In just four days, 1 million songs have been downloaded at Apple's new iTunes Music Store in Japan, the fastest pace for the service's launch in any of the 20 nations where it's now available.
Apple (AAPL), whose iPod portable music player is a big hit in Japan, started the music download service on Thursday, and has already become the No. 1 online music store in the country. The American version of the service took a week to sell 1 million song downloads.
But the company acknowledged more work is needed to sign additional record companies for the Japanese service, which now has 15 Japanese labels.
Apple has not signed a deal with Sony's music division, which includes some of the most popular Japanese singers and bands. Sony (SNE) and Apple have become major rivals in pushing competing music technologies. Sony, which has focused on CD and mini-disc products, initially tried to push a more proprietary digital music format, and has fallen behind Apple and its iPod, which stores music on a hard drive in the more widespread MP3 format.
The popularity of iTunes in Japan has dealt another blow to Sony because it has already surpassed the number of downloads Sony's affiliated online music store gets in a month -- about 450,000.
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Chinese drama to go: Two motorcycle racers vie for the same woman in "Appointment," a romance squeezed into five-minute episodes made to be shown on mobile-phone screens in China. Its makers hope the 25-minute series will capture attention in the country's crowded cell-phone market, where entrepreneurs are competing furiously to come up with the latest gimmick.
The competition is intense, but with 400 million customers in the world's biggest mobile-phone market, China offers a potential jackpot to the company that invents a new craze. The latest innovation comes from Beijing's Le-TV Media Group, which says "Appointment" is China's first TV show made just for mobile phones.
However, it can be viewed only on sophisticated phones with internet connections made by South Korea's LG Electronics, one of the sponsors of "Appointment." The LG phones cost about $850 -- a lavish sum in a country where the average person makes less than $1,000 a year. The price of the average Chinese mobile phone is closer to $150, and the most bare-bones model can cost as little as $36.
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Playing catch up: An energy bill President Bush is to sign Monday would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. And that has technologists worried about software and gadgets that now compensate for daylight time based on a schedule unchanged since 1987.
Users would have to override the clocks on VCRs and DVD recorders, switching to "manual" to ensure shows record correctly. For computers running Windows, most affected applications would likely be taken care of by a Microsoft update, but calendar systems will need to be checked to ensure that appointments already entered get properly adjusted.
Some electric utilities have advanced meters to adjust rates based on peak and non-peak hours, and studies would be required to determine if any modifications are needed. The telecommunications industry, meanwhile, must ensure that its clocks are properly adjusted to bill customers properly.
Joe Tasker, senior vice president for government affairs at the Information Technology Association of America, points out that daylight time already varies around the world, and some parts of the United States don't observe it at all. "We already are used to having a system in place that specifies all the information that we need" for a particular region, Tasker said. "It's just a question of changing the effective date."
Moti Tzur, a sales manager at Sakal Electronics Ltd. in Jerusalem, where daylight time is based on the lunar Jewish calendar, says the constant changes do little to confound manufacturers, sales representatives or consumers. "We get up and change the time on the VCR ourselves," Tzur said. "These things come with directions."
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Merge and conquer: Stocks rose Monday after E-Trade and Quest Diagnostics said they would buy rivals in deals worth more than $1.6 billion combined, and a British newspaper said Cisco Systems could bid for cell-phone maker Nokia.
The deals were enough to distract investors from record high oil prices after the U.S. embassy closed in Saudi Arabia due to security threats.
The possibility of a deal involving Cisco (CSCO) and Nokia (NOK) was reported by the British newspaper The Business, which said technology infrastructure company Cisco is considering buying a wireless company, and that Nokia had been identified as the most likely target. Cisco rose 8 cents to $19.38; Nokia rose 36 cents to $16.30.
Quest Diagnostics, the nation's top provider of medical tests, said it is planning to acquire LabOne in a $934 million deal that will expand Quest's share of the testing market. E-Trade Financial will buy Harrisdirect for $700 million.
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Recovering telecom: Nortel Networks, the Canadian telecommunications-equipment maker struggling to recover from an accounting scandal, said Monday its second-quarter profit nearly tripled as revenue increased.
The company said its quarterly income grew to $45 million, or 1 cent per share, from $16 million, or break even per share, a year ago. The latest results included charges of $90 million from restructuring activities and $39 million for the sale of businesses and assets, as well as adjustments from prior quarters that reduced earnings by about $40 million, or 1 cent per share. Revenue rose 10 percent to $2.86 billion from $2.59 billion last year.
The results from Nortel (NT), which was rocked by an explosive accounting scandal last year that resulted in the company restating its results for 2001, 2002 and 2003, keep Nortel up to date in its filing requirements. Its shares rose 20 cents, or 7.6 percent, to $2.85 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
