Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store Japan will be gaining more content from Wednesday with the addition of songs from Victor Entertainment Inc. The recording label, which is affiliated with Victor Co. of Japan Ltd. (JVC), will add 18 albums totalling 209 tracks to Apple’s online music distribution service, it said. The tracks cover mainly Japanese domestic artists.
A group of major m-commerce companies announced a large-scale U.S. trial last week to include contactless payment, mobile content and premium arena services at Philips Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. The companies claim the trial will be the first large-scale test of next-generation mobile-phone applications in North America. The grouping includes Chase, Cingular Wireless, Nokia, Philips, Visa USA and others. The contactless payment functionality will be based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology first developed by Sony and Philips. Other NFC trials are underway in Germany and France.
Wireless Watchers will know that the Sony/Philips NFC technology is also powering the super-successful “FeliCa”-branded mobile contactless payment services in Japan and has been adopted by NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone as the de facto market standard for m-commerce, e-wallets, transportation and other peer-to-peer data transfer services. Sony first deployed NFC on the Octopus card in Hong Kong in 1997 and rolled their mobile handset trial ran in Japan in December 2003 — see WWJ video here. Today, over 7 million FeliCa-enabled phones have already been sold by DoCoMo alone.
One might think the two-year jump on deployment and commercial experience, not to mention brand equity, in Japan would motivate Sony to transplant an obvious success story from Tokyo to markets elsewhere. Instead, it looks like the wheel is being reinvented all over again.
Fuji Television Network Inc., Japan’s biggest broadcaster, said it’s in talks to sell a stake to NTT DoCoMo Inc. Tokyo-based Fuji confirmed the negotiations in a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, following a Nihon Keizai newspaper report saying DoCoMo is in talks to buy a 3 percent stake in the broadcaster for about 20 billion yen ($171 million). Fuji Television may sell treasury stock to DoCoMo, the newspaper reported, without saying who provided the information.
Vodafone K.K. announced today that it will commence sales of the Vodafone 804SH [ .jpg image ], a new 3G handset by Sharp, on 22 December 2005 in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions, and all other regions on 17 January 2006. The 804SH has a new contrasting design with the upper and under body of the handset featuring “different forms and material feel”. The 804SH also features ‘Custom Screens’ for menu screen icon and wallpaper customisation, allowing customers to express their individuality from the display screen. This is the carriers second Osaifu-Keitai (mobile wallet) handset with embedded IC-chip to support Vodafone live! FeliCa and their first 3G phone with the Motion Control Sensor that responds to movements.
Epson Toyocom Corp. announced that it will release a new series of voltage-controlled X’tal (crystal) oscillators (VCXO) that support mobile handsets capable of receiving terrestrial digital TV broadcasts. The VG-4231CE Series will be among the smallest-footprint crystal solutions in the industry yet will offer frequency control characteristics equivalent to their predecessors. This will allow them to meet the ongoing demand for miniaturization while also easily handling the complicated timing of high-quality image recording signals. Samples will begin shipping in February 2006.
Proxim Wireless Corporation, a global provider of broadband wireless equipment and subsidiary of Terabeam, Inc., today announced that it is supplying NEC Infrontia Corp., a leading manufacturer of key telephone systems and point-of-sale (POS) systems, with the infrastructure to deploy Wi-Fi hotspots and wireless POS solutions throughout Japan in all of the locations of two large retail chains. These deployments are individually the largest retail wireless networks in both companies’ history.
