Year: <span>2007</span>
Year: 2007

Year: 2007

End of an Era: Reflections on Ringtones

It seems like only yesterday that polyphonic ringtones were all the rage in Japan, with mobile content companies frantically hustling to create MIDI-like files for all the popular songs in first 4-voice polyphony in 2000, followed by 16-poly in 2001 and 40-poly in 2002. Although many in the mobile industry thought the ringtone market here had peaked by that time, it somehow managed to keep growing for another three years. In fact, it has really only been in the past seven months or so that we’re finally seeing the major shakeout here that was expected several years ago.

Hitachi and Alvarion Partner on WiMax

Hitachi and Alvarion have agreed to develop Broadband Mobile Wireless Access System using Mobile WiMAX technology jointly in Japan and overseas market. The goal of this agreement is to develop system solutions, combining base station technology of Alvarion with the mobile gateway technology, construction and maintenance technology of Hitachi. Alvarion also announced activity in this space recently with NTT West in Okinawa.

Acrodea Signs Vivid Deal with DoCoMo

Tokyo-based Acrodea has made several recent announcements, in Japanese only, concerning the adoption of their Vivid product suite with handset makers across all three operators. The most significant of which would be the inclusive licensing agreement concluded with DoCoMo for their Vivid UI to be deployed on all models scheduled to be released going forward. The companies Panorama and 3D Message middleware is also now available on handsets from Sharp and Sanyo via SoftBank Mobile and KDDI respectively. See WWJ’s hands-on demo. video of the UI in action Here.

ACCESS Adds New ACE Partners

ACCESS has announced the addition of eight new members to the growing roster of companies supporting its ACCESS Linux Platform and NetFront browser technologies through the ACCESS Connect Ecosystem (ACE) global partner program. The addition of the eight new members brings the total number ACE partners to over 65. ACE partners work closely with ACCESS to expand the mobile Linux market and help fuel the growth of converged technologies and devices.

Media-FLO Info for Japan

Qualcomm quietly opened MediaFLO-info.com on 1 August as part of the companies march to launch their mobile tv broadcast services in Japan. The Japanese only version includes overview materials, links to the FloForum and Mobile Media Planning Corp., which is wholly-owned by SoftBank, along with a sign-up form for their mail magazine. No official press release announcing the new site could be found, in English or Japanese, at the time of this posting.

Dowa to Recycle Mobile Phones

Dowa-Eco is planning to import used mobile phones from Southeast Asia to extract nonferrous metals such as gold and copper from them for recycling, according to the Daily Yomiuri. The Dowa group has the only smelter in Asia capable of extracting individual metals from ores such as copper, gold and lead which are needed for making substrates used in mobile phones.