42nd RWPPI General Meeting held (on 2007/04/18) at Pioneer Corporation’s Head Office in Meguro.

The opening speech was made by the RWPPI Representative Mr. Aizawa. “With the end of the DVD format wars, shifting our focus to satisfy end-user demands is of increasing importance. Greater emphasis on our Round Robin Test activities must be continued for reliable compatibility with new technologies and wider range of products.”

This was followed by a report from the RWPPI secretariat Mr. Saito, on the JRT Tokyo Seminar (Feb. 23) and Taiwan Seminar (March 8-9) held respectively, that highlighted the Round Robin Test results. This time, an outside guest speaker was also invited to present a special lecture at the Taiwan Seminar, with the topic “The Future Trends of Red Optical Disc,” presented by Mr. Komatsu, CEO of BOC (Holdings) Ltd. (a research company), and was very well received by the attendees. The next day following the Taiwan Seminar in Taipei, a Technical Meeting was held between the Taiwanese and Japanese engineers of optical storage discs, PC software, and hardware manufacturers at ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) in Hsinchu, having active discussions.

Next, the annual questionnaire results of RWPPI member’s opinions and feedback of its activities was presented by Ongen Publishing Co., Ltd. This year’s results received very straightforward responses on issues covering RWPPI’s overall activities, Satisfaction of General Meetings, Evaluation of its Home Page, and in regard to its Activities Report

In continuation, plans for RWPPI’s FY8 activities were presented by the Secretary General, Mr. Morishita, which was unanimously approved by the attendees. For this new term starting from April, main concentration will focus on the Round Robin Test activities aside from General Meetings to be held quarterly, making best efforts to link the meetings with the Round Robin Test Meetings for the benefit of the attendees.

From WebStream Corporation, the “DVD Toaster” service to burn DVD video contents directly onto current DVD-RW/R discs now available in the market was introduced. This service enables the end-user to easily burn contents from the internet, without the necessity of any special application software. This new business model captured high interest of the attendees.

As the last topic on the agenda, the special lecture by Mr. Nakano of Nokia Japan Co., Ltd. presented us insights of his business experiences in the U.S.A., Europe, Japan, and the unique company culture of the “NOKIA Way,”　with easy to understand explanations. Interesting aspects related to business and mobile communications sparked the attendees to raise many questions after the presentation, showing how interested they were in the lecture.