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

AOL Sells Tegic to Nuance

Nuance Communications and Time Warner announced yesterday they have signed a definitive agreement whereby Nuance will acquire Tegic Communications a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL and a developer of embedded software for mobile devices. Tegic brings industry-leading T9 predictive text input software, which has shipped on more than 2.5 billion devices, and next-generation integrated text and touch input solutions to Nuance’s portfolio of voice-enabled applications for device control, mobile search, email and text messaging.

Verizon Announces Wireless Wallet

Verizon Wireless has announced their m-commerce service, enabled as a BREW application from technology partner Obopay as the first mobile payment offering for any major U.S. carrier, will be available in the coming weeks. The Obopay service will allow customers to receive, send and spend money via their mobile phones, check their account balances, collect money owed from other mobile users, view transaction histories and invite friends to use the system.

Mobagatown Announces Summer Campaign

DeNA’s Mobagatown site, which hit 5 million users with over 400 million daily page views back in May, has announced an interesting summer Yukata campaign. In co-operation with Aeon dept. store the companies have set-up a virtual avatar catalogue from which members can build, for a modest fee, their outfit based on actual products complete with best dressed contest prizes. This would seem to be a rather slick ad. campaign ultimately designed to drive purchases of the real thing just in time for the summer matsuri (festival) season. The company ran a similar campaign for Nike where customers who bought physical goods were rewarded with virtual prizes.

Japan Mobile up for Golden Lion

Dentsu is on the short-list in the mobile advertising category at the 2007 Cannes Lions awards with their Comic Shogakukan campaign. According to this article on Adage, Media Lions jury President David Verklin said he was impressed by how much more advanced mobile marketing is outside the U.S., especially in Japan. “We were stunned by the Japanese approach to mobile,” he said.

DoCoMo Charts Course for Fiscal 2007

DoCoMo held it’s annual general shareholders meeting here yesterday at the Okura hotel to provide their FYE 2006 results and introduce the companies roadmap for 2007. According to several media reports the Q&A session touched on topics ranging from flat-rate data cards to making dual-mode GSM chipsets a common standard on future handsets and their desire to explore expansion opportunities into emerging markets overseas.

Kids Phones Worry Airlines

According to this article via the Yomiuri Shimbun, airlines are growing increasingly concerned about children bringing cell phones onto planes, as they could interfere with navigation systems. Airlines are especially concerned about the latest children’s cell phones, which contain a built-in crime prevention function that automatically restarts the phone if it is switched off. [WWJ demo video Here]