Sony Corp said on Thursday it would launch the world’s thinnest liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs this year, broadening its product line-up ahead of the critical year-end shopping season.

The new 40-inch model, which is 9.9 mm thick, is estimated to sell for 490,000 yen ($4,478) in Japan, Sony said.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also offer the world’s first LCD TVs that display 240 frames per second, compared with 120 frames for Sony’s existing models.

More frames in a given time make fast-moving images in sports programs and action movies look seamless.

Sony, the world’s second-largest LCD TV maker behind Samsung Electronics Co Ltd expects a 46-inch model with the 240 frame function to sell for around 400,000 yen.

Both models will go on sale in Japan on November 10, closely followed by overseas launches.

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers’ Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.

Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.

“If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use,” according to the company’s updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.

Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.

On September 29, 2008 Yahoo! will shut down it beta service Yahoo! Mash. Mash users (me included) already got an email announcement about the closing and being urged to copy al the important information of the web site and copy it to a different document.

Once the service is closed all of the content on your Mash profile with the EXCEPTION of your profile photo, nickname, age, sex and location (if you’ve provided this information) will be unavailable.

Here is the email message I got:

Dear Yahoo! Mash member,

Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it.

Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.

For a list of FAQs, please refer to the Mash Help Page.

Thanks for trying out Mash!

Matt Warburton