The education ministry will issue a warning to Japan’s first all-Internet university to more diligently confirm the identities of students to prevent the use of ringers posing as students. Cyber University is operated by Japan Cyber Educational Institute, a SoftBank subsidiary established in January 2006, and began offering courses to the public in April 2007.
DoCoMo and Google jointly announced they have formed a partnership that will include providing search services, search-related advertisement and potential applications to i-mode users. The two companies will also collaborate to enhance the user-friendliness of i-mode services, by making various Google services easier to access through i-mode handsets. The pre-loading of Google Maps application into upcoming DoCoMo i-mode handsets is one of the initial initiatives being discussed.
We’ve had a few contacts about the Yahoo! Kids Filter article (no, unfortunately it’s not a mute button) posted earlier in January. Thankfully the boys over at Infinita have waded in and they managed to pull together more details about this whole murky underworld of regulations, and exceptions, for mobile content in Japan.
Walt Disney Japan held a press conference in Tokyo to introduce their new “Disney Mobile” service which is slated for public launch on March 1st. Although the company will run the business as an MVNO, it emphasized that the service will be distributed in collaboration with SoftBank Mobile with the same “White Plan” price package offerings. There’s a nice Flash video on the home page Here.
Japan’s Sanyo is selling its mobile phone business to Kyocera as part of its ongoing restructuring, the company has announced. The two companies have been working on the deal since fall last year. As part of the agreement Kyocera will be able to use the Sanyo brand on cell phones sold in Japan and North America, Sanyo’s main markets.
Mobile Content Networks (MCN) announced the launch of allwords a new mobile content advertising network that enables mobile content providers to purchase all keywords in popular vertical content categories (music, images, games, shopping, etc) in order to increase user traffic, clickthrus, and conversions. Mobile network operators and portals also benefit from an important new revenue opportunity associated with the sale of category based keyword advertising.
