EBay to Try Again in Japan by Using Help From Yahoo ...

TOKYO, Tuesday, Dec. 4 (Reuters) — EBay and Yahoo Japan said Tuesday that they would link up their auction sites to make cross-border bidding easier, in a deal that will give eBay, the American auction titan, another chance to woo Japanese consumers.

Shares in Yahoo Japan, owner of the nation’s biggest auction Web site, rose 3.9 percent to 56,400 yen on news of the deal.

EBay withdrew from Japan in 2002 after only two years, a rare failure for the company, after struggling to make inroads in a market where Yahoo Japan and Rakuten already operated well-established sites.

EBay and Yahoo Japan, which together have about 4 trillion yen ($36 billion) in annual successful bids, will first start a Japanese-language site on which Yahoo Japan users can bid for eBay items, spokesmen from the two firms said. The companies said they would call the site Sekaimon or “gateway to the world.”

Yahoo Japan, which estimates it has more than half of the online auction market in Japan, is about one-third owned by Yahoo and 40 percent by the Softbank Corporation. Softbank’s shares gained 2.1 percent, to 2,665 yen.

EBay has been seeking local partners to bolster its Asian operations in the face of mounting competition.

In China, it is working on a joint venture with the TOM Group’s TOM Online to compete against Alibaba.com. In Thailand, it plans to start a joint site with a domestic partner, Sanook.

Yahoo Japan said Shop Airlines, a unit of the online sales services firm NetPrice, would manage the site, payment services, customs clearance and delivery.

AMD hopes for quick return to profit...

AMD sees pricing in the chip market remaining competitive and aims to return to profitability soon, chief executive Hector Ruiz said on Thursday.

AMD, the number-two maker of chips, controls about a fifth of the market for the CPUs at the heart of the world's one billion personal computers and servers.

It has been locked in a price war with market leader Intel and has reported four straight quarters of net losses.

"The good news is that for consumers, prices keep going down," Ruiz told reporters after inaugurating a R&D facility in Bangalore, which is India's technology hub.

"The bad news is we always have to figure out how to still do that and hopefully make money. It's a very competitive industry and I don't see pricing being anything but competitive in any segment in this industry," Ruiz said.

Last month, AMD posted a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss of $396m (£191m) on higher sales of chips for notebooks and signalled that the brutal price war with larger rival Intel had abated.

Ruiz said AMD aims to return to profitability soon.

"That is our number-one goal right now," Ruiz said.

AMD is a technical partner in Indian semiconductor consortium SemIndia, which plans to set up a chipmaking facility with an investment of $3bn over the next five years. Intel had initially shown interest in making chips in India, but pulled out due to delays in India releasing its guidelines.

Sony and others to promote FeliCa cards...

Sony said that it and four other Japanese companies would set up a joint venture to promote the use of FeliCa contactless cards, used for ticketing and electronic money transactions.

The joint venture, which includes trading house Mitsui & Co and printing and electronics components company Dai Nippon Printing, will be established in January with capitalisation of ¥400m (£1.7m). Sony will take a 60 percent stake, it said.

Plastic cards equipped with Sony's FeliCa chips, which can be scanned for data transfers, are used widely in Japan and other Asian countries, including China and Singapore. Sony has shipped more than 250 million FeliCa chips since 1996.

In Japan, electronics makers put the chips in mobile phones, turning handsets into e-wallets and e-tickets.

In the UK, mobile operator O2 is working with handset manufacturer Nokia and Transport for London on a six-month e-ticketing trial, which will allow travellers in London to use their mobile phone in place of an Oyster card. The system may in future be extended to give users the ability to pay sums of up to £10 simply by swiping their mobile phone over a card reader.

Microsoft plans 'mega data centre' in Ireland...

Microsoft said that it will spend $500m (£239m) on building a new European data-processing centre in Ireland.

Microsoft said in a statement that the planned Dublin centre will house tens of thousands of servers providing information and web-based applications to internet users.

Construction will begin later this month, with the centre expected to be completed by 2009.

"This is the first 'mega data centre' deployment outside the US specifically targeted for the growth and performance of Windows Live services," said John Mangelaars, vice president of Microsoft's EMEA Online Services Group.

The software giant said an additional "substantial" investment is planned to help fund the centre's server technology.

The 51,000 square-metre facility will deliver Windows Live services and store data for the company's online-services businesses, such as MSN and Windows Live.

Peru signs up for 260,000 OLPC laptops...

One month after the One Laptop Per Child charity went into mass production with its $188 laptop, the Peruvian government has signed a contract to purchase 260,000 units.

Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor and founder of the project, announced the deal on Saturday. He also revealed that Mexican billionaire and long-time friend, Carlos Slim, had ordered 50,000 units for distribution in Mexico.

In November, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity contracted Taiwan's Quanta Computer to start producing the green-and-white computer in its new Changshu manufacturing centre, which is located north-west of Shanghai.

The first countries to place mass orders for the rugged green-and-white laptops were Uruguay and Mongolia.

Ivan Krstić, the director of security architecture for the OLPC project, has said that Uruguayan water and mobile-phone utility companies have allowed the organisation to plant wireless access points on existing towers to facilitate the laptop's use.

News Burst: Hi-tech car robbers using infra-red.

The victim of the latest such break-in has reported to police that an intruder managed to open the door to his remotely-locked Jaguar in order to rob him of his Rolex watch.

Wireless security specialist at Oceanus Security, John Everett, confirms that the technology required to remotely de-activate a car's central looking system not only exists but is also widely available.

"In theory you could intercept any infra red message and then copy it in order to break into a car. The technology needed to do this is also probably commercially available as it operates at a fairly low frequency range."

UK government accuses Chinese of IT espionage

The U.K. government has accused the Chinese of hacking into the computer systems of some of its leading companies, according reports published by the English press over the weekend.

According to The Times, the Director-General of intelligence agency MI5, Jonathan Evans, sent a confidential letter to 300 chief executives and security chiefs at financial institutions and legal firms last week warning them that they were under attack from Chinese state organizations.

The summary of the letter, which was posted (securely) on the Web site of the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, warned its recipients of the "electronic espionage attack."

"The contents of the letter highlight the following: the Director-General's concerns about the possible damage to U.K. business resulting from electronic attack sponsored by Chinese state organizations, and the fact that the attacks are designed to defeat best-practice IT security systems.

"The letter acknowledges the strong economic and commercial reasons to do business with China, but the need to ensure management of the risks involved."

According to one security expert quoted in the Times article, one of the techniques used by the Chinese groups were "custom Trojans," software designed to hack into the network of a particular firm and feed back confidential data.

The MI5 Web site acknowledges the U.K. is a high-priority espionage target.

"We estimate that at least 20 foreign intelligence services are operating to some degree against U.K. interests. Of greatest concern are the Russians and Chinese," it said.