KDDI Launches Mobile EZ-Book Portal
Online bookstores are nothing new but KDDI has wrapped up a mobile reading solution that transforms cell phones into personal book-mobiles. Starting 21 April, EZ Book Land for au WIN EV-DO cell phones brings bestsellers, business titles, movie novelizations, manga (comics) and anime right onto handsets — 7,000 titles from ten sites. Like the EZ Channel video program service, books auto-download to subscribers late at night (when network demand is low) to be read at leisure with no connection fees to worry about. Viewer software is provided by the XMDF e-book viewer developed by Sharp for regular titles and Celsys Comic Surfing software for manga/anime. EZ Book Land partner Maruzen’s bookstore chain anchors the portal in the real world for book orders of the three-dimensional kind via au Books.
The weather is warming up and that means a lot more than Cherry Blossoms in this country — bring out the beer and bentos! Baseball season is back! The new season also brings some cool new technology that will knock pro baseball off the TV screen, out of the ballpark, through the sports bar doors’ and right onto your keitai screen. Like many traditional staples of entertainment here, pro baseball is going mobile — but with a decidedly animated twist.
Japan’s wireless industry provides some of the coolest mobile experiences on planet Earth. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that mobile players here are also masters at the street-level marketing of cell phones and wireless services — and KDDI’s Designing Studio is not only the latest over-the-top effort at creating a consumer-targeted mobile funland, it’s also the best. In today’s program, WWJ’s Gail Nakada speaks with the Studio’s general manager, tours five floors’ worth of interactive games, live handsets and mobile demos, and plugs into Harajuku’s ultimate mobile zeitgeist.
Recently, East Japan Rail (JR East) and NTT DoCoMo held a press event in Tokyo to announce the January 2006 start of “Mobile Suica” which will allow i-mode phones to serve as train tickets. WWJ’s Gail Nakada 
In today’s program, we speak with Yutaka Nakamae from Panasonic’s Corporate External Relations Group who met with us during last fall’s CEATEC consumer electronics show in Tokyo. While there’s plenty of eye candy, including Panny’s 900iV (released in mid-2004), some skin-able models to please those who can’t decide on their favorite color and the very cool GSM X700 (now on sale in Europe), the real intelligence relates to finding our who’s boss in the carrier/manufacturer relationship (Hint: Who owns the customer?). Today’s proggy is not only a fun one — showing some great cellys from the October CEATEC show — but it also reconfirms the reality of the relationship between cell-phone makers and cellular operators in Japan — in this case, Panasonic and DoCoMo.