Decorating your Cell Phone: Not Just for X-mas
For a special bonus Christmas present, today’s video program highlights a small company that really adds sparkle to Japan’s national obsession with custom keitai decoration. WWJ videographer Lawrence Cosh-Ishii spoke with Syouji Koyama this week at his (temporary) LED blazing storefront in the fashionable Shibuya shopping district, right across from Japanese gorgeous-Gal headquarters (aka the 109 Building). Cell-phone accessories may look like kid stuff to overseas viewers but the fun and games of charms, designer hand straps, custom-painted handsets and key pad jewels is a multimillion dollar spin-off industry that’s crossing Japan’s borders into Asia and coming to a country near you.
It’s been a fantastic year for us reporting from the heart of Japan’s mobile revolution and 2005 is shaping up to be yet another exciting adventure in the world of mobile.
On 16 November, Dr. Brian Clark, acting president and CEO, Vodafone KK, presided at an Imperial Hotel presser announcing Vodafone Japan’s first-half results for the fiscal year ending 31 March 2005. Despite mobile operating revenue falling 2.5 percent year-on-year (to 736.8 bn yen), Clark put on a brave face and emphasized the new 3G terminal line-up, increased 3G coverage, growth in prepaid, and enhanced roaming. Nonetheless, several of his comments contrast sharply with what WWJ knows to be true about the Japan market.
Tokyo’s best and brightest mobilistas gathered for 
From the Tokyo Game Show, in which long-time Tokyo mobile entrepreneur Neeraj Jhanji, builder of the first (and probably only) IM i-mode client for AOL, provides WWJ subscribers with an exclusisve look at his Until Now Very Quiet Plans (indeed, a working demo) to create a mobile version of the globally überpopular Habbo Hotel community service… er… site… or whatever it is. OK — it’s a networking community for digierati burnt out on traditional RPG shooters. In any event, Habbo’s mobile potential is huge (we think) and Neeraj is likely one of the few who can make it happen. 
President Nakamura faced the Tokyo press on September 30 and did… not too bad a job. In a wide-ranging presentation followed by Q&A, he covered fuel cell R&D (commercialization after FY 2006), Softbank’s moves to obtain 3G spectrum (vacating the spectrum tomorrow “cannot be done”), and Big D’s global strategy (with a dual-mode GSM/W-CDMA handset, you can access both). Nakamura also talked about churn, competition with KDDI/au, and the possibility of abandoning pre-paid services. A post-fall IR Roadshow program that’s not to be missed.
The 
Japan’s 3G networks enable new types of high-bandwidth mobile content that weren’t viable under 2G for either economic or technical reasons. One of the coolest is mobile manga, delivering full-color comic book magazines to cell phones. There’s a manga stuffed in every Japanese commuter’s back pocket (together with a ketai), so porting manga to keitai could make an awful lot of money for content producers. It’ll also save a bunch of trees. Wireless Watch Japan was at 
Flash has been an integral part of the fixed-line Web for years and with its launch on DoCoMo’s 505i-series 2G handsets in spring 2003 (and on FOMA 3G last fall), it has developed into a mobile Web standard in Japan as well; six major Japanese manufacturers are already producing Flash-enabled handsets. Flash has now rolled out on yet another batch of 3G phones, this time from KDDI. We caught up with Macromedia’s senior director of marketing for mobile, Anup Murarka, at KDDI’s launch event in Tokyo and had a fascinating discussion about the past, present, and future of Flash for wireless. Full Program (also available in Real Player and Quick-Time formats) Run-time 20:51
This free-for-all program takes you to KDDI’s recent launch event at the Imperial hotel announcing the carrier’s three new WIN handsets, all now making use of Macromedia Flash lite. You’ll get a close-up of these phones in action plus tips on the new 3G flat-rate price plan coming in August. We also highlight NTT DoCoMo’s N900iL dual-mode 802.11b/W-CDMA handset based on the FOMA N900i which, unfortunately, has been transformed into the de facto proprietary, intranet-only “Passage Duple” 
Earlier this week, NTT DoCoMo showcased a prototype 3G/WLAN combination phone carefully configured to make it useless for public hot spots. Against this, Fujitsu Labs and spinoff Net-2Com Corp. have developed something much more useful — a VoIP/PHS phone aimed at the consumer market to be commercialized this fall, with CDMA, GSM, and other versions to follow “depending on market demand.” WWJ treked over to the Fujitsu Solution Forum event in Tokyo recently to have a look at this breakthrough phone; we also took a test ride on Fujitsu Lab’s new PDA unit running a virtual hotspot application that should be coming to reality near you sometime soon.