Year: <span>2006</span>
Year: 2006

Year: 2006

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile Phones

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile PhonesNHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.

The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.

WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.

RFID Cigarette Vending Machines

The Tobacco Institute of Japan said Thursday it will start switching cigarette vending machines nationwide to new machines featuring an age-verification system from March 2008 to prevent minors from buying cigarettes. The institute announced that a total of 620,000 tobacco vending machines nationwide will be switched during 2008 to types that can read “tobacco cards” with integrated circuit chips bought by adult smokers.

Not surpised, we’ve seen the same age verification function on “Sake Pass” machines [ .jpg image ] for some time already — Eds.

TOKYOPOP – Manga to Go

TOKYOPOP Inc., has teamed up with uclick, LLC, a leader in mobile entertainment, to bring “TOKYOPOP Mobile Manga” to mobile phone users worldwide. This unique, downloadable manga application plays manga titles in their original multi-panel format on mobile phones. uclick has developed a new JAVA and BREW subscription application that offers new manga content every day. With a clean, rich graphic presentation coupled with a simple user interface, the manga application puts this popular Japanese art form into the hands of dedicated fans looking for that dose of manga on the go.

Bridging the Mobile Gaming Divide

Bridging the Mobile Gaming DivideDespite all the effort WWJ has put into finding and covering software developers that have successfully transitioned out of Japan’s navel-gazing mobile market to markets elsewhere, I must admit we haven’t found thousands. Or even dozens. But one of them is Shinjuku, Tokyo-based G-mode, and this week the Japanese mobile game maker and its Dublin, Ireland-based partner Upstart Games said four IQ-enhancing games, already popular in Japan, would be distributed in the US and Europe via Upstart. The news underscores the profits to be found when forward-thinking mobile players work hard to bridge the wireless culture divide.

Upstart’s CEO Barry O’Neil told WWJ that the company has been planning to launch a brain training game for mobile since the runaway success of the genre in Japan late last year. Ironically, the Irish side was initially skeptical that such a narrow niche could win operator interest in Europe or the US. “We’ve a relationship with G-mode dating back to last year, and their Right Brain Paradise was something we’d looked at in the past, but felt gaining operator support could be difficult. Now that the genre is becoming more widely known we felt the time was right to introduce this mobile series,” he wrote in an email yesterday.

The three-game series, dubbed, “I.Q. Academy” is intended to help get players’ brains in shape by offering games designed to exercise the brain’s right side and improve spatial, visual and cognitive skills in the player. I.Q. Academy is based on G-mode’s hyperpopular ‘Right Brain Paradise’ series, which, according to the company, has sold almost two million downloads. The series is expected to launch in Europe and the US in the coming months (WWJ subscribers log in for full article).

DoCoMo Plans to Test WiMax

DoCoMo also announced today that it has applied to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications for a license to set up experimental outdoor wireless stations to test WiMAX, which they refer to as a “new wide-area wireless broadband network technology, based on the IEEE 802.16e standard.” According to the statement, DoCoMo, working in collaboration with other NTT group companies, will conduct the test in the Yoyogi area of Tokyo for about one year using the 2.5GHz frequency band.

DoCoMo Partners with Lawson

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and LAWSON, Inc. have just announced a business alliance that will result in customers using DoCoMo’s Osaifu-Keitai (phones with wallet functions) for a variety of practical mobile services at LAWSON convenience stores beginning by April 30th. According to the press release: “The deal will converge substantial business assets of the two companies, namely DoCoMo’s more than 50 million mobile phone subscribers and LAWSON’s some 8,300 convenience stores nationwide.”

Toshiba Wins Hynix Suit

The Tokyo District Court ruled in favor of Toshiba in the Japanese electronics maker’s patent infringement suit against the Japanese unit of South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductor over its flash memory-related patents. The court ordered Hynix Semiconductor Japan to discontinue the sale of products in violation and pay 7.8 million yen ($67,000) in damages.

Omron Antenna Boosts RFID

Japan-based Omron Corp. has developed a electronic control antenna technology claimed to be the first embedded in an UHF-band RFID reader that can improve RFID tag reading performance. UHF RFID tags have been subject to multipath interference, an inherent problem of electromagnetic signals, which can make an RFID tag unreadable even if it is within the range of the reader.

Ministry to Adopt Ultra Wideband Wireless

The Japan communications ministry said Monday it will put into practical use this fall the ultra wideband wireless system that enables indoor data transmission at five times the speed of the fiber-optic communication system. With a transmission speed of up to 500 megabits per second, the system will allow the recording of more than two high-definition television programs at the same time, the ministry said.

Au Announces New Handset & Service

According to a press release from KDDI/au today, the company has just announced a new handset, the W43T [.jpg] from Toshiba. Also just announced: this Toshiba unit will incorporate the company’s new 3D Navi GPS service functions and that both will be introduced to the market starting in late April. This latest CDMA-1X unit also offers LISMO mobile music and touts a 3.2-megapixel camera, although it does not have a 4GB HDD, like the recent W41T, or the mobile commerce ‘FeliCa’ chip.