Surprise! NEC’s new card mobile phone is just going on sale in the China market. Japan’s number one cellie maker certainly appears to be spreading its wings in China these days, even if, or perhaps because things aren’t looking too pretty at the moment in the UK.
As mentioned in previous stories and our recent video report, Sony and DoCoMo have been busy setting up FeliCa Networks Inc. to develop the companies’ mobile FeliCa IC that will, we think, lead to the massive expansion of the mobile phone as a do-all contactless payment device. Sony announced today that it has firmed up the FeliCa Networks company organization with Takeshi Natsuno (“Mr. i-mode”) as one of the directors.
“We know what kind of contents sell, we know what the customers want and we can create a great user experience for the users on the networks,” says Playboy.com’s VP of Global Licensing, Markus Grindel, talking to Wireless Watch Japan in Part 2 of our exclusive video coverage from the 3G Mobile Forum 2004. With adult content helping kick-start and then drive the VHS and DVD revolutions, estimates of a $4-7 billion market for this content category in the wireless space in 2006 don’t seem far-fetched at all. But a number of roadblocks, including carrier technologies, billing and DRM pose significant hurdles as well. “Right now its very hard for me to determine if someone receives an image from us if that image is being sent to someone else. How old is that person.. I don’t know, and that’s a key factor to figure out,” says Grindel. Full Program Run-time 12:47
We finally filmed the introduction to our latest video program – outside an establishment called “Sexual Harassment Corporation” – one of four or five adult industry vendors, including a brothel and a “Love Hotel” in a side street off the main drag, where prostitutes jump out and routinely proposition drunk salarimen (and the happily married author). There isn’t a station on the Yamanote line that isn’t crowded by similar scenes, and there there’s hardly a carriage on the JR line that doesn’t have, shall we say, full-blown advertisements for adult mags and manga that show Japanese girls seemingly as young as 14 flirting and flaunting themselves. Let’s face it, sex sells in Japan. Which brings us to wonder why Playboy.com is being blocked from the official Mobinet space.
NEC Corp. has developed a cellular telephone with digital camera function that is the size of a credit card, and plans to unveil it next week. Few details of the telephone are available at present and NEC is expected to announce its development and the name of a launch customer at a Tokyo news conference scheduled for Tuesday.
KDDI, Japan’s number two wireless carrier, has both been surging ahead of DoCoMo and Vodafone K.K. with its new net adds over the last quarter, and in profits. Last Friday, Jan 30, the company announced that its net profit grew 140.5% to 123.4 billion yen ($1.2 billion) for the quarter ending December 30, 2003 compared to last year.
Vodafone K.K. announced today that after early April it will market the V801SH by Sharp, a new Vodafone Global Standard (VGS) 3G handset compatible with Vodafone live! for use both in Japan and abroad. The V801SH is a dual mode handset capable of operating on Vodafone’s 3GPP-based W-CDMA network in Japan and roaming on GSM networks worldwide.
The government-affiliated Communications Research Laboratory and private-sector companies will team up with Chinese research institutions and firms this autumn on a project to develop a technology standard for 4G mobile telephony, sources familiar with the matter said. NTT Communications Corp, KDDI Corp, Hitachi, Ltd, NEC Corp and Fujitsu Ltd will also be among the Japanese participants.
Japan’s Communication Research Laboratory (CRL) plus NTT Communications, KDDI, Hitachi and Fujitsu are teaming up with the China Academy of Telecommunications Research, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and some local carriers to formulate and develop an 4G standard and to fight off the ITU’s standardization bid…
The acceleration of DoCoMo’s fantastically subsidized FOMA handset uptake continues apace, with the company today announcing that subscriptions have just topped 2 million, about 2 months ahead of DoCoMo’s deliberately conservative estimates. (Once bitten, forever shy?) For a benchmark comparison, this places DoCoMo about 2 million handsets ahead of Vodafone K.K.’s 3G subscriber base and about 8 million behind KDDI’s. Still, it’s a nice christening present for the new and beautiful 900i handsets that the company is going to let loose on the network next month. See the DoCoMo press release for more details.
