The Japanese government plans to allow three or four companies to start offering high-speed wireless Internet Protocol phone services in 2007, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Thursday. The article said the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will formally unveil its plans for wireless IP phone services on Friday.
NEC Australia has announced the launch of their first i-mode 3G mobile phone – the NEC N600i – for those down under. Available now in Telstra stores, the dual-mode N600i is equipped with the Access NetFront 3.2 browser, a QVGA 2-in colour LCD screen, Bluetooth, TransFlash memory card and a 1.3-megapixel auto-focus camera. The new unit is also available to order via Telstra’s i-mode online shop.
A total of 32 women, hoping to become presenters for a video-based cell-phone weather service, gathered at KDDI’s Designing Studio showroom in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. Final auditions for the Kanto region’s “Weather News” service began on Monday when KDDI selected their short-list of just 7 from the 1,034 people who had submitted written applications. Online voting to choose the two winning candidates will be carried out 12-25 October.
KDDI/au have announced the latest addition to their CDMA 1X handset line-up, the A1405PT [ .jpg image ] from PanTech & Curitel. The phone was jointly developed with KDDI and marks the first entry of a Korean-made model into the Japanese market. Due to hit the streets by the end of November, it comes with a limited set of features (only a VGA camera for example), but it does tout an organic EL “Stream Screen” sub-display and has a built-in “crime prevention buzzer function” that is able to sound the warning sound of a large volume. This should be a fun feature for our next trip out to see the Yomiuri Giants play!
Japan’s top mobile carrier DoCoMo and leading online mall operator Rakuten have forged a capital alliance to expand mobile auction services. Rakuten will spin off its peer-2-peer (P2P) auction network, Rakuten Flea Market, into a separate entity, Rakuten Auction, Inc from Dec. 1st. DoCoMo will then invest 4.2 billion yen ($37 million) starting Dec. 16 for a 40 percent share of the new firm. The deal does not include Rakuten’s profitable B2C (Business-2-Consumer) Super Auction site, which offers new goods from its huge listing of online mall operators. Rakuten currently has around 17.3 million users; DoCoMo 45 million subscribers.
Anxious to break the news to the media, the planned tie-up was announced at a hastily called press conference in Tokyo’s Okura Hotel with virtually no details on how the two firms plan on tweaking the service to attract DoCoMo users or differentiate it from KDDI’s EZ Web auAuction or even Rakuten’s current somewhat limited mobile auction portal. DoCoMo President Masao Nakamura and Rakuten President Hiroshi Mikitani were ill prepared to answer questions from the media pressing for more details.
Vodafone K.K. have just announced that on 1 November 2005 the company will introduce “Love Flat-rate,” Japan’s first mobile service that allows customers to call and send mail to a designated party as much as they like, according to a press release. The service name stands for the ability to call and mail the person ‘one loves most’ without worrying about the cost. The service lets a customer call and mail a designated party (one Vodafone K.K. phone number) without limitations, and discounts video calls by 50% for a monthly fixed charge of 300 yen (315 yen including tax).
On Friday, the MIJ team wrapped up the October mission to Tokyo and headed home to the Heartland for happy hour and some relaxed networking; everyone was pooped but delighted with the program (so said the team, not me the organiser!).
After a full day Wednesday at CEATEC to view fuel-cell mobile batteries, digital-TV handsets and a super new satellite pocket rocket from DoCoMo, we spent Thursday and Friday back on the MIJ agenda, meeting with, respectively, an LBS application developer, a major content aggregator, an alternative mobile payment provider (to find out what to do when your content is just too pricey for the official menus), a mobile marketing manager and a 3G carrier, among others. Thursday evening was another highlight as we met with Andrew Shuttleworth, one of Tokyo’s most knowledgeable and opinionated mobile application usability gurus, and a trio of young, female, non-tech Japanese college students who utterly tore apart preconceived notions of why Japanese use mobile like they do. (What? You mean you don’t like to pay for content??)
Listen to WWJ’s Lawrence Cosh-Ishii and Daniel Scuka begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting on Dave Graveline’s “Into Tomorrow” live at CEATEC; from 11:00-mark via MP3 Here.
Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, Inc., creator of hit 3G mobile games and environments, has come to terms with Sony BMG Music Entertainment in a licensing deal to provide music from the Sony play list to its 3G mobile V-disco product. V-Disco is a wireless subscription site combining chat, music streaming and music downloading to mobile phones with interactive 3D graphics and animated virtual avatars. Users and visitors to V-Disco select an avatar for themselves and join the fun. Club-goers choose genres and songs from the club list, listening to their tunes while their avatar strolls along chatting with other party people in real time.
In an e-mail to WWJ, Eberhard Schoeneburg, CEO of Artificial Life, said the company is already in testing with operators in Japan and he thought they were not too long away from launch in this market. V-disco users select songs and 3D animated avatars, watching them funk it up on any of several virtual dance floors. “It is a completely new and very entertaining way of presenting and delivering high-quality music to 3G mobile phones,” Schoeneburg commented in a prepared statement.
The Mobile Intelligence Japan (MIJ) team spent Wednesday at the CEATEC show, checking out some of the most innovative mobile tech and services the Japanese ecosystem is currently developing. To start, Hitachi’s methanol fuel-cell handset for KDDI [ close-up image here ] was one of the major announcements made during this year’s event. Several Japanese electronics manufacturers, including Toshiba and Fujitsu, are working on a fuel-cell solution for powering and recharging cell phones and other portable devices; Fujitsu’s rather large (as big as a shoe?) version for DoCoMo provides up to 9 Watt-hours of juice.
There were also big line ups to view the new digital TV cell phones made by Sanyo, Panasonic and Sharp (for each of KDDI, DoCoMo and Vodafone) with plenty of people crowded around the NHK booth to test drive one of the units; all are due to launch by next spring and run for around 2 hours.
Later, we spotted Net2Com’s new IP-and-Skype handset available (since last week) for Livedoor mobile customers and were surprised to see a prototype streaming satellite handset from DoCoMo. The Mobaho! compatible phone — a full FOMA 3G device — will receive music and other programming direct from Mobile Broadcasting Corp.’s bird high above Tokyo and will launch next spring; the Mitsubishi-made device has about 2 hours of continuous playback time and appears intended to steal some of KDDI’s Chaku-Uta-Full thunder. Be sure to watch our latest video program featuring EZ Channel.
Finally, your WWJ crew had a chance to sit down and speak with Dave Graveline to record a radio interview covering some of the show’s highlights to be broadcast on 10 October.
CEATEC, otherwise known as ‘Disneyland for mobi-keeners,’ is possibly planet Earth’s most intense concentration of mobile goodies. KDDI’s “EZ Channel” system, launched together with flat-rate data billing and the high-speed 1X EV-DO “WIN” 3G network in late 2003, is one of the few content services optimised for the network’s 2.4-Mbps nominal speed. WWJ went to CEATEC to grab the details on EZ Channel, which includes a unique overnight download feature that makes use of the quietest time of the day to deliver up to 3 megabytes of video programming to subscribers’ handsets while the network snoozes.
The EZ Channel service allows subscribers to select 3 programs from a menu of 53 channels (by end-October 2005), including news, weather, sports and entertainment favorites such as “Chaku Uta Ranking” (Label Mobile), “Sponge Bob Mobile” (Viacom) and Disney Mobile Wave. A single channel typically runs up to 1MB, and is refreshed 1-3 times per week (some, like weather, are new daily).
