START Lab Inc. (株式会社スタート ・ ラボ; ''Sony Taiyo Yuden Advanced Recording Technology Laboratory'') is a
joint venture
A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acce ...
of
Sony Corporation
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
and
Taiyo Yuden Co., Ltd. The headquarters are in
Chiyoda, Tokyo
is a Special wards of Tokyo, special ward located in central Tokyo, Japan. It is known as Chiyoda City in English language, English. .
START Lab, founded in June 1989, was active in the optical media business. Initially intended to produce small-scale runs of CDs for business customers on the basis of newly developed CD-R technology, it pioneered the sale of
CD-R
CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times.
CD-R discs (CD-Rs) are readable by most CD readers manufactured prior to the int ...
media to consumers. The current president is
Masanori Kimizuka
Masanori is a masculine Japanese given name.
Kanji and meaning
The name Masanori is generally written with two kanji, the first read and the second read , for example:
*Starting with ("correct"):
**: second kanji means "rule" or "regulation ...
.
START Lab , Company Profiles
50.1% of START Lab is owned by Sony, 49.9% is owned by Taiyo Yuden.
START Lab ceased operations in March 2016 after parent company Taiyo Yuden ended production of storage media.
Well-known product lines included the That's consumer media, the That's CD-R/DVD-R for master product line, and the CD/DVD error checkers (ES-50, ES-70, ES-1000 rebranded Almedio model).
References
{{reflist
External links
Official website (English)
Official website (Japanese)
Electronics companies of Japan