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

Year: 2005

Vodafone: Changes to Executive Structure

Vodafone K.K. announces that at today’s Board of Directors Meeting it has decided on changes to its executive structure. William (Bill) T. Morrow, the current Chief Executive of Vodafone UK, will be appointed Representative Executive Officer and President effective 1 April. The current Vodafone K.K. President, Shiro Tsuda, will take on the responsibilities of Executive Chairman while continuing as a Representative Executive Officer, and will also become Chairman of the Board on 1 April. David Jones will complete his term as COO on 31 March.

WWJ Newsletter: Latest Issue

On Friday, Yahoo Asia News carried an interesting Kyodo story on mobile spam in Japan. According to the report, Japanese mobilers are being swamped with junk email despite all-out efforts by the cellcos to eliminate the nuisance. Much of the spam (meiwaku) mail advertises adult web sites and is sent in bulk to millions of mobiles from regular spam servers — that’s the, uhmmm, beauty of Japan’s reliance on Net-standard email rather than SMS for mobile messaging.

The latest edition of the WWJ email newsletter is available online here.

NTT Posts Solid 9 Month Results

Reuters is reporting that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), the world’s biggest telecoms group by revenue, posted a solid operating profit for the first nine months of its business year, despite intense competition. While the group’s fixed-line business may be struggling, the mobile arm is doing rather well, thank you very much.

Matsushita Profit Rises 47%

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world’s largest consumer-electronics maker, said third-quarter profit rose 47 percent on lower costs and flat-screen television sales. The company will cut 7,000 to 8,000 jobs in Japan in its components and mobile phone units by March 31, it said. Matsushita Electric has 340,000 employees, more than double Sony’s, according to Bloomberg data.

3G FOMA 901i Launch

3G FOMA 901i Series LaunchThe 901i-series of 3G FOMA cell phones is DoCoMo’s latest tactical weapon in Japan’s escalating “lighter and smarter” mobile arms race. The four 901i handsets come packed with sophisticated go-go fun: twin stereo speakers and spatially enhanced sound; fat video and music files (500KB); pre-loaded games from Square Enix, Capcom and others; FeliCa smart-card e-wallet functions (in three models); 2-megapixel cameras; a TV guide for accessing TV program listings as far as eight days in advance (in one model) with genre and keyword searches including customized settings and registration for favorite TV shows plus it doubles as a remote control for TVs, DVD-Ds and VTR machines. Wow!

DoCoMo 700i 3G Series: We Smell Fear

Sharp's SH 700iYou can think of DoCoMo’s newest handsets as “901i lite.” The cell carrier hopes four, slim 700i handsets will sing and dance their way into ever-stingier consumers’ hearts and wallets. They are packed with would-be FOMA functionality minus the FeliCa e-wallet and could just provide a significant competitive advantage at a time when KDDI and Vodafone are still rushing to market with fully featured 3G battleships that command heavy-duty prices. Sometime-WWJ commentator Ken Gai’s take on the move is that Big D is merely launching a shrewd counter-attack on KDDI/au… and will use this series as launch pad to boost migration to 3G — perhaps even passing KDDI for total 3G subs by Christmas. But WWJ wonders: What else are they afraid of? The 700i-series handsets are packed with FOMA functions: Chaku Uta ring tones, Chaku Motion ring videos, Chara Den (character avatars that project the caller’s image during video calling), Deco-mail (HTML-formatted virtual stickers for decorating mobile email) plus a QVGA LCD screen, Java and Macromedia Flash applications. In fact, these cellys are almost FOMA in all but name.