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

Year: 2007

Face Check Your Celebrity Status

Our research partners over at Infinita dug-up a great little nugget here today, a cool new service called Koacheki or Face Check. Launched by J-Magic just one month ago the site has already registered an incredible 15 million requests! Based on face-recognition software announced by Oki Electric late last year, the company scans photos submitted from users cellphones and responds with a link to review their top three celebrity matches. A simple yet brilliant way to gather a massive marketing mail list for advertisers and other more advanced services that J-Magic offers.

Urgent News Flash System Planned

KDDI announced yesterday that they are working with rival operator NTT DoCoMo and the Meteorological Agency to develop a platform which will deliver urgent earthquake “news flash” information to cell phones. According to the limited details made available it seems like they are planning to target users only in the immediate area where an earthquake is expected to hit.

Gemini Mobile Announces New Investors

Gemini Mobile has raised an additional financing round of $5 million from Japan’s ACCESS, Aplix Corp. and Nomura Securities. Previous investor, Mitsubishi-UFJ Capital, also invested in this latest round. The new funding follows the recent $20 million round from Goldman Sachs announced in March. The new financing will be used for general business purposes including continued momentum of Gemini’s international expansion efforts.

DoCoMo Buys into FamilyMart

DoCoMo has just announced that they will form a strategic alliance, through a capital tie-up, with the FamilyMart convenience retail chain. DoCoMo will acquire 2,930,500 common shares owned by FamilyMart — approx. 3% of total issued shares — for about 9 billion yen (usd $74 Million) on June 13, 2007. From July 10, FamilyMart stores will begin accepting m-commerce payments via the DoCoMo iD platform which is currently accepted in only about 140 of nearly 7,000 locations nationwide.

Oki Announces Safety Phone

Oki Electric has succeeded in developing the world’s first ultra small DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) wireless module for embedding in mobile phones to be used for inter-vehicle communication systems. Using this module the company succeeded in trial production of the world’s first mobile phone, “Safety Mobile Phone” specifically designed to improve pedestrian safety. The Safety Mobile Phone notifies vehicles in the surrounding area of its location and retrieves the location information of vehicles in the surrounding area that are equipped with the DSRC system.

Mobile Novel Sales Growing

The Economist has caught-on to the growth of mobile novels in Japan noting; “with sales of books in decline, a new market has come as a godsend to Japan’s publishing companies. Sales of mobile-phone novels—books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your keitai, or mobile phone—have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today and are still growing fast.” BusinessWeek ran a good op-ed on this subject last month as well.

Veepers Powers Eshaberi Mail for KDDI

Pulse Mobile announced that the Veepers character animation technology will be pre-installed on all 2007 Summer “au” WIN branded phones from KDDI. Eshaberi Mail (talking mail) allows customers to create naturally talking avatar movies with lip synchronized animations by combining images such as photographs and illustrated characters. Users can also record their own voice which is used to drive characters’ animations.

Yomu.TV Project Announced

NHK and Index have announced their intent to develop a video search application dedicated for digital tv on mobile phones. Yomu.TV effectively uses title text in the broadcast captioning as meta data to access programs by the keyword and will apparently even offer specific scene retrieval. Index will take charge of the technical intelligence concerning the cellphone design development while NHK is responsible for the applications core design and production.