A regular WWJ reader who requested anonymity (for obvious reasons) send me a blast panning the new Toshiba BREW-enabled CDMA 1X handset. “Just thought you might be interested. I bought a A5304T with BREW last week, and it is crap! Actually, the BREW part and the camera are all right, and the phone design itself is nice; but the user interface and display suck.
Japan’s largest newspaper Web sites get hundreds of millions of page views per month. But many new media pioneers are still unsure where news sites fit into the media mix in Japan — and whether they’ll ever make a profit. A man walks by a bank in Osaka just as it erupts into flames. He pulls out a camera-equipped cell phone — one of 10 million in use in Japan — and snaps a photo.
2002 saw 48.8 percent of the nation’s households sporting Internet-capable electronics equipment, according to the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry. According to the statement including such devices as computers and mobile phones topped 50 percent in the Kanto and Kinki regions.
Tens of billions of dollars are riding on the future of fast, mobile Internet services, but industry leaders leaving the world’s top wireless trade show still struggle to justify the investment. At the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, the 28,000 visitors as usual overloaded the local mobile phone network, underlining that the industry still faces basic problems as it seeks to rekindle sales with advanced data services.
Access D2 Communication’s 2003 Picture and Text ad rates guide (in Japanese only). D2C is a JV between – You guessed it! – DoCoMo and Dentsu.
Morinaga is a great example of the content providers that organize their offerings into more sophisticated “mini platforms” that support sales, marketing, and promotion campaigns for off-line products. In other words, they provide mobile content (images, ring tones, etc.) as part of an overall marketing effort (either for themselves or for clients) – usually combined with PC Web or non-electronic channels.
