Tokyo-based Enfour Inc. and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company have announced the global rollout of the first iPhone and iPod Touch applications featuring the American Heritage dictionaries and other best-selling Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reference titles. This custom-built iPhone application features fully searchable and updated definitions, real-voice audio pronunciations, zoomable graphics, bookmarking, annotation and history.
According to the Foreign Policy blog – we told you Obon is a slow news cycle! – online game company NHN Japan has set up a series of these statues around town to promote their mobile game site hange.jp. Apparently, when people touch the statue’s arm with their mobile phone, the application site will automatically open and a lucky winner will be rewarded 10,000 U.S. Dollars.
How about that, this article via AP indicates the Japanese government is gearing up to help the domestic mobile industry push into new markets. According to the blurb: Details and budget plans for the government effort are being outlined in the next few months, but a proposal was approved at a ministry meeting last month. It will be interesting to see how this effort develops, especially considering the recent moves by GSMA. Perhaps your humble scribs here will get a call from the ministry since we have been covering this fascinating story for the last 7 years now!
Kudo’s to TechCrunch for looking beyond the usual US-centric focus to explain the magic mobile ecosystem here in Japan with 1,000 words or less. While, as stated, the web access device of choice is running at even 50-50 between PC and cellphone, it’s most certainly not an either/or scenario…
For those of you who don’t know, the middle of August is Obon season in Japan and traditionally the slowest news cycle for the year. Most folks plan their vacation – to beat the heat – around this time and your loyal WWJ team is looking forward to catching up on some outstanding projects behind the scenes. Meanwhile, here are a couple of interesting notes we missed recently from the Nikkei related to the continued growth trend of mobile manga and the iPhone launch results.
DoCoMo has announced that it will stop accepting applications for its 2G ‘Mova’ mobile service as of November 30. Without stating when it would turn-out the lights on their legacy PDC network it would seem possible that it will happen by Q4 of fiscal 2008, therefore March 31 2009. It’s the end of an era!
