Editor’s Note
Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Japan Telcos Announce Fiscal 2007 Results

NTT DoCoMo’s 2007 fiscal year ended on March 31st and the company has posted their earnings release (.pdf) Here. Operating revenues were off 1.6% YoY while operating income of 808.3 billion jpy, or approx. $8B usd, was up 4.5% with the net income growing by 7.4% to 491 billion jpy. Operating revenues, operating income, income before taxes and net income for fiscal 2008 were estimated to increase 1.2%, 2.7%, 4.3% and 2.4% respectively. See the details from KDDI and SoftBank Mobile – as available – after the jump.

The Father of i-mode to Leave DoCoMo

Takeshi Natsuno, famed father of the i-mode platform is set to step down, according to reports in the Japanese media. “He is going to be leaving the company at the end of April,” an informed source in DoCoMo told AFP. The writing was on the wall when he was not front and center – as usual – hosting the 905i-series launch here last November. “Marking another notable difference from previous line-up introductions was the absence of Natsuno-san, famed ‘father of i-mode’ and always energetic MC, from the stage” WWJ reported at the time.

LifeWatcher Gets Red Herring Global Award

Mobile Healthcare has been selected as a winner of the Red Herring 100 Global Award. This list of the best 100 privately held companies in the world recognizes those that play a leading role in technology innovation around the globe. The company has been getting a lot of attention for it’s LifeWatcher application and we are pleased to note that WWJ spotted the significance of this story – video interview here – way back in 2003. Congrats!

MoMoTokyo: Next-gen Networks & Services

We’re thrilled to announce the next MoMo Tokyo event, 22 October at the fabulous Designing Studio, will feature presentations from Dr. Hitomi Murakami, former executive director and principal research engineer at KDDI’s R&D labs, and Tomi Ahonen, best-selling author and strategy consultant for digital convergence and advanced mobile telecoms. Both gentlemen are long-time industry insiders and the evening promises to be extremely informative and very well-attended.

End of an Era: Reflections on Ringtones

It seems like only yesterday that polyphonic ringtones were all the rage in Japan, with mobile content companies frantically hustling to create MIDI-like files for all the popular songs in first 4-voice polyphony in 2000, followed by 16-poly in 2001 and 40-poly in 2002. Although many in the mobile industry thought the ringtone market here had peaked by that time, it somehow managed to keep growing for another three years. In fact, it has really only been in the past seven months or so that we’re finally seeing the major shakeout here that was expected several years ago.