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

Casio Shares Tumble 16 Percent

Shares of Casio Computer Co. fell the most in 32 years after the company missed its profit target and unveiled plans to expand in the crowded mobile-phone market. The stock tumbled by the 400-yen daily limit, or 16 percent, to 2,025 yen in Tokyo, erasing $931 million from its market value. Brokerages including HSBC Holdings Plc downgraded the stock after the company reported annual profit of 25.1 billion yen ($209 million), missing its own estimate by 9 percent.

Mobile Monday Tokyo Demo Night Video

A Totally Vivid User Interface - Video DemoThe recent MoMo Tokyo event, held 23 April at KDDI’s Designing Studio, featured a mobile mash-up of presentations in the super-cool Demo Night format – which has been popular in other chapter cities. For Demo Night, a line-up of interesting mobile companies were allowed a 5- to 7-minute show & tell session for their mobile content or service offering – displayed on an actual handset and projected on the big screen for all to see. We’ve posted video of all six presentations for those of you who were unable to attend in person.

Tracey Northcott, VP at Enfour Group demonstrated Camera Jiten a native Brew dictionary application for instant scanning of English words giving their Japanese translations. Mandali Khalesi, CEO of Naviblog, showed-off how to find the closest Guinness with your mobile phone. David Collier, founder and CEO of Pikkle, demonstrated a new type of full-screen mobile flash service they provide to enable rich social networking. Nobuyoshi Noda, Mobile Division Deputy GM of Adways, gave an overview of the Mobile Affiliate Advertisement Smart-C product. Tim Smith, Director of Freeverse Consulting, introduced Malibu IVP, a middleware approach to creating useful and viable 3G videocall applications and Hiroshi Oda, VP Corporate Communications from CIAJ, announced that CEATEC JAPAN 2007 will launch a new special exhibit area under the theme of Digital Contents for their annual trade-show in October.

Boingo Roaming into Tokyo

Boingo Wireless announced a roaming agreement with livedoor Co. Ltd., to add the company’s central Tokyo Wi-Fi network to their 60,000 global hotspot collection. This agreement marks the second Asian hot zone to join the Boingo Roaming System the first was citywide WIFLY network in Taipei, which added in July 2006. According to the press release livedoor’s network covers 80% of the outdoor area located within the Yamanote Line with thousands of power-pole mounted access points.

SoftBank Announces FYE 2006 Results

Softbank Corp. announced their FYE 2006 results yesterday indicating that the parent companies fourth-quarter operating profit more than doubled YoY after buying Vodafone mobile-phone unit last spring. The entire presentation video is available in English Here. The 1.66 trillion yen acquisition made Softbank the second-fastest growing company in sales terms on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average for the fiscal first half ended Sept. 30. Operating profit rose to 73.8 billion yen ($615 million) in the three months ended March 31 from 34.4 billion yen in Q4 2005, while sales more than doubled to 721.9 billion yen from 298.4 billion yen, according to Bloomberg.

NEC Launches First Overseas WiMAX Trial

NEC has recently commenced a full-scale mobile WiMAX (16e) trial in Hualien city with Tatung, a major Taiwanese conglomerate company which runs manufacturing, sales of consumer-electronics and LCDs, as well as ISP business. This mobile WiMAX trial marks the first project to be conducted by NEC outside of Japan, and will continue until September, 2007. The trial was conducted as part of the “M-Taiwan” project being lead by the Taiwan. M-Taiwan is a national project to establish a networked information society and to cultivate IT-related industries in the domestic market.

SoftBank Mobile White Plan Results

SoftBank Mobile has announced that the number of subscriptions for the companies “While Plan” has exceeded four million on May 3, 2007. Originally introduced in early January, this simple price package offers a monthly basic charge of ¥980 with free domestic voice calls between SoftBank Mobile users from 1:00 to 21:00, and for domestic voice calls other than those it charges a tariff of 21 yen/30 sec. In addition, text messaging between 3G users is, with some restrictions, free of charge.

DNP's Electric Wave Poster

Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) has announced [in Japanese] the development of an information delivery terminal for mobile phones equipped with FeliCa. This so-called Electric Wave Poster system is composed of their ‘PetitPorta’ reader unit and a dedicated URL management server which is configured to deliver information related to the POP (point of purchasing advertisement) to RFID enabled handsets. The total number of accesses for each Petit-Porta location can be tracked and, if desired, a membership prompt is also possible in order to collect user information for loyalty programs or future marketing campaigns.

i-mode Launch Cancelled in India

NTT DoCoMo has just announced that the company and Indian mobile operator Hutchison Essar Ltd. (“Hutch”) have agreed not to proceed with the contract signed on December 15, 2006 regarding the licensing of the i-mode mobile Internet service in India. DoCoMo and Hutch had been striving to launch i-mode service in India within 2007. Due to the changes in business environment, both companies concluded that it would be difficult to launch i-mode service at this time and agreed not to proceed.

Satellite Phones for the Masses

According to this article on the Yomiuri, plans to launch a satellite to create an emergency cell phone relay station in space were announced by the Japanese Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry last week. The stationary orbital satellite with an antenna more than twice the size of any existing satellite antenna, would be used to secure mobile phone connections when ground base relay stations have been knocked out in an earthquake or other natural disasters. The ministry hopes to have the system running by the end of fiscal 2015.

MLB Team Offers QR Code Tickets

According to this press release the MLB Washington Nationals became the first major sports team in the United States to use mobile phone ticketing technology in April. Tickets@Phone will allow fans to have their tickets delivered to their phone via text message which includes a unique barcode along with standard ticket information. The barcode may be scanned for entry at the left side of Main Gate at RFK Stadium. Once scanned, each guest will receive a print out of their ticket to be retained throughout the game.