Technology

  AP On a recent muggy afternoon in Tokyo, 21-year old Shintaro Naganuma joined several hundred customers browsing CDs at the eight-story downtown outpost of music retail chain Tsutaya. Having discovered a couple of new rock artists on YouTube, the third-year university student hit Tsutaya Co.’s flagship store in trendy Shibuya to look up their albums. That process encapsulates the …

  San Francisco / AFP A high-profile Google event on Tuesday is widely expected to show a new emphasis on hardware, challenging rivals Apple and Amazon and launching a new strategy for the online giant. While the company has offered no official preview, it is expected to unveil a new line of Google-branded smartphones, a tablet and a home virtual …

  Bloomberg Apple Inc. is in negotiations with Sharp Corp. to secure organic LED displays for the iPhone maker’s next-generation of devices, a person familiar with the matter said. Any OLED supply agreement would depend on the Osaka-based company’s output capacity, said the person, who asked not to be identified because talks aren’t public. The discussions stem from Apple’s desire …

  Bloomberg New rules of the road for robot cars coming out of Washington this week could lead to the eventual extinction of one of the defining archetypes of the past century: the human driver. While banning people from driving may seem like something from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, it’s the logical endgame of a technology that could dramatically …

  Bloomberg It’s official. BlackBerry Ltd., the Canadian company that invented the smartphone and addicted legions of road warriors to the “CrackBerry,” has stopped making its iconic handsets. Finally conceding defeat in a battle lost long ago to Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., BlackBerry is handing over production of the phones to overseas partners and turning its full attention …

  Bloomberg The race is on to get more consumers hooked on Amazon ahead of the holidays, and music is the latest lure. Amazon.com Inc. is working on a stand-alone music-streaming service and will release more details in the coming weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. With a price tag reported to be about $5 a …

  AFP Global automakers are showing off new electric vehicles at the Paris auto show as they look ahead to a world of tighter environmental standards on emissions. Volkswagen on Thursday displayed the I.D, a battery-powered compact it says will sell for about what a fully equipped Golf diesel does when a production version eventually goes on the market in …

  AFP Although wave-generated power could meet a quarter of America’s energy needs, the technology lags other renewables such as wind and solar. But the U.S. Navy has established a test site in Hawaii, where power from floating devices travels a mile through undersea cables to Oahu’s power grid — the first wave-induced electricity online in the US. Some things …

  Bloomberg Virtual reality is on the cusp of becoming mainstream, but one startup in Japan is betting the technology won’t really succeed unless it cracks one critical piece of the puzzle: human eyeballs. Fove Inc. is introducing the world’s first commercially available VR goggles equipped with tiny infrared cameras to follow eye movements. By tracking human irises, the gadget …

  Bloomberg So far Apple Inc.’s HealthKit has mostly collected fitness data from its devices. In the future, if the company gets its way, the software will interpret that information, turning it into advice for users, doctors and others. Scores of health-care experts hired by Apple in recent years are building improved electronic health record software that can better analyze …