Year: <span>2005</span>
Year: 2005

Year: 2005

Toshiba 803 Handset with Oasis SD

Toshiba Mobile announced an agreement to bring exclusive live and pre-recorded content from Oasis to its music mobile phone, the Toshiba 803T. As part of this agreement Toshiba has been appointed exclusive mobile sponsor for Oasis live dates across major European territories up to Christmas 2005. The 803T handset [ .jpg image ], which will be launched in Europe in October, will be bundled with exclusive audio and video from Oasis on a 512-MB SD card. This content includes video for the new Oasis single “Let There Be Love” as well as five exclusive live audio and video tracks recorded at the Oasis homecoming concert at the City of Manchester Stadium in July 2005.

Marlboro Rolls New Shift Gears Campaign

Here’s a slick way for Philip Morris to tap into their customers, within the well-established pack a day distribution network, using mobile. Running from early September through the end of December, Marlboro cigarette packs will have a unique lotto number under the lid allowing registered members to win branded merchandise on the spot ranging from lighters and ball caps to larger weekly prize draws for jackets and mountain bikes. The grand prize trip to Italy for some hands-on F1 gear jamming!

Clearly an innovative approach to tap into, segment and reward the companies loyal base. While it’s not the first time they have run at ‘coupon code’ campaign, the QR driven approach – created by part of the same crew who earned a Golden Lion at Canne for Vidal Sassoon – this should definitely render more valuable meta data results than 1994. Watch the show&tell video [26mb – .mp4] to see the process in action.. 😎

Firm Grip On Handset Design

Today, TechFaith employs 1,800 designers and hardware and software engineers, occupying four floors of an old TV factory in a grubby industrial district near Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road. The company has developed more than 100 handset designs for 9 of the top 10 Chinese manufacturers as well as Japan’s NEC, Kyocera, and Mitsubishi.

Yahoo Japan Launches Mobile Content

Yahoo Japan announced it will launch a mobile content distribution service in which cell-phone users can buy games, ring tones, news and other services in 17 categories from 59 content providers including Cybird and game-maker Taito Corp. A full breakdown of their new offerings after the jump.

KDDI to Buy Tokyo Electric Unit

Confirming the rumors of late August, KDDI Corp., Japan’s second-largest phone company, will buy the telecommunication unit of Tokyo Electric Power Co. for 127.5 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in stock to expand its Internet-based phone services and gain customers. Japanese telecom companies are seeking ventures with utilities companies to compete against former government monopoly NTT. KDDI will inherit PoweredCom’s more than 4,000 business customers, including Hewlett-Packard Japan, and 64,000 kilometers of fiber optic network infrastructure in the Tokyo area.

Can Visto, Vodafone, Nokia Push Email into Corporate Pockets?

Nokia E-SeriesA brief prediction. While idly surfing about the web today, I noticed that Visto, a US-based developer of corporate email solutions, has started a Japanese-language website; there’s no new, startling information, but they’ve translated their product & corporate data, news releases, etc. — presumably, at some cost. Why the big effort? They’ve just announced a deal to deliver push email on Nokia’s new E-series business devices (did someone say "Looks like a Blackberry?"); they are also working with Vodafone in The Netherlands for mobile email.

It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to predict they’ve got a deal cooking with Big Red in Japan. Could Visto and Vodafone, the come-from-behind 3G carrier, have a chance to place a Nokia Blackberry-style device into Japan’s potentially lucrative corporate market, populated by salarymen who have until now disdained ultra-cool email-capable 3G phones for anything other than low-margin voice calls? Until now, only DoCoMo has provided any sort of mail-capable, PDA-type device, and only to mixed results (the devices, notably from Sharp and Motorola, have been rather pricey). December’s shaping up to be an interesting month.