According to this article, American broadcasters are quietly planning to beam the stations signal to cellphones, video iPods, in-car DVD players and other gadgets that would be equipped with TV tuners. The high-quality digital tv broadcasts likely would start in 2009. The new effort could pump fresh life into stations that have steadily lost viewers to cable TV, the Web, game players and mobile phones.
Kyocera announced the successful field-testing of handsets used in a WirelessWallet consumer trial by Cellular South. Equipped with Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, the handsets were used by consumers to make wireless payments and purchases in the nation’s first multi-city trial by a wireless service provider. According to Cellular South, WirelessWallet will become available to consumers in early 2008.
According to reports in the Japanese media, NEC Corp unveiled its ‘Wideband Wearable Antenna’ which can be attached to various kinds of material, including clothing. NEC will conduct a field test to receive 1Seg digital-tv in the 470-770MHz band and apparently plans to continue evaluating other potential target areas such as WiMax.
The fall and winter 2007 handset season is officially upon us now with au announcing their new series of models will hit the dori by middle of November. The latest line-up also claims one ‘world first’ with a co-op between Samsung and Hitachi, on the W53H – Wooo, touting a 2.8 inch QVGA organic EL display targeting users hooked on 1Seg digital-tv. More details with pics and links after the jump.
Advanced M-Pay, the mobile payment arm of AIS, is penetrating the online community and making inroads into the high-margin international direct dialing services in an effort to turn a profit in 2008 for the first time ever. The 70:30 joint venture firm between the Thai cellular market leader Advanced Info Service and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo (as noted Here) expects the strategic shift to improve its performance by 30% next year in terms of transaction volume and value, revenue and profit.
According to Seeking Alpha, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association [JEITA], stated mobile phone shipments in Japan has climbed 39.1 percent to hit a total of 4.2 million units in August. “The industry group attributed greatly the rise in the shipments to a surge in the number of handsets able to receive digital terrestrial television broadcasts. The report said that shipments of 3G handsets climbed 50.7 percent on year to 4 million units, compared to shipments of 2G handsets went down 93 pct to 17,000 units.”
Sony and KDDI will enable digital music to be shared between Sony portable and home-use music players and mobile phones on KDDI’s network. The new joint service, dubbed auxSony Music Project, will start from December through free software upgrades, will allow music files to be freely transferred between some of their products, according to this press release.
NTT DoCoMo and KT Freetel just announced that in November they will set up a venture fund in Korea to invest in promising mobile and IT firms. Through the fund, DoCoMo and KTF expect to identify promising companies for tie-ups in technology and other opportunities in the mobile and IT sectors. The fund will will operate for six years, with an option for a two-year extension, and will be managed by KTBnetwork Co., Ltd.
Mobile Content Networks (MCN) has announced the establishment of MCN Japan K.K., a wholly-owned subsidiary of MCN Inc. Concurrent with the formation of MCN Japan K.K. MCN has moved its global operating headquarters to Tokyo to accelerate response to growing demand for MCN’s whitelabel Mobile Search Management platform in Japan, Southeast Asia, China, and India.
We’re thrilled to announce the next MoMo Tokyo event, 22 October at the fabulous Designing Studio, will feature presentations from Dr. Hitomi Murakami, former executive director and principal research engineer at KDDI’s R&D labs, and Tomi Ahonen, best-selling author and strategy consultant for digital convergence and advanced mobile telecoms. Both gentlemen are long-time industry insiders and the evening promises to be extremely informative and very well-attended.
