Nintendo looks to flexing it’s business muscle, as the Japanese gaming company took a 27% stake in PUX Corporation. PUX is a subsidiary of Panasonic, whose facial recognition software for digital cameras and voice recognition was used in Nintendo games like Brain Age.
Nintendo’s desire to acquire PUX looks to be an attempt at taking advantage of PUX’s new developing technology and to add it to its own future developments. The technology Nintendo is interested in is PUX’s development of new ways for the user interface to enhance the operation of systems. PUX Corporation had originally designed software created to recognize characters entered on the DS touchscreen, a feature heavily used in Brain Age.
As of now, Nintendo is the second largest owner of PUX’s shares. Panasonic originally owned up to 78%. However, after Nintendo’s purchase (which was around 35 million Yen), Panasonic’s stake with PUX was reduced to 51%.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo has aggressively gone after software development, as Mobiclip was acquired by Nintendo back in 2011. Now called Nintendo European Research & Development, this division’s video codec is used for many 3DS and Wii games. Nintendo European Research & Development also helped in the development of the Wii U Internet Browser.
We will have to wait and see if Nintendo’s business venture will see success.
