NTT Communications announced they have started recruiting monitors for their planned service to “send text or audiovisual content together with formulas for creating and dispensing fragrances”. We posted about this last spring, and actually had a sniff of the pilot at their R&D labs in late 2006, where we also saw the holographic projection demo during that visit at Yokoska – 4G killer app. anyone!
Point On Research conducted this survey, in Japanese, on Japan SNS in early June, with interesting results. The questionnaire targeted demographics, representing 50-50 sample of male to female and equal 25% ratio on the age split between teens, twenties thirties and forties, for feedback on platforms and access with Mixi the clear leader at 72% and mobile preferred to PC by more than 4 to 1 margin. Another note of interest shows that over 65% of the group indicate they are daily users!
We just could not let This Article go un-challenged – hence see our ++ respond inline below.
The most important factor that led to America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation. Federal trustbusters made AT&T lease its lines to others and eventually broke up the giant telephone company.
++ The Japanese government made similar moves with NTT. Perhaps a more valid point passed over is how the respective governments historically manage and allocate the public wireless spectrum. Results clearly show a "Regulated" Japan approach enabled the mobile industry here to significantly trump the progress of a so-called "Free Market" USA (highest bid auctions) model.
Later they forced IBM to separate its hardware and software businesses. These actions opened the door to competition and lower prices. More important, they changed the industry’s structure, replacing monoliths with smaller, specialised companies which have to work with others with complementary skills. The result has been tremendous innovation. …**Counterintuitively, fragmenting these industries helped common standards to emerge, they say.
++ All of the major vendors have smaller spin-off suppliers here doing the piece work.. often the deepest source of innovation is coming from bottom up to the likes of NEC, Fujitsu and Panasonic et all. **Yet standards in Japan – especially for mobile as mentioned below – are somehow less relevant? Continued after the jump>>
Plenty of news today considering the recent announcement from Apple, the iPhone 3GS will hit here June 26th, so we thought it would be worthwhile to review where things stand to-date for Steves Amazing Device in Japan. Since both Apple and SoftBank Mobile have always refused to disclose unit sales, even targets for that matter, it has naturally been an ongoing obsession for many – how is the iPhone doing in Japan? There are several angles to approach this on so for starters lets just say that, while there seems to be recent awakening and therefore increased adoption, expectation often leads to disappointment.
As the 1st year anniversary since launch here last July is fast approaching we have assembled our most candid and personal observations, for WWJ Subscribers, after the jump.
The Japan Times picked up on this thread, regarding the use of mobile phones to manage pandemics, with details of a funding proposal to the Ministry of Communications. Basically a disease-tracking system using GPS, the SoftBank subsidiary plans to run an initial pilot by outfitting 1,000 elementary school students with handsets to trial the program. This is one of several dozen approved funding proposals and, as we mentioned earlier, a natural attention grabber considering the combination of recent panics and predictable privacy issues.
The folks at Niwango have announced a beta trial for users to setup a live broadcast channel from and for their mobile handsets. According to the announcement [.PDF in Japanese] they will enable up to 500 concurrent viewers starting June 1st, with plans to scale up to support a total of 3,000 viewers per stream in July. They have positioned this as an experimantal service and for the initial launch it will only be available to premium members who also subscribe via i-mode. If you don’t know what NicoNico Douga (Smile Video) is, they presented to Mobile Monday Tokyo in July 2008 – details Here.
