Sign of the Times
Sign of the Times

Sign of the Times

DoCoMo 1H Profits off 20 Percent

NTT DoCoMo Inc.’s net profit for the fiscal first half ended 30 September was 20 percent lower than a year earlier, with the decline in net profit to a great extent due to the absence in the first half of one-off gains of the kind made in the corresponding period of last year (when the company booked a special capital gain of 62 bn yen from the sale of its 20-percent stake in Hutchison 3G UK Holdings Ltd.). DoCoMo reported a first-half net profit of 309.82 bn yen, compared to 385.28 bn yen a year earlier.

Mobile Payments Research Report

Strategy Analytics released this new report ‘Mobile Contactless Payments – Growth on the Horizon’ analyzing payment for goods or services using phones instead of cash, credit or debit cards. At a global level, activity in the mobile phone contactless payment market today is still negligible; over the past two years the only bright point has been the FeliCa service in Japan, which has provided a model for the speed with which services can take off if the right players and the right structure are put in place. The report estimates that FeliCa will drive $900 million worth of payments in Japan during 2006.

OKI Launches Face Sensing Engine 3.0

Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. announced the development of Face Sensing Engine (FSE) Ver3.0, a middleware for embedded systems. OKI adds a new function that can detect several faces from a data of a single photo and can verify specific faces, providing industry-leading processing performance. Photos taken by mobile phones are usually stored based on the date and time the particular photo was taken, which makes it difficult to sort them and search among them. With OKI’s FSE ver.3.0, photos are automatically stored according to who is in the photo, enabling easier access to the photo.

3G Phone Checks Drunk Drivers

According to an article in the local media, a cell-phone-enabled breath analyzer system developed by DoCoMo is proving popular among bus and transport companies. The new system, which uses a DoCoMo 3G handset, is designed to be foolproof. First, the driver makes a video-phone call to his or her company and breathes into the analyzer connected to their cell phone. The video image showing the driver blowing into the analyzer and data regarding the alcohol concentration on his or her breath are transmitted to the company and confirmed by computer there.

M-Commerce Convergence Announced

East Japan Railway Company (JR East), NTT DoCoMo, JCB, and bitWallet just announced that they have agreed to share a common platform to enable their e-payment brands — Suica, iD, QUICPay and Edy — to share the same point-of-sale reader/writer device and data center. The system is expected to begin commercial operation with the Suica and iD brands in January 2007, with QUICPay and Edy [ .jpg image ] to be added subsequently.

JR Boosts m-Commerce and Survey Results

JR has announced they will drop the previous requirement to have the company’s “View” credit card in order to take advantage of their Mobile Suica service as of 21 October. They have also indicated that by sometime in December this year, SoftBank Mobile customers with FeliCa-enabled handsets (no model types announced) will also finally be able to use JR’s m-commerce system.