TOKYO (AP) ? Japanese phone company Softbank, owned by billionaire Masayoshi Son, says its net profit more than doubled in the October-December quarter from a year earlier, helped by strong sales of Apple's iPhone and iPads.
Net profit rose to 65.9 billion yen ($724 million) in the last quarter of 2012 compared with 32.83 billion yen a year earlier.
Sales rose 7 percent to 932.7 billion yen ($10.2 billion).
Softbank is seeking approval from U.S. authorities for its $20 billion purchase of a 70 percent stake in Sprint Nextel Corp. that would be Japan's biggest foreign acquisition ever. It expects to complete the sale by mid-year, it said.
Softbank, which also offers fixed-line broadband services, has carried out an aggressive marketing drive in recent years, starring a talking white dog that has proved popular among Japanese.
The company credited strong sales of the iPhone5, iPad and "mimamori" phones with security buzzers in them for its stronger earnings in the previous quarter, as its market share rose to 24.3 percent with the addition of 2.37 million new subscribers in April-December. The company had 31.3 million subscribers as of the end of 2012.
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Andrew Bujaski?s Computer Chess was my favorite of the 28 films I saw at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It is a complete and utter cinematic experience, in large part due to it being shot on the Sony AVC 3260, a ?70s-era tethered video tube camera. The camera first hit the market in the late ?60s and was designed as a lightweight portable camera for both professionals and amateurs. Its shallow focus, low contrast black-and-white image looks at first like modern security camera footage, but the Sony has a zoom lens that allows for a wide variety of framings, which provides a varied depth of field from shot to shot and this is in part what defines its most unique trait. Computer Chess features both tightly composed shots of heads bent over computer screens in a crowded room and long empty shots of a man dancing down a long hotel hallway. The camera itself is tethered to a recording box and then the film?s tech team was also simultaneously digitizing the image. This made the camera extremely bulky and immobile. Consequently, inside crowded rooms, the camera does not glide or dance with the actors like it does in modern films. The shots are often static and frames are often angled in such a way that it feels as if we don?t have unlimited access to these strange characters and their often obtuse arguments. The quality of the image could be called crude by comparison to today?s high resolution, high contrast, hypersensitive focus control cameras, but nevertheless, its unique vibe is both disorientating and transporting.
Bujalski?s film tells the story of a group of cutting edge computer geeks who gather in a Texas hotel for a computer chess tournament in the early 1980s. The team whose computer wins will face off in the final match for the ultimate man vs computer challenge, reminiscent of the actual Garry Kasparov chess challenges. There are an assortment of computer types with weird haircuts and unhip period clothes verbally sparring with each other about tech problems as well as larger esoteric questions regarding their own individual computers idiosyncrasies. Also in the hotel for the weekend is a marriage encounter couples therapy group who sit in a circle attempting to better understand their partners? and their own frustrations.
The dislocation caused by the physical aspects of the production, the weird haircuts, lingo, clothes and the black-and-white imagery transport you to a world that for sure existed but has never really been explored on the big screen with such texture. Unlike other films of this period, Computer Chess doesn?t attempt to evoke warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings of a bygone era; instead, it uses the dislocation generated by the video image to cause us to be hyper-aware of how different the world was in the past from how it is now. Bujalski depicts an innocent computer age when the excitement of technology was driven by a pure pursuit of exploration, rather than the pursuit of application value. At one point a programmer says the future of computers is in dating and we are reminded that there was a time when computer science had yet to be fully co-opted by the corporate consumer driven mentality that currently fuels the dreams of young tech geniuses.