European Market
European Market

European Market

Navitime Japan Goes Global

NaviTime Japan have announced that their overseas map retrieval service will be available as of 1 August in the UK, France, Germany and the US. Running on the i-Mode and v-Live menus, Japanese tourists will be able to determine the best guided directions from a car, a subway or on a walking route. The firm said the service, offering event information such as sports, theater and festivals along with hotel info in the target travel destination, allows users to confirm sightseeing, restaurant and store locations from their local maps.

NEC to Enter Russian 3G Market

NEC Corp plans to enter the 3G mobile phone infrastructure market in Russia, which will begin commercialization of 3G mobile phone service in 2006, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported, citing NEC chairman Hajime Sasaki. NEC will compete for their orders against Nokia Corp, Telefon AB LM Ericsson and other European companies to supply base stations and base station controllers, the Nikkei said.

NEC to Supply Platform and i-mode Mobile Handset for MTS Russia

NEC announced today that it has received orders of Mobile Internet Platform and mobile handsets for Mobile TeleSystems (MTS)’s i-mode(TM) service. MTS Russia’s largest mobile phone operator in Russia and CIS which is currently holding over 40 million subscribers and over 35% market share. i-mode operation in Russia is scheduled to start in September 2005, and further operation is scheduled in Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Belarus in the future. Expansion of high-level functionality for the mobile Internet services in Russia is moving forward, and advanced and rich services are becoming a reality in near future. “Russia is one of the important markets for NEC.” said Noboru Wakita, Senior General Manager of NEC’s Mobile Solutions Operations Unit.

France Telecom & ACCESS Develop Rich Media Solutions

ACCESS announced it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with France Telecom for the joint development of a complete wireless Internet solution based on ACCESS’ products and services. This R&D partnership will enable both companies to collaboratively design and deploy innovative, rich media mobile Internet technologies for France Telecom mobile customers. The R&D department of France Télécom and ACCESS are committed to leveraging resources and sharing expertise to develop products based on the NetFront browser framework. The technologies that will be supported within the browser framework include SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), streaming video, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), and other rich media and animation technologies.

Fujitsu to Resell WiMAX in EU

Airspan Networks said Monday that it would allow Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe to resell its WiMAX base-station products. Specifically, Fujitsu will resell the HiperMAX, MacroMAX and MicroMAX base stations, as well as the EasyST and ProST customer premises equipment, which use the Intel “Rosedale” WiMAX chipset. Airspan also clarified the timing of the EasyST’s deployment, which will occur during the third quarter.

Mobile Karaoke Rocks Russia

Launched last week by one of the leaders in the content provider market, a service called INFON offers 20 karaoke song files that can be downloaded on all mobile networks. The sing-along craze that originated in Japan moved into mobile telephony two years ago, based on Java applications that Irish technology firm Alatto developed for the European market. In 2003, Vodafone Japan launched a service that allowed subscribers to “practise” songs and, later, to plug their handset into a TV to watch the lyrics on the big screen, while singing into the phone mouthpiece.