The Mobile Contents Forum (MCF) is gearing up for the Mobidec 2007 conference again this year to be held on 27 November at the swanky Meguro Gajoen in Tokyo. Their stated focus topics for the popular annual industry event include; SEM, SEO, advertising, user-generated content, m-commerce and digital tv broadcasting for mobile. We’ve always enjoyed this gathering in years past and look forward to attending again in November!
According to Seeking Alpha, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association [JEITA], stated mobile phone shipments in Japan has climbed 39.1 percent to hit a total of 4.2 million units in August. “The industry group attributed greatly the rise in the shipments to a surge in the number of handsets able to receive digital terrestrial television broadcasts. The report said that shipments of 3G handsets climbed 50.7 percent on year to 4 million units, compared to shipments of 2G handsets went down 93 pct to 17,000 units.”
Mobile Content Networks (MCN) has announced the establishment of MCN Japan K.K., a wholly-owned subsidiary of MCN Inc. Concurrent with the formation of MCN Japan K.K. MCN has moved its global operating headquarters to Tokyo to accelerate response to growing demand for MCN’s whitelabel Mobile Search Management platform in Japan, Southeast Asia, China, and India.
There has been a fair amount of speculation (see here and here) about pricing strategies, related to future handset subsidies and voice minute charges, for mobile operators in Japan based on regulation suggestions made in a recent report to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
US-based ScanR will provide their new service to KDDI customers via the EZWeb official contents portal as of October 4th 2007, press release [in Japanese] Here. “ScanR” creates PDF files of documents and business cards from user-generated cameraphone images, and stores those files online to deliver via FAX or e-mail. The service, which can also automatically transcode business card information into file data to be compiled onto the address book of your mobile phone, is on display in KDDI’s booth at CEATEC this week.
The CIAJ has released the telecom equipment figures for Q1 fiscal 2007 (April – June) that show negative performance continues in the mobile terminal category, which accounts for approx. 70% of the market. Handset sales account for approximately 67% of the market and therefore has a large impact on overall production figures. The 2007 results show a significant drop from the 2006 figure, but is similar to the performance in 2005.The total number of subscribers continues to increase, indicating that the trend among carriers to purchase high-end products by domestic brands and import low-end modestly priced products from abroad continues.
