Shares of Casio Computer Co. fell the most in 32 years after the company missed its profit target and unveiled plans to expand in the crowded mobile-phone market. The stock tumbled by the 400-yen daily limit, or 16 percent, to 2,025 yen in Tokyo, erasing $931 million from its market value. Brokerages including HSBC Holdings Plc downgraded the stock after the company reported annual profit of 25.1 billion yen ($209 million), missing its own estimate by 9 percent.
The recent MoMo Tokyo event, held 23 April at KDDI’s Designing Studio, featured a mobile mash-up of presentations in the super-cool Demo Night format – which has been popular in other chapter cities. For Demo Night, a line-up of interesting mobile companies were allowed a 5- to 7-minute show & tell session for their mobile content or service offering – displayed on an actual handset and projected on the big screen for all to see. We’ve posted video of all six presentations for those of you who were unable to attend in person.
Tracey Northcott, VP at Enfour Group demonstrated Camera Jiten a native Brew dictionary application for instant scanning of English words giving their Japanese translations. Mandali Khalesi, CEO of Naviblog, showed-off how to find the closest Guinness with your mobile phone. David Collier, founder and CEO of Pikkle, demonstrated a new type of full-screen mobile flash service they provide to enable rich social networking. Nobuyoshi Noda, Mobile Division Deputy GM of Adways, gave an overview of the Mobile Affiliate Advertisement Smart-C product. Tim Smith, Director of Freeverse Consulting, introduced Malibu IVP, a middleware approach to creating useful and viable 3G videocall applications and Hiroshi Oda, VP Corporate Communications from CIAJ, announced that CEATEC JAPAN 2007 will launch a new special exhibit area under the theme of Digital Contents for their annual trade-show in October.
Boingo Wireless announced a roaming agreement with livedoor Co. Ltd., to add the company’s central Tokyo Wi-Fi network to their 60,000 global hotspot collection. This agreement marks the second Asian hot zone to join the Boingo Roaming System the first was citywide WIFLY network in Taipei, which added in July 2006. According to the press release livedoor’s network covers 80% of the outdoor area located within the Yamanote Line with thousands of power-pole mounted access points.
Softbank Corp. announced their FYE 2006 results yesterday indicating that the parent companies fourth-quarter operating profit more than doubled YoY after buying Vodafone mobile-phone unit last spring. The entire presentation video is available in English Here. The 1.66 trillion yen acquisition made Softbank the second-fastest growing company in sales terms on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average for the fiscal first half ended Sept. 30. Operating profit rose to 73.8 billion yen ($615 million) in the three months ended March 31 from 34.4 billion yen in Q4 2005, while sales more than doubled to 721.9 billion yen from 298.4 billion yen, according to Bloomberg.
NEC has recently commenced a full-scale mobile WiMAX (16e) trial in Hualien city with Tatung, a major Taiwanese conglomerate company which runs manufacturing, sales of consumer-electronics and LCDs, as well as ISP business. This mobile WiMAX trial marks the first project to be conducted by NEC outside of Japan, and will continue until September, 2007. The trial was conducted as part of the “M-Taiwan” project being lead by the Taiwan. M-Taiwan is a national project to establish a networked information society and to cultivate IT-related industries in the domestic market.
SoftBank Mobile has announced that the number of subscriptions for the companies “While Plan” has exceeded four million on May 3, 2007. Originally introduced in early January, this simple price package offers a monthly basic charge of ¥980 with free domestic voice calls between SoftBank Mobile users from 1:00 to 21:00, and for domestic voice calls other than those it charges a tariff of 21 yen/30 sec. In addition, text messaging between 3G users is, with some restrictions, free of charge.
