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KDDI Hits 50 Million Full-Song Milestone

KDDI has reported hitting 50 million full-song downloads as of May 20 2006. The service launched in November 2004 and passed the 10 million mark 6 months later. There are an estimated 80 mobile music stores selling full-song downloads with a total of over 150 thousand titles to choose from. As of November 2005 there was approx. 5 million KDDI customers with full-song download capable handsets in Japan, currently there are about 35 compatible models, including the most recently announced 7 new phones.

The Girls Love Mobile Manga

We noticed in a online recent article that the most prominent mobile manga viewers are actually female! Apparently statistics show more than half of the viewers are women and some stories are dominated by majority of 70 percent or more. So, when do those ladies watch manga..?!? According to the story a spokeman said: “Midnight, just before falling asleep in her bed, she watches quietly under the blanket… that’s the trend, I guess.”

DoCoMo plans music download service in June

NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s largest mobile phone operator, plans to launch a music download service as early as June to compete with rival KDDI Corp.’s popular version, the Nihon Keizai business daily reported on Thursday. The paper said DoCoMo will offer thousands of songs for about 300 yen each, similar to the price offered by KDDI’s “au” mobile unit.

Faith, Square Enix and Taito JV

Faith Inc. have announced they will take the lead position in a joint venture with game publishers Taito and Square Enix. The three companies have founded a new company, Brave Inc., capitalized at 80 mn yen, with 1,600 shares issued and 14 full-time employees. The holding structure shows 60 percent was invested by Faith Inc., 30 percent from Taito and the remaining 10 percent coming from Square Enix.

TOKYOPOP – Manga to Go

TOKYOPOP Inc., has teamed up with uclick, LLC, a leader in mobile entertainment, to bring “TOKYOPOP Mobile Manga” to mobile phone users worldwide. This unique, downloadable manga application plays manga titles in their original multi-panel format on mobile phones. uclick has developed a new JAVA and BREW subscription application that offers new manga content every day. With a clean, rich graphic presentation coupled with a simple user interface, the manga application puts this popular Japanese art form into the hands of dedicated fans looking for that dose of manga on the go.

Bridging the Mobile Gaming Divide

Bridging the Mobile Gaming DivideDespite all the effort WWJ has put into finding and covering software developers that have successfully transitioned out of Japan’s navel-gazing mobile market to markets elsewhere, I must admit we haven’t found thousands. Or even dozens. But one of them is Shinjuku, Tokyo-based G-mode, and this week the Japanese mobile game maker and its Dublin, Ireland-based partner Upstart Games said four IQ-enhancing games, already popular in Japan, would be distributed in the US and Europe via Upstart. The news underscores the profits to be found when forward-thinking mobile players work hard to bridge the wireless culture divide.

Upstart’s CEO Barry O’Neil told WWJ that the company has been planning to launch a brain training game for mobile since the runaway success of the genre in Japan late last year. Ironically, the Irish side was initially skeptical that such a narrow niche could win operator interest in Europe or the US. “We’ve a relationship with G-mode dating back to last year, and their Right Brain Paradise was something we’d looked at in the past, but felt gaining operator support could be difficult. Now that the genre is becoming more widely known we felt the time was right to introduce this mobile series,” he wrote in an email yesterday.

The three-game series, dubbed, “I.Q. Academy” is intended to help get players’ brains in shape by offering games designed to exercise the brain’s right side and improve spatial, visual and cognitive skills in the player. I.Q. Academy is based on G-mode’s hyperpopular ‘Right Brain Paradise’ series, which, according to the company, has sold almost two million downloads. The series is expected to launch in Europe and the US in the coming months (WWJ subscribers log in for full article).