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

Year: 2005

Overseas Mobile Games Enter Japan

Best of West rides into townNow here’s a twist: just when we’ve spilled a lot of ink lately telling you how Japanese mobile Internet players are succeeding overseas, in comes a press release from Dublin, Ireland-based Upstart Games Ltd. announcing that their Tokyo subsidiary, Upstart KK, has launched what they call the first multi-carrier service dedicated to providing Japanese mobilers with access to popular US and European games. With a catchy name and the allure of foreign brands, the “Best of West” gaming contents channel may just grab a few thumbs, not to mention per-download revenues.

Credit Saison Seeks Partners

Credit Saison Co., Japan’s second- largest publicly traded credit card operator, said it will expand ties with regional banks to outgrow bigger rivals Nippon Shinpan Co. and JCB Co. and win 30 percent of the domestic market by 2010. [..] Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., Japan’s No. lender, has allied with NTT DoCoMo Inc. to offer credit services for mobile phone subscribers. It had about 12.8 million cardholders as of March 31 2004.

Entertainment firms the ones to watch

According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) report, Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2005-2009, the media and entertainment (M&E) industry will increase at a 7.3 percent compound annual growth rate to $1.8 trillion in 2009. The US remains the largest M&E market but not the fastest-growing one. It has been outpaced by Asia/Pacific where China is on track to overtake Japan as the region’s entertainment giant by 2008.

Students Get Security Cell Phones

Tokyo’s Shinagawa-ku has taken an extra step to protect children in the ward by deciding to give them “crime prevention cell phones” that allow them to alert authorities if they are in danger and make emergency calls. Trials of the alert system the phones use will start at the beginning of next week. Plans have been made to supply the devices to all 12,000 elementary school students in the ward within this year.

ACCESS' NetFront Powers Full Internet Browsing on N901iS 3G Handset

ACCESS announced that its NetFront full Internet mobile browser has been selected by NTT DoCoMo for deployment in its 3G FOMA N901iS handset. The N901iS is part of DoCoMo’s 901iS Mobile Wallet series—the most advanced handset series ever developed by DoCoMo. In combination with ACCESS’ NetFront browser, the N901iS handset’s advanced functionality expands to deliver support for both i-mode as well as full Internet browsing. ACCESS’ NetFront browser provides N901iS end-users with a rich, full Internet mobile browsing experience that includes the ability to scale down standard Web pages to fit the width of the phone screen, thus eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling while significantly facilitating the mobile browsing experience.