In December, Furuedai Junior High School in the city of Suita, Osaka Prefecture introduced an RFID system. 160 of the 298 students at the school are wearing namebadges [.jpg image]. The objective of this system is to make the school safe. If a person who doesn’t have a legitimate RFID tag comes in through a school gate, the system notifies teachers and a surveillance camera starts recording the areas.
GeoVector has announced a partnership with NEC to enable Japanese mobile content providers to offer information for end users to simply point their mobile phones at a building, retailer, restaurant, hotel or billboard advertisement. Just like using a mouse to click on your computer screen to retrieve information, now mobile phone users in Japan can Click on the Real World using their mobile phone, aided by GPS and a built-in compass. GeoVector’s technology makes a variety of innovative content-based applications and M-commerce transactions possible.
A growing number of people are taking photos of deceased family members or friends during funeral services. In July last year, Akiko Deguchi, a funeral planner, saw a surprising scene at a funeral ceremony held at a Yokohama funeral hall — five to six attendees were taking photos of the deceased person’s face on their mobile phone cameras shortly before the lid was placed on the coffin.
KDDI just announced the results from their recent WiMAX trials held in central Osaka. The company has conducted the experiment to evaluate the performance of this system, in accordance with IEEE802.16e, and confirmed that practical use in an urban environment was possible. KDDI has charted the performance of this IP base “Ultra 3G” system as a wireless method to supplement exisiting 3G service with base station to radius coverage suitable for large city scale services.
DoCoMo announced today they will start selling the 3G FOMA NM850iG handset, made by Nokia [ .jpg image ], which works on DoCoMo’s 3G FOMA network in Japan and W-CDMA, GSM and GPRS networks overseas where DoCoMo’s global roaming services are available, beginning February 24, 2006. Application to DoCoMo’s WORLD WING 3G roaming service is required to use the handset overseas for voice calls, i-mode, videophone and short messaging service (SMS).The handset connects wirelessly with Bluetooth devices, including PCs for data synchronization and connection to the Internet.
Sony Ericsson has introduced the W950, an ultra-slim, ultra-stylish, UMTS-enabled device with 4GB of onboard storage complete with touch screen for simple navigation through music genres, playlists, individual songs or music albums. The music player within the W950 has the functionality and sound quality of an equivalent standalone device. Its 4GB storage can take up to 4,000 songs and the sound quality, delivered on high quality headphones, makes listening to music a real pleasure. A new graphic-rich interface on the Walkman player makes it easy to navigate around the music library by song, artist or playlist and now it’s possible to search visually by browsing through album covers using the stylus and touch screen.
