A new report by Japanese business site Tech On notes that Japan’s mobile industry is booming – and that mobile gaming is on the rise, too. According to the report figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Communication state that the mobile industry has grown to 722.4 billion Yen (4.9 billion Euro) over the past 12 months – a rise of 39 per cent.
Guppy Games has selected Kotobuki Solution Co., Ltd. (KEMCO Japan) as their distribution partner for releasing mobile game contents in Japan. The first title for distribution will be Jump Girls with an expected launch by fall 2006. Jump Girls is a strategy puzzle game jointly developed by ZIO Interactive which has been very popular on South Korean carriers. KEMCO Japan will be the distribution partner for launching Jump Girls with the four major Japanese carriers: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Vodafone, and Willcom.
The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry plans to draw up a new set of rules this fall to allow companies that do not own their own wireless infrastructure to more easily enter the mobile communications business, ministry officials said Thursday. The new rules are aimed at helping companies that lack their own networks to become “virtual mobile network operators” by using the networks of established mobile phone operators, including NTT DoCoMo Inc., KDDI Corp. and Vodafone K.K., the officials said.
Japan came second, after South Korea, in terms of access to digital communications technology, while having the lowest monthly broadband prices, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Telecommunication Union.
Editor’s note: WWJ will try and get our hands on a copy of this report; the ranking would change, no doubt, if broadband access via mobile were considered. We strongly suspect Japan would still rank as one of the cheapest on a cost-per-megabyte for traffic basis, exclusive of content fee.
IRISH phone users are paying the highest bills in Europe, it was revealed last night. Both mobile and fixed-line rental charges are almost twice the EU average, according to new figures. Vodafone, with profits last year of more than E45billion, claims that its Irish revenues are the highest anywhere in the world, except Japan.
(Sort of makes you wonder why they sold out to Son… — Ed.)
Five Japanese companies including Fujitsu and NEC developed a systematic method to facilitate information sharing using varieties of barcodes and RFID tags. They have agreed on a method to create conversion tables that allow a company to translate the serial numbers used by other companies into the company format. This systematic method may facilitate information sharing across different companies, which would be useful for building traceability or retail systems.
Qualcomm and Microsoft will work together to port the Windows Mobile operating system to certain Qualcomm chips, speeding time to market and potentially dropping the price of smart phones, the companies said. The chips are expected to become available to handset makers in the second half of this year and should hit shelves in 2007. By integrating and testing support for Windows Mobile on Qualcomm’s Mobile Station Modem chips, the companies hope to help device makers speed product development times.
NEC and Matsushita (Panasonic) are in talks to extend their co-operation in the mobile phone sector in an effort to ensure survival in the overcrowded Japanese market, NEC’s president said on Monday. The expanded collaboration would focus on handset manufacturing and could include the joint procurement of components and further collaboration in research and development. The two groups already co-operate in 3G technology research. According to reports, three-way talks among NEC, Matsushita and Texas Instruments Inc. about cellphone cooperation are in their final stage. The consolidation strategy was mentioned by NEC’s incoming president, Kaoru Yano, in March.
We noticed in a online recent article that the most prominent mobile manga viewers are actually female! Apparently statistics show more than half of the viewers are women and some stories are dominated by majority of 70 percent or more. So, when do those ladies watch manga..?!? According to the story a spokeman said: “Midnight, just before falling asleep in her bed, she watches quietly under the blanket… that’s the trend, I guess.”
Sharp Corp. overtook NEC Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. as Japan’s biggest mobile phone maker by shipments for the first time, MM Research Institute said in a report dated yesterday. Shipments by Sharp gained 20 percent to 7.6 million units in the year ended March 31, accounting for 16.3 percent of the total 46.3 million shipments, the researcher said.
