1.
Telephone
–
A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. In 1876, Scottish emigrant Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice and this instrument was further developed by many others. The telephone was the first device in history that people to talk directly with each other across large distances. Telephones rapidly became indispensable to businesses, government, and households, the essential elements of a telephone are a microphone to speak into and an earphone which reproduces the voice in a distant location. Until approximately the 1970s most telephones used a dial, which was superseded by the modern DTMF push-button dial. The receiver and transmitter are usually built into a handset which is held up to the ear, the dial may be located either on the handset, or on a base unit to which the handset is connected. The transmitter converts the sound waves to electrical signals which are sent through the network to the receiving phone. The receiving telephone converts the signals into audible sound in the receiver, telephones permit duplex communication, meaning they allow the people on both ends to talk simultaneously. The first telephones were connected to each other from one customers office or residence to another customers location. Being impractical beyond just a few customers, these systems were replaced by manually operated centrally located switchboards. For greater mobility, various systems were developed for transmission between mobile stations on ships and automobiles in the middle 20th century. Hand-held mobile phone]s was introduced for personal service starting in 1973, by the late 1970s several mobile telephone networks operated around the world. In 1983, the Advanced Mobile Phone System was launched, offering a standardized technology providing portability for users far beyond the residence or office. These analog cellular system evolved into digital networks with better security, greater capacity, better regional coverage, the public switched telephone network, with its hierarchical system of many switching centers, interconnects telephones around the world for communication with each other. With the standardized international numbering system, E.164, each line has an identifying telephone number. Although originally designed for voice communications, convergence has enabled most modern cell phones to have many additional capabilities. Since 1999, the trend for mobile phones is smartphones that integrate all mobile communication, a traditional landline telephone system, also known as plain old telephone service, commonly carries both control and audio signals on the same twisted pair of insulated wires, the telephone line. The control and signaling equipment consists of three components, the ringer, the hookswitch, and a dial, the ringer, or beeper, light or other device, alerts the user to incoming calls
2.
Mobile phone
–
A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the systems of a mobile phone operator. Most modern mobile telephone services use a network architecture, and, therefore. Mobile phones which offer these and more general computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to seven billion, penetrating 100% of the global population. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone manufacturers were Samsung, Apple, a handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a pocket-size folding telephone with a thin carbon microphone. Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships, the race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and this was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone system in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Several other countries followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology, in 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. In 1991, the digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard. This sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators, ten years later, in 2001, the third generation was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. This was followed by 3. 5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access family, allowing UMTS networks to have data transfer speeds. By 2009, it had become clear that, at point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications. Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized fourth-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies
3.
Telephone exchange
–
A telephone exchange is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network or in large enterprises. In historical perspective, telecommunication terms have been used with different semantics over time, the term telephone exchange is often used synonymously with central office, a Bell System term. Often, an office is defined as a building used to house the inside plant equipment of potentially several telephone exchanges. Such an area has also referred to as the exchange. Central office locations may also be identified in North America as wire centers, All central offices within a larger region, typically aggregated by state, were assigned a common numbering plan area code. For corporate or enterprise use, a telephone exchange is often referred to as a private branch exchange. Smaller installations might deploy a PBX or key telephone system in the office of a receptionist and this made it possible for subscribers to call each other at homes, businesses, or public spaces. These made telephony an available and comfortable communication tool for everyday use, one of the first to propose a telephone exchange was Hungarian Tivadar Puskás in 1877 while he was working for Thomas Edison. The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, the worlds first commercial telephone exchange opened on November 12,1877 in Friedrichsberg close to Berlin. George W. Coy designed and built the first commercial US telephone exchange opened in New Haven. The switchboard was built from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire, Charles Glidden is also credited with establishing an exchange in Lowell, MA. with 50 subscribers in 1878. In Europe other early telephone exchanges were based in London and Manchester, Belgium had its first International Bell exchange a year later. In 1887 Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard, later exchanges consisted of one to several hundred plug boards staffed by switchboard operators. Each operator sat in front of a panel containing banks of ¼-inch tip-ring-sleeve jacks. In front of the jack panel lay a horizontal panel containing two rows of patch cords, each connected to a cord circuit. When a calling party lifted the receiver, the loop current lit a signal lamp near the jack. The operator responded by inserting the rear cord into the jack and switched her headset into the circuit to ask, Number. For a local call, the operator inserted the front cord of the pair into the partys local jack
4.
Electric bell
–
An electric bell is a mechanical bell that functions by means of an electromagnet. When an electric current is applied, it produces a repetitive buzzing or clanging sound and it consists of coils of insulated wire wound round iron rods. When an electric current flows through the coils, the rods became magnetic, the clapper hits the bell and makes it ring. The most widely used form is the bell, which produces a continuous sound when current is applied. The bell or gong, which is often in the shape of a cup or half-sphere, is struck by an arm with a metal ball on the end called a clapper. In its rest position the clapper is held away from the bell a short distance by its springy arm. When an electric current is enabled to pass through the winding of the electromagnet it creates a field that attracts the iron arm of the clapper. This opens a pair of electrical contacts attached to the clapper arm, the magnetic field of the electromagnet collapses, and the clapper springs away from the bell. This closes the contacts again, allowing the current to flow to the electromagnet again and this cycle repeats rapidly, many times per second, resulting in a continuous ringing. The tone of the sound generated depends on the shape and size of the bell or gong resonator, where several bells are installed together, they may be given distinctive rings by using different size or shapes of gong, even though the strike mechanisms are identical. Another type, the bell, has no interrupting contacts. The hammer strikes the gong once each time the circuit is closed and these are used to signal brief notifications, such as a shop door opening for a customer, rather than continuous warnings. An electric buzzer uses a mechanism to an interrupter bell. They are quieter than bells, but adequate for a warning tone over a small distance, a buzzer or beeper is an audio signalling device, which may be mechanical, electromechanical, or piezoelectric. Typical uses of buzzers and beepers include alarm devices, timers, with the development of low cost electronics from the 1970s onwards, most buzzers have now been replaced by electronic sounders. These replace the electromechanical striker of a bell with an electronic oscillator, the first commercial electric bells were used for railway signalling, between signal boxes. Complex bell codes were used to indicate the types of train passing between signal boxes, and the destinations to which they should be routed and these were single-stroke bells, applying current to an electromagnet pulled the bells clapper against the bell or gong and gave one chime. The bell did not ring continuously, but only with a single ring, to sustain the tone, these bells were usually much larger than are used today with interrupter bells
5.
Volt
–
The volt is the derived unit for electric potential, electric potential difference, and electromotive force. One volt is defined as the difference in potential between two points of a conducting wire when an electric current of one ampere dissipates one watt of power between those points. It is also equal to the difference between two parallel, infinite planes spaced 1 meter apart that create an electric field of 1 newton per coulomb. Additionally, it is the difference between two points that will impart one joule of energy per coulomb of charge that passes through it. It can also be expressed as amperes times ohms, watts per ampere, or joules per coulomb, for the Josephson constant, KJ = 2e/h, the conventional value KJ-90 is used, K J-90 =0.4835979 GHz μ V. This standard is typically realized using an array of several thousand or tens of thousands of junctions. Empirically, several experiments have shown that the method is independent of device design, material, measurement setup, etc. in the water-flow analogy sometimes used to explain electric circuits by comparing them with water-filled pipes, voltage is likened to difference in water pressure. Current is proportional to the diameter of the pipe or the amount of water flowing at that pressure. A resistor would be a reduced diameter somewhere in the piping, the relationship between voltage and current is defined by Ohms Law. Ohms Law is analogous to the Hagen–Poiseuille equation, as both are linear models relating flux and potential in their respective systems, the voltage produced by each electrochemical cell in a battery is determined by the chemistry of that cell. Cells can be combined in series for multiples of that voltage, mechanical generators can usually be constructed to any voltage in a range of feasibility. High-voltage electric power lines,110 kV and up Lightning, Varies greatly. Volta had determined that the most effective pair of metals to produce electricity was zinc. In 1861, Latimer Clark and Sir Charles Bright coined the name volt for the unit of resistance, by 1873, the British Association for the Advancement of Science had defined the volt, ohm, and farad. In 1881, the International Electrical Congress, now the International Electrotechnical Commission and they made the volt equal to 108 cgs units of voltage, the cgs system at the time being the customary system of units in science. At that time, the volt was defined as the difference across a conductor when a current of one ampere dissipates one watt of power. The international volt was defined in 1893 as 1/1.434 of the emf of a Clark cell and this definition was abandoned in 1908 in favor of a definition based on the international ohm and international ampere until the entire set of reproducible units was abandoned in 1948. Prior to the development of the Josephson junction voltage standard, the volt was maintained in laboratories using specially constructed batteries called standard cells
6.
Model 500 telephone
–
The Western Electric model 500 telephone series was the standard domestic desk telephone set issued by the Bell System in North America from 1950 through the 1984 Bell System divestiture. Millions of model 500-series phones were produced and were present in most homes in North America, many are still in use today because of their durability and ample availability. Its modular construction compared to previous types simplified manufacture and repair, touch-tone service was introduced to residential customers in 1963 with the model 1500 telephone, which had a push-button pad for the ten digits. The model 2500 telephone, introduced in 1968, added the * and # keys, the Western Electric 500-type telephone replaced the 300-type which had been produced since 1936. Development started in 1946 and lead to pre-production units in 1948, third and fourth quarter production was estimated at 49,000 and 93,000, respectively. Including 20,000 units of a special set, approximately 183,000 units were produced by the end of the first production year. In the following years, systematic replacement of 25 million 300-type telephones commenced because of the much improved electrical and this also permitted the use of thinner loop wires and thus delivered cost-savings in the build-out of the network. The replacement of 300-series telephones with 500-series sets created large stockpiles of 300-type components that had not reached their intended service life and this program commenced in 1955, and the converted set was labeled as the model 5302 telephone. It was produced until the mid-1960s in the shops of each Bell Operating Company. From the 1949 field trials until 1953, only sets of the 500-type telephone were manufactured. The introduction of telephones in color occurred in stages from 1954 until 1957, as manufacturing capability was refined. As with most telephones of the time in the United States, choices for telephone styles and colors were limited. Most phones made by Western Electric, starting in about 1968, carried this disclaimer molded into their housing, telephones were also sometimes labeled with a sticker or ink stamp marking the name of the operating company that owned the telephone. In 1983, after the court ordered the Bell System divestiture, many customers were offered the option to buy the leased telephones they had in service. The Western Electric model 500 improved upon several design features over the earlier telephones, thus, the phone could be tested and serviced easily without the housing. This design improved manufacturing and servicing efficiency, the earlier 302 had been equipped with an enamel-coated dial plate that displayed the numerals and letters through the holes of the rotary finger-wheel. Years of use caused the lettering and numbering, and even the porcelain coating, the design of the 500 improved this by molding the characters into the plastic, through a double-injection molding process. This design was carried over to the 1500 and 2500-series telephones and was used in the keys to eliminate wear
7.
Greeting card
–
A greeting card is an illustrated piece of card or high quality paper featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are given on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays. Greeting cards, usually packaged with an envelope, come in a variety of styles, there are both mass-produced as well as handmade versions that are distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. While typically inexpensive, more cards with die-cuts or glued-on decorations may be more expensive. Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the two largest producers of greeting cards in the world today, in Western countries and increasingly in other societies, many people traditionally mail seasonally themed cards to their friends and relatives in December. Many service businesses also send cards to their customers in this season, the Greeting Card Association is an international trade organization representing the interests of greeting card and stationery manufacturers. For me, there’s nothing like a card to send a special message. I’m proud to be a part of an industry not only keeps people connected. Standard Greeting Cards, A standard greeting card is printed on high-quality paper, inside is a pre-printed message appropriate for the occasion, along with a blank space for the sender to add a signature or handwritten message. A matching envelope is sold with the card, Some cards and envelopes feature fancy materials, such as gold leaf, ribbons or glitter. Photo Greeting Cards, In recent years, photo greeting cards have gained widespread popularity, the first type are photo insert cards in which a hole has been cut in the centre. A photo slides in just like a frame, the second type are printed photo cards in which the photo is combined with artwork and printed, usually on a high-end digital press, directly onto the face of the card. Both types are most popular for sending holiday greetings such as Christmas, personalised Greeting Cards, Websites using special personalisation technology, such as Moonpig, allow consumers to personalise a card which is then printed and sent directly to the recipient. Reusable Greeting Cards, These are greeting cards for the budget conscious, there are two common formats for reusable cards. Firstly there are cards with slits in them positioned to hold pages, secondly there are notepad style cards where pages stick to the back of the cards. The pages that have used for reusable cards can be removed after being received. Risqué Greeting Cards, Some companies offer risqué greeting cards, with adult-based humor, the humor in these cards can sometimes be offensive to more conservative parts of the population. Musical Greeting Cards, Recently greeting cards have made that play music or sound when they are opened
8.
Japan
–
Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
9.
NTT DoCoMo
–
NTT DOCOMO, Inc. is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, do communications over the mobile network, Docomo provides phone, video phone, i-mode, and mail services. The companys headquarters are in the Sanno Park Tower, Nagatachō, Chiyoda, at the beginning of 2015, it was the fourth largest public company in Japan when measured by market capitalization. Docomo was spun off from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in August 1991 to take over the mobile cellular operations. It provides 2G PDC cellular services on the 800 MHz band, and 3G FOMA W-CDMA services on the 2 GHz and 800 MHz and 1700 MHz bands and its businesses also included PHS, paging, and satellite. Docomo ceased offering a PHS service on January 7,2008, NTT Docomo is a subsidiary of Japans incumbent telephone operator, NTT. The majority of NTT Docomos shares are owned by NTT, while some NTT shares are publicly traded, control of the company by Japanese interests is guaranteed by the number of shares available to buyers. It provides wireless voice and data communications to subscribers in Japan, NTT Docomo is the creator of W-CDMA technology as well as mobile i-mode service. In late 1995, Docomo CEO hired the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for strategy development, NTT Docomo has more than 53 million customers, which is more than half of Japans cellular market. The company provides a variety of mobile multimedia services. NTT Docomo is listed on the Tokyo, London, and New York stock exchanges, on April 19,2008, it was announced that Ryuji Yamada, the current co-president of NTT Docomo, will be promoted as the president of NTT Docomo in June 2008. Masao Nakamura will stay in NTT Docomo as a director and also the senior adviser. Since October 2006, when the introduction to the service allows the user to carry their original phone number with a new provider was made, NTT Docomo has lost many users to KDDI. This promotion was made in order to get more users for NTT Docomo, the company was the last major global mobile carrier to offer Apples iPhone, which it finally did with the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c. This has been cited as one of the reasons for the stream of its customers switching for competing networks. In June 2011, the announced that they were teaming up with McAfee to provide McAfee VirusScan Mobile for its Android mobile users. In July 2012, NTT Docomo acquired Italys Buongiorno in a deal worth 209 million euros, on October 2007, the prototype Wellness mobile phone of Japans NTT Docomo Inc. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. was launched at CEATEC. It checks health with a sensor that detects body movement and measures calories
10.
NEC
–
NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational provider of information technology services and products, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC provides IT and network solutions to enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited and its NEC Semiconductors business unit was one of the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders before merging with Renesas Electronics. NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group, kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda established Nippon Electric Limited Partnership on August 31,1898 by using facilities that they had bought from Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing Company. Iwadare acted as the partner, Maeda handled company sales. Western Electric, which had an interest in the Japanese phone market, was represented by Walter Tenney Carleton, Carleton was also responsible for the renovation of the Miyoshi facilities. It was agreed that the partnership would be reorganized as a company when treaty would allow it. On July 17,1899, the treaty between Japan and the United States went into effect. Nippon Electric Company, Limited was organized the day with Western Electric Company to become the first Japanese joint-venture with foreign capital. Ernest Clement and Carleton were named as directors, Maeda and Mototeru Fujii were assigned to be auditors. Iwadare, Maeda and Carleton handled the overall management, the company started with the production, sales and maintenance of telephones and switches. NEC modernized the facilities with the construction of the Mita Plant in 1901 at Mita Shikokumachi. It was completed in December 1902, the Japanese Ministry of Communications adopted a new technology in 1903, the common battery switchboard supplied by NEC. The common battery switchboards powered the subscriber phone, eliminating the need for a permanent magnet generator in each subscribers phone, the switchboards were initially imported, but were manufactured locally by 1909. NEC started exporting telephone sets to China in 1904, in 1905, Iwadare visited Western Electric in the U. S. to see their management and production control. On his return to Japan he discontinued the system of sub-contracting and replaced it with a new system where managers. Inefficiency was also removed from the production process, the company paid higher salaries with incentives for efficiency. New accounting and cost controls were put in place, and time clocks installed, between 1899 and 1907 the number of telephone subscribers in Japan rose from 35,000 to 95,000
11.
MIDI
–
A single MIDI link can carry up to sixteen channels of information, each of which can be routed to a separate device. These messages are sent via a MIDI cable to other devices where they control sound generation, a simple example of a MIDI setup is the use of a MIDI controller such as an electronic musical keyboard to trigger sounds created by a sound module. This MIDI data can also be recorded into a hardware or software device called a sequencer, advantages of MIDI include compactness, ease of modification and manipulation and a wide choice of electronic instruments and synthesizer or digitally-sampled sounds. MIDI technology was standardized in 1983 by a panel of industry representatives. In June 1981, Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi proposed the idea of standardization to Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim, in October 1981, Kakehashi, Oberheim and Smith discussed the idea with representatives from Yamaha, Korg and Kawai. Smith proposed this standard at the Audio Engineering Society show in November 1981, MIDIs development was announced to the public by Robert Moog, in the October 1982 edition of Keyboard magazine. By the time of the January 1983 Winter NAMM Show, Smith was able to demonstrate a MIDI connection between his Prophet 600 analog synthesizer and a Roland JP-6, the MIDI Specification was published in August 1983. The MIDI standard was unveiled by Ikutaro Kakehashi and Dave Smith, MIDIs appeal was originally limited to professional musicians and record producers who wanted to use electronic instruments in the production of popular music. The standard allowed different instruments to speak with other and with computers. This interoperability allowed one device to be controlled from another, which reduced the amount of hardware musicians needed to own, MIDIs introduction coincided with the dawn of the personal computer era and the introductions of samplers and digital synthesizers. The creative possibilities brought about by MIDI technology have been credited as having helped to revive the industry in the 1980s. MIDI introduced many capabilities which transformed the way musicians work, MIDI sequencing made it possible for a user with no notation skills to build complex arrangements. A musical act with as few as one or two members, each operating multiple MIDI-enabled devices, could deliver a performance which sounds similar to that of a larger group of musicians. By performing preproduction in an environment, an artist can reduce recording costs by arriving at a recording studio with a song that is already partially completed and worked out. Educational technology enabled by MIDI has transformed music education and those new to the subject of MIDI might confuse it with digital audio. MIDI symbolically represents a note, whereas digital audio represents the sound produced by the note, MIDI was invented so that musical instruments could communicate with each other and so that one instrument can control another. Analog synthesizers that have no digital component and were built prior to MIDIs development can be retrofit with kits that convert MIDI messages into analog control voltages. When a note is played on a MIDI instrument, it generates a signal that can be used to trigger a note on another instrument
12.
SoftBank Group
–
SoftBank Group Corp. is a Japanese multinational telecommunications and Internet corporation established on September 3,1981, and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It has operations in broadband, fixed-line telecommunications, e-commerce, Internet, technology services, finance, media and marketing, semiconductor design, the company is headed by founder Masayoshi Son. SoftBank was ranked in the Forbes Global 2000 list as the 62nd largest public company in the world, between 2009 and 2014, SoftBanks market capitalization increased by 557%, the fourth largest relative increase in the world over that period. SoftBank bought COMDEX from The Interface Group in 1995, and in 1999 allowed organizers of COMDEX to restrict admission of media and they eventually sold COMDEX to Key3Media, a spin-off of Ziff Davis, in 2001. On January 28,2005, SoftBank became the owner of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, on March 17,2006, SoftBank announced its agreement to buy Vodafone Japan, giving it a stake in Japans $78 billion mobile market. In April 2006, they bought a 23% stake of Betfair, in August 2006, SoftBank sold all its shares of SBI Group to a subsidiary of SBIs holding company, making SBI independent. On October 1,2006, Vodafone Japan changed its name, mobile phone brand name, and its mobile phone domain name to SoftBank Mobile, SoftBank. On January 28,2008, it was announced that SoftBank and this cellphone contains more than 400 platinum diamond, totaling more than 20 carat. The cost is said to be more than 100,000,000 yen, on February 3,2010, SoftBank acquired 13. 7% in Ustream with the option to increase shares to 30% by July 2011. On October 1,2010, Ayumi Hamasaki became the commercial spokesperson, on October 3,2012, the take over of competitor eAccess was announced, and was completed in January 2013. On July 1,2013, SoftBank announced that Willcom became a wholly owned subsidiary effective July 1,2013, eAccess was merged with Willcom, which resulted in a new subsidiary and brand from Yahoo. On October 15,2012, SoftBank announced plans to control of American Sprint Nextel by purchasing a 70% stake for $20 billion. On July 6,2013, the United States Federal Communications Commission approved SoftBank’s acquisition of the Sprint Corporation for $22.2 billion for a 78% ownership interest in Sprint. The acquisition involved payment of $17.2 billion in cash to Sprint shareholders, the transaction was financed by way of cash and a bridge loan from a consortium of banks. On August 6,2013, SoftBank bought 2% more shares of Sprint Corporation, in October 2013, SoftBank acquired 51% stake in Supercell for a reported $2.1 billion. In 2014, SoftBank co-designed Pepper, a robot, with Aldebaran Robotics. In May 2015, Masayoshi Son said he would appoint Nikesh Arora, Arora has been heading SoftBanks investment arm. On June 1,2015, SoftBank acquired additional 22. 7% stake in Supercell, increasing its stake to 73. 2%
