. It will be available directly from NCR, but also through its extensive network of distributors: Bank of America merchant services will sell it, as will payment processors like First Data.

The aim is to bring to bear NCR’s sales force, distribution, infrastructure and service capabilities into a huge effort that will disrupt the efforts of companies like Square and Intuit and a scattershot of other upstart companies who also sell point-of-sale apps for the iPad. “There’s a lot of these small point-of-sale outfits that are cropping up everywhere. None of them can do what we do,” Nuti said.

Next year, there will be a version for Android devices, and international expansion into the U.K., Brazil and China.

The discussions center on a possible partnership for production or developing manufacturing technology for organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, television sets, the people said.

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Panasonic recorded a net loss of ¥438.4 billion ($5.49 billion) in the three months ended March 31 compared with a loss of ¥40.7 billion in the same period a year earlier. Sales fell 8 percent to ¥1.880 trillion in the quarter, hurt by soft demand for flat-panel televisions and mobile phones.

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If the company’s revised net-loss forecast of ¥780 billion — its previous projection, in October, was ¥420 billion — proves accurate, it would be the second-largest ever for a Japanese manufacturing company. Hitachi Ltd. lost ¥787.34 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2009, as the financial crisis struck.

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The first is located in Makuhari, Japan, and will be devoted to IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise service. This is the cloud service that IBM announced in April, and which is aimed at big enterprises that delivers a mix of public and private services. I talked with Ric Telford, VP for cloud services, about SmartCloud the day after it launched.

It’s the sixth data center for IBM’s SmartCloud. In March, it said it would spend $38 million to build a data center in Singapore. Others are in Germany, Canada, and the United States. For its part, Amazon switched on a data center in Japan in March, though at last count it had five data centers around the world. (Anyway, who’s counting?)

IBM also announced that later this year it will open a second new data center in Japan, this one devoted to LotusLive, its online messaging, social collaboration and meetings software, which is a rival of sorts to Microsoft’s Exchange and Office 365 as well as Google Apps. Among other things it will offer services to Japanese companies who for legal or other reasons aren’t allowed to host their data outside the country. One big client, I’m told, is the electronics company Panasonic.

That’s right, 17 companies all at once, and all over six patents related to Wi-Fi that it says are being infringed. The defendants include household names like Dell, Research In Motion, Intel, Canon and Asus, as well as some lesser known names in tech like Atheros–the wireless chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm–Marvell Semiconductor and the Chinese networking concern Huawei.

The suit was filed in the United States District Court Eastern District of Texas, which is notable because this district has developed something of a reputation of being friendly to so-called patent trolls, companies who make their living not by making products, but by suing established companies with the resources to either pay damages or cash settlements after arguably infringing on some patents they happen to have. When a few cases filed in this court went in favor of the plaintiff some years ago, numerous others followed. It also gained the nickname of “rocket docket,” meaning patent cases tended to be wrapped up inside of one to two years, much faster than in other courts.

Mosaid says it has licensed the six patents in question to 15 other companies, some of which you’ve heard of. They include Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and Nokia.

And if you’re not on either list–sued today or working with a license–and sell a Wi-Fi enabled product, you can probably bet that Mosaid is coming for you sooner or later. As Mosaid CEO John Lindgren put it in a company statement: “We believe that all companies offering products that implement the Wi-Fi standard require a license to our wireless patents.” Sounds like Mosaid’s lawyers are going to be busy.

Marketwatch reported that two or three undersea cables belonging to China United Network Communications Group Co. were affected by the quake. The information was incomplete, and it wasn’t immediately clear specifically which of its cables were affected and to what extent. Meanwhile Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co. reported some damage to the APCN-2 cable.

I talked with Stephan Beckart at Telegeography, a firm that tracks the submarine cable business, and he said there are 20 undersea cables touching Japan. (Click the image above to see a bigger version of the map.) He said few countries are better prepared for a major quake than Japan, and that this extends to planning for its communications infrastructure. Cables are put down away from major fault lines and have lots of redundancies built in. Most of the cable landing points in Japan are well north of where the quake hit, he said.

Bloomberg is reporting Japanese telecom providers have been struggling to maintain service after the quake, and that wireless service is poor across the country.

EETimes is reporting that several semiconductor and other electronics manufacturing operations are in the affected area. Both Fujitsu and Toshiba have wafer fabs in Iwate prefecture. Reuters is reporting that six Sony plants have been closed; at least one of them is a semiconductor fab. Dow Jones Newswires is reporting that Sony has ceased all manufacturing operations in the country.

IBM has reported damage to some of its facilities, but specifics aren’t yet known.

Salesforce.com has issued some status updates saying there are service degradations on three separate instances as a result of the quake. Amazon Web services, which just opened a new data center in Japan, appears to be running normally.

Generally speaking the Internet itself seems to be holding up, judging by the various YouTube videos and other information that is getting out Japan. NHK’s English service is broadcasting live on the Web and I’ve had it running on my screen all morning without interruption.

I’ll update this post as I learn more.

Either way, this canonical categorizing of the multiplicity of slates and e-readers by CEA Chief Economist and Director of Research Shawn DuBravac is pretty stunning. There are more than 100 in all, and they run the gamut from Panasonic’s diminutive 4-inch VieraTablet to Kno’s dual-14-inch-screen device. DuBravac has helpfully broken them out according to OEM, screen size and operating system (note the proliferation of Android tablets). Notably absent: Any data on pricing and availability, which isn’t too suprising since only a portion of the tablets on this list will ever need it, particularly with the iPad 2, Research In Motion’s PlayBook and whatever webOS creations Hewlett-Packard’s Palm division has cooked up headed to market.

Chart and data courtesy Shawn Dubravac

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo said it has already started the process of establishing broad 3-D health and safety guidelines for electronics manufacturers, content makers and broadcasters.

While there is no medical evidence to link 3-D with health-related side effects, questions about the technology have arisen in the wake of a warning from videogame console maker Nintendo Ltd. that cautioned 3-D games on its upcoming 3DS handheld could potentially damage the eyesight of children six years old and younger.

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The two partners are an unlikely pair. Taipei-based AmTran is best known for the TVs it makes for Vizio, the largest LCD TV maker in the U.S. based on shipments. Its new JVC lineup is sure to compete with Vizio, in which AmTran holds a roughly 20 percent stake.

JVC is a traditional Japanese company that made newspaper headlines when it balked at its parent company Panasonic selling its stake to a foreign investor a few years ago.

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This is the first time Apple’s cracked 10 percent in the Japanese market since the iPhone debuted there, so this is something of a milestone. More so when you consider that the company is now in spitting distance of incumbent Kyocera (12.7 percent) and not too far away from market leaders Sharp and Panasonic, which hold about 18.8 percent and 16.6 percent of the market, respectively.

And people said the iPhone would never be big in Japan….

[Image credit: iPhonAsia]

Evolta-kun’s epic journey on the Tokaido, one of Japan’s ancient thoroughfares, is part of a marketing campaign by Panasonic Corp. to promote its Evolta rechargeable batteries. At each of the route’s 53 stages where a weary traveler would once stop for food and lodging, Evolta-kun recharges its batteries (literally).

Even the robot mascot has his own crew of costume-wearing female models (the Evolta Sisters), an exclusive theme song (We, Challengers) and, of course, a daily comic strip. The robot travels with an entourage of five staff. One ‘Evolta Sister’ pushes a cart that emits an infra-red signal to control the robot’s direction; two members are in charge of checking for safety and two cameramen chronicle every robotic step of his journey.

There are rules: Evolta-kun stops at red lights. It doesn’t walk at night or in the rain. The robot can’t climb stairs. (With regards to stairs, a staff member will carry it by hand,” according to the rules.)

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