Year: <span>2007</span>
Year: 2007

Year: 2007

Corporate Use of Mobile Ads

The Nikkei Advertising Research Institute, Nikkei Media Laboratory, and D2 Communications surveyed usage trends by companies using mobile advertising to reach Japan’s more than 97 million mobile phone subscribers. Between February and March of 2007, survey data for advertising expenditure among influential companies was collected by the Nikkei Advertising Research Group from a target group consisting of 1500 leading companies, with 274 companies responding, producing a response rate of 18.3%.

Japan Mobile Advertising Awards

This May, members of the official Screening Committee for the 6th Annual Mobile Marketing Awards convened award prizes to 19 companies for excellence in advertising and marketing using mobile. There were over 314 entries to the competition, an increase of more than 100 applications over the previous year, demonstrating the rising number and variety of companies using mobile. The Awards Ceremony is scheduled for July 19th, at the ANA Intercontintental in Tokyo.

JASRAC Wins MyUta Decision

Back in November 2005, Tokyo-based Image City announced the beta launch of MYUTA, a new service allowing subscribers to store their digital music files (for their own personal use) on a central server. A key feature of the service was the capability for subscribers to access and play the stored music tracks on their mobile phones. JASRAC immediately stepped in and contacted Image City, claiming the service required its approval in order to launch. Image City disagreed, saying the service was outside of JASRAC’s domain, and the stage was set for a legal battle.

Mobile Blogs and SNS Survey

Seron over at What Japan Thinks translated a recently-published report from infoPLANT looking at access trends of blogs and SNS from both mobile phones and PC’s. Conducted between the 15th and 22nd of May 2007 3,709 people self-selected themselves to complete a public survey offered through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 61.9% of the sample was female.

Wireless Wallet Trials in US

According to PC World, Cellular South in Jackson, Miss., joined USA Technologies in Malvern, Pa., this week to announce a two-city consumer trial of WirelessWallet, a service that will let consumers make m-commerce payments from a cell phone. They will use handsets from Kyocera that will act as a digital credit card enabling customers to tap & go their phone on a NFC terminal to make purchases.

SoftBank Mobile Rockin in May

When the TCA subscriber numbers came out on Thursday the champange corks were popping in Shiodome. For the first time ever the number 3 operator (J-Phone, then Vodafone and now SoftBank) gained the most net customers (162,400) on the month beating KDDI’s 138,500 and nearly double DoCoMo’s 82,700. While their Yahoo! portal also added more clients than EZweb and i-mode the company also managed to boost their 3G accounts up by nearly 500,000 month-on-month to total 8.6 million or 50% of their total subscriber base.

MCN Wins Meffy Award

Mobile Content Networks won a Meffy award in Monte Carlo for its popular FM Radio Music Search application which was launched on DoCoMo’s D903i in 2006. The Meffys Search and Discovery Award was a new category introduced this year to highlight the great work being done by companies to encourage people to discover and enjoy content on their handsets. Congats!

Willcom Introduces New Smart Phone

Willcom, Sharp and Microsoft held a press conference yesterday at the Okura Hotel to announce the new W-Zero3 ES smartphone. The 3rd model in their series from Sharp this latest unit weighs in at 157grams and measures just under 18mm thick. Boasting a 3.3 inch VGA (480×800) LCD touch-screen display and the so-called xCrawl jog dial with Windows 6 OS running on Marvells PXA270 520MHz processor and Wi-Fi enabled this device will be available on order here by the end of June. WWJ was on-hand for the event and will post video asap, more details after the jump.