It seems that Taiwan’s High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) will soon set up a branch office in Japan, paving the way for the company to support their debut on DoCoMo announced earlier this year. The Japan office location would be HTC’s newest overseas foothold; the company has already set up branches in Europe, the U.S., and Hong Kong. HTC is the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Guppy Games has selected Kotobuki Solution Co., Ltd. (KEMCO Japan) as their distribution partner for releasing mobile game contents in Japan. The first title for distribution will be Jump Girls with an expected launch by fall 2006. Jump Girls is a strategy puzzle game jointly developed by ZIO Interactive which has been very popular on South Korean carriers. KEMCO Japan will be the distribution partner for launching Jump Girls with the four major Japanese carriers: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Vodafone, and Willcom.
AirTight Networks has announced that DoCoMo Engineering Shikoku has signed an agreement to resell SpectraGuard wireless intrusion prevention solutions (WIPS) in Japan. DoCoMo Engineering Shikoku is the first Japanese reseller signed by Active Inc. — AirTight Networks’ distributor for the Japanese market. “Japan is an important market for our company, and there is no better endorsement for AirTight Networks than to have DoCoMo Engineering Shikoku reselling our solutions,” said Dennis Tsu, vice president of marketing at AirTight Networks.
Every once in awhile we come across something from DoCoMo’s Yokoska R&D labs that really turns our head and this is a great example, Video Here. The company appears to be working on a wireless charger function for enabled handsets to ‘juice-up’ while away from the home station charger cradle. As the increase of power hungry on-board applications continue to push usage and drainage this would seem to be a logical pursuit that we forsee becoming future reality. Meanwhile, the just announced AquaFairy solution will have to do (?!?) for quick power charge while on the go.
The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry plans to draw up a new set of rules this fall to allow companies that do not own their own wireless infrastructure to more easily enter the mobile communications business, ministry officials said Thursday. The new rules are aimed at helping companies that lack their own networks to become “virtual mobile network operators” by using the networks of established mobile phone operators, including NTT DoCoMo Inc., KDDI Corp. and Vodafone K.K., the officials said.
The pending Japan arrival of Research in Motion (RIM)’s hyperpopular BlackBerry email device, widely known as the ‘CrackBerry’ for its simple, efficient and addictive delivery of corporate email, will inject a new dimension into this country’s complex device and service matrix.
A wise move or a sign of desperation? These two viewpoints seem to characterize media, pundits’ and bloggers’ responses to last month’s announcement that DoCoMo would bring the BlackBerry email device into Japan, in partnership with RIM, based in Canada. Our own take on it was: Who Cares? WWJ was mindful that “virtually everyone in Japan’s workforce already has an always-on, fully connected email device right in their back pocket — in other words, a phone!”
Furthermore, before and since then, there has been more news, helping make it even more difficult to assess the BlackBerry’s prospects.
According to the pundits, NTT DoCoMo’s decision to import the BlackBerry is either (a) a master stroke aimed at securing the giant carrier’s corporate mobile offerings as 3G competition heats up in 2006/07, or (b) expensive folly that will see enterprise sales teams saddled with a clunky, ‘not-made-here’ device that competes poorly if at all against universal 3G phones that already receive push mail in real time, thank you very much (and some media reports have stated the first Japan BlackBerrys won’t even accept Japanese text input). The truth, however, is probably somewhere between these extremes, and so WWJ went straight to the source.
