DoCoMo announced today they will form a business and capital alliance with Aquafairy Co. to develop fuel-cell products. DoCoMo will acquire an approximate 36.5-percent stake in the company through a purchase of newly allocated shares in the near future. Aquafairy, which develops and markets micro fuel cells for mobile devices, was established in Osaka in 2006 and has 11 employees. It has capital of 33 million yen.
Japan’s eAccess Ltd. said on Monday its wireless unit will borrow its bigger rival NTT DoCoMo Inc.’s network to offer a nationwide cellphone service. eAccess’ mobile unit will roam on DoCoMo’s network in areas outside the major cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. The agreement will helps eAccess launch a nationwide voice service in March 2008 before completing its own network. Prior to the nationwide mobile phone service, eAccess aims to offer wireless data service in March 2007.
We’re pleased to see that OboPay has closed its second round of funding lead by $7 mn from none other than Qualcomm! That would indicate it’s quite likely we’ll see a strong push for their BREW-based P2P mobile commerce application in the future. This news also seems to be at least somewhat disruptive to the existing embedded IC chip effort lead by Sony and Phillips. As both KDDI/au and Vodafone (almost SoftBank Mobile) are running on Qualcomm’s chipset in Japan, this development might present them with a viable alternative to paying license fees to FeliCa Networks as well…
Seems we were not on the VIP invitation list, at least NikkeiBP made it, to attend this recent Tokyo Fashion Show event featuring the latest styles targeted at Ginza shoppers here for fall 2006. However, the Sony Ericsson W43S was front and center with the all girl hip-hop group YA-KYIM on the catwalk singing their signature theme for the handsets new TV ad campaign.
NEC Electronics is looking for a sharp increase in profitability based on sales of platform ICs, particularly for mobile phones, according to CEO Toshio Nakajima. Last year, NEC Electronics had an 11 per cent market share in WCDMA baseband chips, behind Texas Instruments (TI) 42 per cent market share and Qualcomm’s 26 per cent, according to analyst iSuppli. Behind the plan is the development of platform ICs such as those envisaged by the recent Adcore-Tech consortium between NEC, NEC Electronics, Matsushita, Panasonic Mobile and TI.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average declined, led by Softbank Corp. after Credit Suisse Group cut its rating on the stock, citing a drop in the value of the company’s investments and its mobile phone business. Softbank shares slid 65 yen, or 2.8 percent, to 2,245. Hitoshi Hayakawa, a Tokyo-based analyst at Credit Suisse cut his rating to underperform from neutral. Softbank’s measures to improve the mobile business are not enough to justify a 1 trillion yen ($8.6 billion) premium, Hayakawa said.
We just noticed this article by Brad Stone on the Newsweek website and smiled quietly to ourselves… he gets it! Nothing in the way of news there though – if you’re a regular WWJ reader – but for main-stream media consumers based in the U.S., it’s certainly one of the better pieces we’ve seen in some time. The obvious reason for accuracy therein comes from the fact that he actually spent a little time here in Tokyo on vacation this summer and had the chance to really test drive a great handset. While Brad’s item did miss on a couple of points (DoCoMo launched their DCMX mobile credit card service this spring with biometric fingerprint authentication capability on Fujitsu phones, for example), overall it’s refreshing to see a story without too much “Gee Whiz, Martha”-material about how people in Japan are using their cell phone to surf the web or send email.
NTT DoCoMo have posted a new corporate video, “The Keitai as Lifestyle Infrastructure.” Their PR email said the video introduces “… our plan to create new revenue sources.” As if they need any..! Access the programme here: http://www.nttdocomo.com/features/keitai.html.
HP Japan and BEA Japan have proposed a new architecture for building business RFID applications, dubbed RFID 2.0. According to their definition edge systems that locally and independently use RFID for data input/output at distribution centers, etc. are RFID 1.0 while systems that allow for a company to integrate the data with existing business applications (and share the data with other companies) should be considered as “RFID 2.0.”
MediaSeek has released a new mobile phone OCR-based application called “Camera Dictionary” (Kamera Jiten), which translates English words into Japanese characters by simply scanning the mobile phone’s camera over the word. The characters of a scanned word are then matched to a dictionary database in real-time ensuring that dictionary lookup is both fast and accurate. The application will be distributed via content provider Enfour Inc. on their EZweb menu site “General English Dictionary” (Sougoeigojiten). Also included is a client server facility where the user can access more detailed information such as explanations, examples, and even pronounciation sound files from the main online dictionary.
