Cameron Diaz has earned herself a cool $3 million for appearing in a commercial for a Japanese mobile phone company. And how about this… the commercial shoot took only six hours to of her time, which works out to a nice little payday of eight thousand dollars a minute.
The latest subscriber figures were announced today with good news for SoftBank Mobile and what must be disappointing results for DoCoMo while KDDI continues to lead the pack in over-all performance again in January. We had mentioned that many industry watchers were expecting SoftBanks new flat-rate voice plan – announced in early January – would have an positive impact, and it certainly did. Most surprising was the small month-on-month loss of i-mode customers, the second time in 3 months, for the incumbent.
Warner Music has partnered with Catalyst Mobile to roll-out Rhino Music Service as an official content offering on DoCoMo’s i-mode menu. The service will provide monthly subscribers – at 315jpy – with search, recommendation, preview, and downloading of individual assets. Other features also include ‘This Day in Rock History’ trivia and ‘Songs You Know Ring Tone Corner.’
NEPRO JAPAN recently published the results of a survey into economising on one’s mobile phone bill. On one day in mid-December of last year they questioned 3,425 people across the three main Japanese carriers, DoCoMo’s iMode, Softbank’s Yahoo! Keitai and au and TU-KA’s EZweb, by means of a public poll available through the main menus of all three carriers’ systems. 44% of the sample were male; 3% were teenagers, 35% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty and over. Similar questions were asked of a similar group around the same time last year, so one can perhaps observe a trend over the past year. Full details with graphs Here.
Japan is unique in that consumer studies show that females use the mobile internet more than their male counterparts and you can see evidence of this in the large number of content sites aimed mainly at women. Beauty Walker and howzy !BEAUTY are examples I’ve posted in the past. Add recently announced Nail Club [.pdf], a nail art simulator for the mobile, to that list. You start with a blank canvas (an unpolished nail) and create your own design using 72 colours, 300 types of airbrush, 200 holograms, 100 3D decorations and 300 gems.
Over the past few years, I’ve often been asked if file sharing – especially music file sharing – is as widespread in Japan as in the US and Europe. My answer has generally been something along the lines of ‘it certainly exists here, but the number of people doing it is pretty small compared to most other countries.’ In just the past year, though, we’ve seen a sharp increase in action taken by Japanese record industry and
copyright organizations to step up efforts against file sharing.
I suppose it’s not so surprising that mobile file sharing has become a major concern here – after all, 90% of digital music downloads in Japan are to a mobile phone. Researching further, though, I was a bit taken aback at just how prevalent these free mobile sites are, especially compared to just one year ago, which was the last time I had looked into the issue.
What’s this?? … mobs of Flying Ketai Pigs..?
Actually, 2007 promises to be far more interesting than even that cheeky title! Here goes our official WWJ Fearless Forecast for 2007 – all in one – huge – breath!
2007 promises to be far more interesting than even that cheeky title! Here goes our official WWJ Fearless Forecast for 2007 – all in one – huge – breath! M-commerce: The carriers? FeliCa-based services will continue to grab serious market share. At the end of 2006, DoCoMo had over 1 mln customers for their DCMX mobile credit-card service alone, not to mention the 18.3 mn regular FeliCa handsets in use as of 31 December. KDDI and SoftBank have FeliCa user bases in the millions as well.. grab a cuppa for after the jump!
Strapya has an extensive collection of charms to attach to your ketai including one called Revolve Game which has pinball, space hockey and car racing (to name a few) all packed into a 55mm x 40mm micro package. The unit runs on two LR44 batteries and has an auto power-off function that shuts down when idle for 3 or 4 minutes. It comes in 10 colors and has 99 levels of play – on the black & white screen – for only 680jpy.
The Japanese government (Soum-sho) is planning to spend 1.2B Japanese Yen (about $10 million usd) to build “a system for watching kids” using mobile phones, GPS, RFID tags, etc. The ministry seems to be looking at systems that monitor kids’ whereabouts using GPS-enabled mobile phones, RFID tags carried by kids, and RFID readers and communication devices installed at school gates and electric polls.
It was the best of times, it was… well, it really was the best of times! Also, as the famous line from Dickens goes, it was the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness and the season of.. Mobile!
Looking back on 2006, it’s hard to decide which news from Japan’s mobile scene was the most spectacular. Vodafone pulled out, Softbank stood up, mobile number portability struck, a record number of new handsets hit the street and – as December winds down – Motorola and Samsung are shipping first foreign-made 3G units into Japan.
A ‘quick’ look at what caught WWJ’s attention in ’06 after the jump.
