According to the Nikkei, via Bloomberg, all four major Japanese telcos are moving one step closer to building out their 4G networks, with infrastructure investments pegged at $10 billion. DoCoMo alone is said to have budgeted nearly half of that amount, to enable data delivery at near fiber speeds, with service launch expected in fiscal 2010 with the others set to follow by 2012.
According to this post on the Asahi Shimbun, the Ministry of Affairs and Communications (MIC) has a proposal to run an experiment later this year, across the country using 2,000 cellphone volunteers, to record potential encounters between people infected with a contagious disease. From what we can tell, the proposed trial will track and collect GPS data for time and location so if someone is found later to be infected the agency, with some help from the telecom operators, would be able to identify and notify people who had may have had recent contact.
NEC Electronics and Renesas have entered talks to strike a merger deal to create a new entity which would become the largest semiconductor company in Japan, and number three globally behind Intel and Samsung with leading market share in micro-controllers and system-on-chip products for cars and mobile devices, capable of generating roughly $13 billion in combined yearly sales.
We’re finally back, and fully recovered, from the the annual CTIA Wireless event held last month in Las Vegas. As you might imagine living large on the strip for almost a whole week took a certain degree of – ahem – stamina, but we did manage to spend some valuable time the show floor, had several meetings in the VIP lounge, some interviews in the media room and a few ‘interesting’ connections in Caesars Palace.
While it’s only be fair to expect, considering the current economic times, that YoY attendance would be down as was the case during Mobile World Congress in February. That being said, the trade exhibitors – and delegates in general – seemed plenty up-beat with both Samsung and LG front and center in full force with along with all the usual suspects taking hefty square footage at LVCC. Of course there were a few Japanese players represented with DoCoMo, Fujitsu and Kyocera, who had an entire section of Sanyo handsets, both taking space to demo their products and services.
According to this report filed from the recent WiMAX Forum Congress Asia event in Singapore, Takeshi Tanaka – president of UQ Communications – is quoted; “People are beginning to think that cellular internet is fake.. the browser is limited, the content and performance are limited, and so are the screen sizes. This is our opportunity to differentiate from the 3G style”. So, the gloves are off!
Nico Nico Douga, the popular Japanese video sharing site known it’s original interface where users can add comments on video in realtime, has finally released their iPhone app – for free! – according to this article on cNet Japan. The design was based on the companies mobile edition, which was done on Java, launched in 2007, however, Iphone apps need to be coded in C and this apparently caused some real challenges for coding the delivery of certain functions such as commenting.
