Economic and fiscal policy minister Kaoru Yosano and Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa have apologized to Diet leaders for watching TV on a cell phone during a House of Councilors plenary session. The incident took place on Oct. 3 when Shozaburo Jimi, vice leader of the tiny Kokumin Shinto (People’s New Party), was asking questions. The Upper House has banned cell phones from its floor since 1995.
We spent most of last week out at Makuhari Messe running around the CEATEC tradeshow with clients visiting from overseas. While we were considerably distracted, catering to their specific focus, it was certainly interesting – as always – to get a glimpse of the mobile future. Of course while most of the usual players were on-site with their wares and the media was swarming to get the inside skinny, btw: plenty of great material from Tech-On Here, two of the most obvious trends we noticed was a definite move towards green technology along with next-generation networks and handsets.
This concept model – the Voyage – from KDDI was a prefect example of innovation aimed at solving one of the major challenges, never enough juice, increasingly faced by mobile users. There was not much in the way of details on that unit when we asked at the time however based on past experience with AU Designs it would be reasonable to expect something like this hitting the street a few years from now and we’ll be digging for more intell. on this one! Meanwhile, some of the other concepts on display especially the Ply device with it’s built-in projector and their Trio design – hint: watch the video demos launched via ‘prototype’ icons on lower nav. bar – were also attracting the crowds.
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.
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.
Mobile Broadcasting Corp. has just announced that it will wind down operations of it’s Mobaho! satellite digital services by spring 2009. According to the press release the company face difficult market conditions for it’s subscription model in direct competition with the freely available 1Seg television offerings. Apparently the TU media (subsidiary of SK Telecom) partners based in Korea will continue operations. As Toshiba owns nearly 37% of the venture it is estimated a potential $250M write-down could affect the companies forcasted earnings for fiscal 2008.
