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Vodafone KK: All Quiet on the 3G Front

Prepare for some grim reading. There wasn’t a lot of good news on Vodafone’s Eastern Front, for the short term at least, arising out of Vodafone K.K.’s November 18-announced first-half financials. It is eerily quiet in the Little V machine gun nests out here on the 3G frontier. Vodafone K.K. faces gently sliding ARPU, wilting subscriber uptake and a long haul launch for a fully-fledged rollout of cutting-edge 3G keitai. “Japan Telecom Holdings (JTH) stock finished down 15 percent for the day after posting first half earnings,” notes CSFB senior telecoms analyst Mark Berman. “The market is essentially saying that it has completely lost confidence in both the competitiveness of Vodafone in Japan, and believes further that the current … management is more concerned with appeasing parent Vodafone than it is with rewarding minority shareholders,” he writes this week. On the other hand, the basis for a big comeback could be on the cards for next summer. We’ll give an overview of these points below, but before we start blazing away. ** We’d like to sincerely apologize to Vodafone K.K. for our mucking up an item in the Happy Packet discount series in last week’s newsletter. For the record, packet rate slashes DO apply to 3G, and we said they didn’t ** Honto-ni, gomen nasai, Vodafone-Sama! WWJ subscribers log-on and in..

How Europe Really Differs from Japan

WWJ co-founder Daniel Scuka reports from Germany

Earlier this month, I wrapped up a 7-city seminar tour, “Mobile Kaizen in Japan.” The one-day MKiJ seminars, co-produced with Mobile Economy, were an in-depth look at the success factors behind the wireless Internet in Japan. Here are some of my own findings..

Attendees included mid- and senior-level people from carriers, content providers, consulting firms, and mobile application houses, as well as several academics, some students, and one or two journalists. All in all, it was a fun, eye-opening experience, and – as best I can tell from verbal and mail feedback – was well enjoyed by our audience.

Mobile Applications For Enterprise Users Missing in Japan

In September, a group of IT professionals visited Japan to roll up their sleeves and find out who are pushing what enterprise applications here. With FeliCa debuting in trial form a few weeks from now, we were interested in hearing their views about Japan’s ready-built business apps. infrastructure. You may be surprised by their findings. Independent consultant (and WWJ subscriber) Donal O’Shea was part of the group that included representatives of a major French airline, an Australian steel company and a UK-based package delivery company, together with Douglas Neal and Piet Opperman of CSC Research Services and Sebastien Bacholet of Cigref. They met with Qualcomm, HP, IBM, NTT DoCoMo, Alcatel/Fujitsu, Telecom France, Nissan, and Hitachi, and toured the Yokohama Reasearch Park. Wow, Big Big Itinerary… In a nutshell, concludes O’Shea, “carriers have never understood the enterprise…”

DoCoMo and KDDI Pushing the Envelope and Raking in Profits

Just as we thought things are gearing up this month, Japan’s number one and two carriers have really pulled some goodies out of their bag. We’ve already talked about KDDI and flat fees, but this week’s subject is profits for the carriers and a grab bag of gains for subscribers. If ever there was a reason not to keep your eyes fixed on Japan’s wireless communications, we’d like to know. DoCoMo trumped itself recently announcing profits, Felicia Mobile commerce with Sony, and now (finally) some concrete plans to expand i-mode. We have the innards of DoCoMo’s recent press conference up for you in this week’s WWJ video program here.

Oki Gets Animated with 3D Digital Avatars

Pick your disguise: I want to be Dr. Jekyll as my mini-me. WWJ was pleasantly surprised last week to find that one of Japan’s usually less-covered semiconductor companies, Oki Electric Industrial, has just come up with 3D digital avatar-producing software called FaceCommunicator-BBE that should allow mobile phone users to appear as a character that mimics (in real time) the user’s facial expressions (anger, doubt, happiness, etc.) during calls. Given Japan’s love of anime (think Pokemon), the software could be a real boon for those obsessed with being really cute – or those, for whatever reason, who don’t want to show their faces during videophone conversations.

KDDI WINs With Mobile Flat Rate; and Half-Price Calls to Mom

They’ve gone and done it now! KDDI’s just announced a double whammy; on November 28, the company will offer 3G’s first flat-rate packet services with all you can surf for 4,200 yen (about $37) on the souped-up, 2.4-Mbps (max) EV-DO version of CDMA 1X that KDDI has branded “WIN” (We Innovate the Next) – presumably to beat up on DoCoMo’s W-CDMA-based FOMA. Then, today, it said it was halving the cost of calls from KDDI Au mobile subscribers to KDDI ADSL/ IP home phones on the Dion Service. The knives are out! With three new service innovations, two new terminals, and a data card, the company appears to be following what Kenshi Tazaki, vice president and team manager of Gartner Research Japan, calls a “high risk strategy” (think of all those potential lost packet charges!). Will Big D respond in kind just as it was hoping to glean megabucks from FOMA users? “It’s a very aggressive shot at DoCoMo and stakes out a clear position by KDDI in the mobile market,” says Tazaki.

Viewpoint: 505iS or SOS call for 2G PDC?

Six months on from NTT DoCoMo’s largely successful counterattack – via the new 2G 505i handsets – on Vodafone’s Sha mail photo messaging service, the market-leading carrier has launched its next set of fab-five 505iS (S= second-generation) phones with working models, mockups, and three models (call girls?) – but, unfortunately, without the lovely Ai Kato (see 505i launch Viewpoint here). On top of entering the 2-megapixel camera war, the 505iS-series offer both JAN- and QR-standard bar-code reader capability (Cool! Get all your details in a flash!); a DoCoMo representative we interviewed gave strong hints that the 505iS may be DoCoMo’s final, or next-to-final, second-generation PDC upgrade. With the company seeking to emulate KDDI’s hugely successful push from 2G to 3G, migrating customers onto FOMA/W-CDMA in the latter half of next year is more vital than ever. As DoCoMo’s recent FOMA predictions arch up Chuck Yeager/stolen-Starfighter-like toward the stratosphere, or at least the top right of the graphs, what gives FOMA The Right Stuff? Is this the end of the road for second generation?

Wireless Watch at CEATEC; Next Stop Ubiquity

There was some real gold buried in the 2,460 booths and 505 companies that exhibited at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) 2003 last week, and a bunch of press releases over the last two weeks have induced us to write a comprehensive tech review of what’s new with mobile technology. At the show we managed to corner the chief designer of Mitsubishi Electric’s next generation keitais (NGKs?) on a new series of very cool modular phones they have developed for next year, Melco looks to have made a conceptual breakthrough with these prototype handsets. Suffice to say we think that series with plug-and-play games console, megapix camera, GPS and other modules that snap onto it’s sleek clamshell design, looks as if they will blow the competition (Sony Ericsson and Samsung versions) out of the water. We also took a ride on the new Sanyo TV-Phone coming out for KDDI and saw a few other goodies like ASIMO and fish feeding with FOMA! We’ll show you all these cool new keitai in action, so be on standby for our video program that’s coming soon. The central message we took from CEATEC was that there are plenty of outstanding innovations coming on stream in the next 18 months that will finally herald the dawn of “ubiquitous” communication. Ahh, ubiquity, the means-anything buzzword that launched a thousand PowerPoint presentations…

After J-Phone's Miserable Summer Vodafone KK is Born

With former J-Phone’s 3G rollout stalled and, it seems, little left in the goodies barrel to counter DoCoMo’s sleek summer-six 2G 505i rollout, and swelling 3G subscriber figures from both its rivals here in Japan, J-Phone needed to distract press attention from the company’s terrible summer. Last week, Darryl E. Green just did that. There was a strong sense of DeJaVu at WWJ when Green, eschewing fowl or game, pulled the NEC ‘tellycelly’ out of his corporate top hat at October 1’s inaugural Vodafone KK press conference. Remember Sha-mail? How fleet-footed J-Phone sidestepped DoCoMo and stole the hearts, or at least the images, of 10 million teenagers with cool keitai camera phones? It looks like the rebranded J-Phone-cum-Vodafone KK combo is going to leapfrog DoCoMo and KDDI again with Japan’s first TV-Phone this December. And, beyond that, Vodafone KK has a lot more up its wide sleeves with six new 3G phones, new business billing plans and bargain rates to fight back.

Tokyo Game Show 2003: Mobile Gaming BREW's Up

By December HelloNet Co. Ltd. of Busan, Korea, will launch a Massive Multi-Player (interactive) BREW based game in Japan making use of KDDI’s CDMA 1X speed, Chief Executive Officer Lee Hwan Joon told WWJ at last week’s Tokyo Game Show. He also put us straight on a few pertinent questions floating around the event. Namely: Is BREW difficult to write? Will MMPGs be too expensive for users? There just won’t be a market for such apps, right? The answer we got from Lee was NO-NO and thrice NO. With a grin and a game that supports 8,000 players acting out on his phone, he was of the opinion that BREW’s a better way to go for the next generation of interactive, keitai-based games. Lee was the most upbeat developer we met at TGS, which itself was an upbeat show. With the mobile games industry set to explode, the evidence is that new JAVA games continue to rock and developers need to be brave if they are to take advantage of 3G’s potential. Oh, and by the way, in our upcoming video program you’ll be some of the first to see Final Fantasy played on a ‘coming soon’ FOMA handset.