Qualcomm quietly opened MediaFLO-info.com on 1 August as part of the companies march to launch their mobile tv broadcast services in Japan. The Japanese only version includes overview materials, links to the FloForum and Mobile Media Planning Corp., which is wholly-owned by SoftBank, along with a sign-up form for their mail magazine. No official press release announcing the new site could be found, in English or Japanese, at the time of this posting.
According to this press release by KDDI, EZ Gree passed the 1 Million members mark this month. Originally launched in November last year, and hitting 500k users in March, the social networking site plans to integrate more carrier led mobile data offerings, notably location based services, going forward. That will be interesting.. 😎
Nepro Japan recently conducted this survey focused on Japanese cell phone users new handset upgrade feature priorities. The questionnaire returned 3,817 valid responses and indicated demographics show 56% of the sample was female, 3% in their teens, 35% in their twenties, 43% in their thirties, and 19% aged forty or older. Some rather interesting results after the jump.
Viacom Japan will re-launch their mobile music channel as a social networking service, myMTV, which will offer members their own profile pages along video uploading and sharing functions. The service is ad-supported and free to consumers and will be available on all three of Japan’s mobile operators when it rolls-out in September. According to comments from executives on-hand at the Tokyo press conference, this effort will serve as a model for future deployment in other markets.
According to Infinita, Media Groove Inc. will beta launch a new mobile SNS service on September 15. Chipuya Town is a Flash-based 2D version of real-world Tokyo youth hotspot Shibuya that users will be able to navigate around and interact in with avatars. The offering also features a virtual currency system which can be redeemed for avatar clothing as well as interior goods for avatar rooms, and according to the press release for mobile content such as full track music downloads, too.
According to the organisers of TGS, as of today the projected participation for their upcoming annual event is 168 exhibitors occupying 1,708 booths which would make it even larger in scale than the largest past show (148 exhibitors, 1,701 booths, in 2006). This may be due to the fact that this year marks the introduction of software titles for the new game platforms released over the past 1-2 years.
