NTT DoCoMo announced today that the company will expand its M-stage Visual Net service to include Personal Handyphone System (PHS) and land line phones that have teleconferencing capabilities, starting March 24, 2003. M-stage Visual Net provides a communications platform that enables numerous people to participate simultaneously in mobile videoconferencing.
Most teens and young adults in Japan rarely use computers to surf the World Wide Web. Instead they use cell phones to access a scaled-down wireless Web. The result: A growing computer literacy problem among Japan’s youth. Yasushi Takashita smiled sheepishly when his slender girlfriend Rika, clinging to the train stanchion next to him, suggested he use the Internet to search for some college-related information he needs. “I don’t know how to use a PC,” he admitted as the orange Chuo Line train car bumped out of Yoyogi, an area in central Tokyo with a high concentration of private prep schools.
After a two-year business strategy planning pause, BREW finally launched in Japan last month. From the consumer point of view, BREW and Java work more or less the same: you navigate a menu, select an application, download it, then run it. There’s little to chose on a technology basis. But BREW – like 3G – may be able to gain a leg up on Java (DoCoMo’s favored choice) if KDDI can continue to roll out cool, fun, cheap, feature-laden (and BREW-enabled) handsets – much as the carrier has done with 3G. Now that KDDI has finally rolled out BREW, we wonder how competition with Java will unfold in 2003? Ironically, BREW’s future may be intimately tied up with that of 3G.
When Rei Nagashima, a 20-year-old university student, first saw the new-fangled mobile phone, she thought it was pretty cool, not to mention harmless. Equipped with a tiny camera, the sleek device could take and send not only photos, but video clips as well. It was given to Nagashima (not her real name) by her wealthy boyfriend after she taunted him, half jokingly, to buy her a new mobile phone.
Went to Machida on Saturday to buy a 256-MB SDRAM memory module to replace the original one that has long plagued my PC with crashes and other devilry (3900 yen, for those that are interested). Sofmap was selling the new SD Card-format mobile data cards for DDI Pocket’s PHS network for 17,800 yen – a little pricey for something that is so small it can be lost in a blink.
It’s rare for me to be Oh-My-God! impressed by mobile applications these days (blame it on George Bush and the endless beat of dreary war drums…), but the demo we saw was really terrific. The animations were great, the sound effects weren’t irritating (like they are with a lot of Java applets), and you could access pics of all the latest car models that slide onto the screen from the left or the right. If there’s a better way to sell cars via mobile, this may be it.
