According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Sony’s planned worldwide layoffs of 8,000 announced late in 2008 will hit Hawaii hard. Currently, Hawaii has 70 employees of Sony. According to Sony, 17 employees will be taking retirement options within the next 60 days. Within the same time frame, another 14 employees will be laid off. All in all, slightly more than 44% of the current Sony employees in Hawaii will be out of jobs before July 1st.

Another area in the United States that will be hit hard is San Diego, California. Multiple sources are indicating that more than 330 Sony employees will be let go in that Southern California city.

Sony was founded in 1945 in Japan and it’s currently headquartered in Tokyo. Although still a very influential company around the world, Sony has recently been hit hard by the poor economy around the world. Their revenue and profits have suffered and they’ve been forced to reorganize their business. Despite the struggles, Sony is said to have more than $200 billion in total assets.

Sony (Image: Flickr)

We’ve talked about writing a novel using your phone’s keypad, and we’ve talked about cell phones as a platform for ebooks.

Book marketing expert John Kremer points to an article in the New York Times called Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular. At this point, the novels are those that have been written for cell phones with short sentences and lots of cell phone spelling.

What’s amazing is that the top seller (Love Sky by Mika) sold to 20 million folks, was printed as a print book and was made into a movie.

Obviously, cell phones are going to play a significant roll in that thing we call book writing and publishing. Stay tuned and flexible.

Write well and often,

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