Mobile Users
Mobile Users

Mobile Users

JR East, NTT DoCoMo, and NTT DATA to Jointly Promote Suica e-Money Service

East Japan Railway Company (JR East), NTT DoCoMo, Inc. (DoCoMo) and NTT DATA Corporation (NTT DATA) announced today that they have agreed to jointly promote JR East’s Suica® e-money service. Through this joint venture, JR East aims to expand the number of retail shops and companies accepting Suica e-money, which will make it more convenient and attract more users. For DoCoMo, the expansion of the Suica e-money service will encourage use of its “Osaifu-Keitai” mobile phones equipped with contactless IC cards.

Foreign Phones Don't Sell in Japan

When Vodafone Group released a line of 3G mobile phones simultaneously in several major cities around the world, Japan was less than enthralled. The marketing blitz in Japan was also the first test of selling foreign-made handsets like Motorola and Nokia in a country where homemade phones have nearly monopolized the market. By many reports, the foreign handset makers fell flat in Japan, the most advanced cellphone market in the world.

Vodafone Weighs Change in Japan

Wireless giant Vodafone added 4.1 million new users – that’s the population of New Zealand – in its strongest quarter for the past five years. Now it will focus its efforts on improving its Japanese business, according to Chief Executive Arun Sarin. Average revenue per customer have slipped in that country, as well as in the U.K. and Germany. Sarin’s not averse to the idea of selling underperforming operations in Japan, where Vodafone languishes behind NTT DoCoMo and KDDI: “We’re not married to any asset. If an asset loses its usefulness to us.. we’d be willing to look at (a disposal),” he was quoted as saying by AFX News.

Japan Ready to Launch Cellphone P2P Digital Cash

Japan Ready to Launch Cell Phone P2P Digital CashbitWallet Ltd., the company that manages digital cash service Edy (Euro-Dollar-Yen), just announced the company will launch a new service called “Edy to Edy” on 20 July. According to the company (rough translation), “[If] the Edy cash value can be sent not only by the Edy number, [but also by] the mail address or the telephone number, it is thought that payments for net auctions, personal gifts or adjustments and congratulations can be used more conveniently.” A minimum transfer fee of 50 yen will be charged for each transaction plus (Aha!) the standard 5% consumption tax; the maximum amount per transfer is limited to 50,000 yen (about US$500). P2P cash transactions between individual handsets has, until now, not been possible in Japan.

DoCoMo Reports Customer Data Loss

According to this statement [in Japanese] NTT DoCoMo lost customer data records for 48,000 people in the Kanto region. The missing hard-disc, reported to police June 27, had client information such as “Contractor Name” and “Phone Number” however did not contain “Customers Address”, “Credit Card Number” or “Password Details” the company said.

TheFeature.com: Last Post

The end of an era! From the TheFeature’s final posting: When TheFeature.com was launched in the fall of 2000, it was a pretty revolutionary idea — a corporation like Nokia setting up an independent, non-branded site with the task of getting people thinking and talking about the future of mobile communications… With the dramatic changes in the Internet publishing landscape since then, and the rise of blogs in particular, TheFeature’s role as a leader in the community perhaps isn’t as necessary as it once was, with many quality sites discussing relevant topics and providing outlets for the vibrant community that’s sprouted up around the mobile industry.