UFJ Nicos, the core credit card division of UFJ Mitsubishi Financial Group and Visa International have agreed to offer mobile phone IC payment services. Under the deal announced UFJ will give Visa the right to use it’s “Smart Plus” settlement technology. The two companies will set up a new firm to oversee the service according to the report.
The news just hit the wires: Vodafone Group has agreed to sell its stake in its struggling Japanese unit to Softbank Corp. for $11.87 billion in cash. The deal announced on Friday values Vodafone Japan at around 1.8 trillion yen ($15.30 billion) including debt and will allow Vodafone to return 6 billion pounds to shareholders.
Editor’s note: This news will be all over the Web in a few minutes. What a sad end to what could have been a highly valuable synergistic move into the world’s most advanced 3G market! Defeated by fickle consumers, the lack of a low-end tier in the segment, and the challenge of coordinating terminals and technologies across borders, Vodafone is heading home. The price of the deal, a whopping 15 billion bucks, proves that Vodafone KK is a valuable commodity — in the right hands. — Eds.
A project team formed by NHK and five major commercial broadcasters in Tokyo have decided that a 600-meter tower for terrestrial digital television broadcasting [.jpg] will be built in the Sumida-Taito area of the capital according to an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun. The new tower, dubbed Tokyo Tower 2 [formally named Sky Tree], is scheduled for completion at the end of 2010 and will be the worlds largest telecom tower, surpassing CN Tower in Toronto, currently the tallest at 553 meters. Video Here
Japanese wireless service operator Willcom Inc., owned by U.S. investment fund Carlyle Group and Japanese electronics firm Kyocera Corp, will soon start choosing book-runners for its public share offering planned as early as next year, financial sources said. Willcom added 64,900 subscribers in February for a total of 3.8 million — an increase of 25 percent since March last year when it introduced the flat-rate voice plan.
Vodafone K.K. today announced the development of the Vodafone 905SH [.jpg] by Sharp, a new 3G handset capable of receiving “One Seg” terrestrial digital TV broadcasts. The new model is planned for release by June 2006, in time for scheduled the upcoming World Cup football matches. This handset features a new Cycloid Style rotating display for easy mobile TV viewing , a design innovation which will enable customers to enjoy digital TV broadcasts in 400 x 240 pixel resolution, full widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio format.
Japan’s mobile-phone shipments are forecast to rise this year, after gaining for the first time in three quarters in the period ended December, researcher IDC said. For all of 2005, shipments rose 0.5 percent to 44.32 million units. Sales of 3G handsets in the fourth quarter helped offset declines in the previous two quarters, fourth-quarter mobile-phone shipments rose 7.1 percent to 11.6 million units from a year earlier, IDC said.
eMobile, a new entrant to the Japanese 3G market, has selected Ericsson as the prime supplier of its new W-CDMA/HSDPA network. The agreement involves W-CDMA 1.7GHz radio networks in the most
populated areas of Japan, such as Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, and a complete nationwide core network, including Ericsson’s service-aware packet core and mobile softswitch solution. Fast roll-out will enable eMobile, a subsidiary company of eAccess, to launch commercial services in March 2007.
Sherelog is a system that fetches data from JR’s Suica RFID train pass and visualizes personal train-ride records on a large public map (or Google Map). Koutaro Hashimoto, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Toshio Iwai, Michitaka Hirose showed this system at the Japan Media Arts Festival earlier this month. The developers’ intentions seem to be (1) to support people to remember their personal travel histories and reflect upon them and (2) to create unique opportunities for communications by making it extremely easy to share personal travel histories.
Japan-based MobileCast has introduced a bluetooth controller and custom face-plate package [.jpg] for DoCoMo’s new P902i 3G handsets made by Panasonic. The “mLink” kit is available, for an estimated market price of about 14,800 yen, in 3 different Disney character designs; Mickey mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Alice in Wonderland and enables remote control operations with the cellphones music player including play, skip, pause and volume adjustment at a working distance of about 10 meters.
According to reports from local media, DoCoMo have applied to the Guinness Book of Records for its i-mode service as a result of the 70 million emails sent in one hour on New Year’s eve 2006. It is said that there has been no other instance when a single mobile Internet service provider has sent and received 70 million mails in one hour.
