East Japan Railway Company (JR East), NTT DoCoMo, JCB, and bitWallet just announced that they have agreed to share a common platform to enable their e-payment brands — Suica, iD, QUICPay and Edy — to share the same point-of-sale reader/writer device and data center. The system is expected to begin commercial operation with the Suica and iD brands in January 2007, with QUICPay and Edy [ .jpg image ] to be added subsequently.
NTT DoCoMo announced today that starting September 29, they will market the FOMA M2501 HIGH-SPEED PCMCIA Type II data card [ .jpg image ] for speedy mobile packet transmissions with PCs. Downlink speeds of up to 3.6Mbps are available in HSDPA service areas in Japan. The card works on W-CDMA, GSM and GPRS networks.
NEC is reported to have inked a deal with Sri Lanka’s Steuartel to sell mobile phones in the local market. NEC also plans to introduce 3G handsets with Steuartel and Dialog’s backing. According to the article they initially hope to sell 3,000 to 4,000 units per month where the monthly demand for new phones is around 100,000 – 150,000 units.
Japan’s Softbank plans to raise about $12 billion by securitizing earnings of the cell phone unit it bought from Vodafone Group, a source close to the matter said on Tuesday, allowing it to secure funds at a lower rate than with conventional loans. Earlier this year, Softbank bought Vodafone Japan for 1.8 trillion yen ($15.4 billion) after borrowing 1.3 trillion yen in short-term bridge loans, arranged by 17 banks led by Mizuho Financial Group, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup.
Research In Motion (RIM) will soon be offering a Japanese-language version of its popular BlackBerry handheld. The announcement came as part of a press conference in Tokyo. During the press conference, the company’s President and Co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, said a BlackBerry solution capable of supporting the entry of Japanese fonts is expected to be available by the first half of next year. NOTE: No Japanese language text input! See here and here for more details.
Opera Software and KDDI have announced a renewal of their commitment to include the Opera mobile browser on KDDI’s 3G handsets in Japan. KDDI and Opera first entered into a partnership in August 2004 to fulfill the promise of 3G capabilities in Japan, and the browser has since been included on 27 KDDI phones.
