Silicon Graphics’ Japanese subsidiary has come up with a pintsized (95 x 65 x 24 mm) 2-megapixel webcam that incorporates a server and can stream video via your preferred flavour of Compact Flash-format communications card (WiFi or 3G cellphone, for example). It has 64MB of SDRAM and 16MB of flash memory, which equates to storage for about two hours’ worth of VGA-sized MPEG 4 video at 15 frames per second. There’s also an NTSC model (left in the photo) that loses the camera in favour of an external camera connection and Ethernet port. Pricing looks set to be rather steep, at around Y150,000 (about $1,400), though this is firmly aimed at corporate and government clients, who have more money to throw around than us plebs. (Doesn’t look like SGI will be releasing this in the States, incidentally.)

Japanese component maker Murata has developed an 802.11b/g chip that’s 9.6 x 9.6 x 1.8 mm in size. It has already shipped limited quantities to several cellphone manufacturers, and—to turn the usual pattern on its head—the chip will appear first in US smartphones, not in a Japan-market product. There’s already one WiFi cellphone about to hit Japanese shelves, from NEC, but news about other models is thin to nonexistent at the moment. We get the feeling that Japanese carriers may not be all that enthusiastic about anything that speeds up the inexorable move toward flat rates for data, given the prophecies of doom that have surrounded that particular development.