Vodafone KK is hoping to appeal to a wider range of companies with changes to its Vodafone Mobile Office price plan. The company plans to reduce monthly basic charges for business customers from 1 June. Under the current scheme, customers form an on-net group of 20 lines or more under the same company account.
According to new findings from Informa, the global wireless market now claims 1.8 billion subscribers, representing worldwide market penetration of 28 percent. That means there are still approximately 4 billion potential wireless users in the world, ignoring for a moment issues of economic ability to own one and war or famine.
Word to the Wireless — Japan’s KDDI will launch a free mobile weblog system, dubbed Duoblog, for subscribers to its 3G WIN EZ Web service on 19 May. In a first from Japan cellcos, users can access and update these mobile blogs directly from their handset or PC through the KDDI Duogate portal. Duoblog sites will be fully customizable with backgrounds (skins), emoticons, images, and applications. Maybe your humble scribes here at WWJ should sign-up and join in the fun..?!? Overseas mobile sites like WinkSite and Hip-Top Nation (to name a few) already provide tools to create free moblogs (mobile blogs) or mobile editions of web logs that can be accessed worldwide from Web enabled cell phones, PDAs and PCs.
At press time, NTT DoCoMo spokesperson Tomoko Tsuda stated that the company has “no immediate plans” to launch a mobile blogging site. Vodafone Japan, too, is taking a wait-and-see attitude, saying they would “monitor market developments in this regard.”
As all Wireless Watchers will know, the youth market in the Asia-Pacific region is becoming a significant driver for growth in the region’s mobile-phone market, according to a report by In-Stat. Around 10-15 percent of all youth disposable income is spent on mobile products in developed countries, displacing spending on traditional youth products like clothing, toys, comic books, etc., while messaging accounted for 40.3 percent of Asian mobile youth data expenditures in 2004.
Mobile content distributor Index Corp. is looking to put more play into mobile content through a new alliance with Takara Toys. Japanese Game powerhouse Konami has washed its financial hands of all shares in Takara making room for Index to move into this big corporate box of marketable fun. Index Corp. has agreed to purchase 22.2 percent of the toy maker’s outstanding shares at a cost of around 11 billion yen reportedly. The partnership aims to use Takara’s lineup of popular TV animation and toys to drive development of content incorporating the Index Group’s mobile centered expertise.
The two have partnered before. Takara’s Bowlingual dog translator, see WWJ video here, is now our in the US and Canada and was jointly developed with Index and includes mobile phone functionality. In January 2004 Index and Takara set up a company to work on joint projects.
Japan’s four mobile operators have announced interim findings [.PDF] that radio-frequency energy from mobile-phone base stations does not affect human cells. The World Health Organization has recommended further research with respect to the safety of these waves and, in response, the companies started examining the biological effect of microwave exposure from mobile phones and base stations in November 2002. The results will be announced at the Bioelectromagnetics (BEMS) Annual Meeting, 19-24 June, 2005, in Ireland, and have also been submitted to the BEMS Journal.
