Viewpoint
Viewpoint

Viewpoint

NTT DoCoMo Buys Into Tower Records Japan

NTT DoCoMo Buys Into Tower Records JapanIn a deal that puts a new spin on mobile music promotion in the Japanese market, DoCoMo announced a partnership with Tower Records Japan opting to buy 42 percent of the music retailer for 12.8 billion yen ($109 million). Scheduled to go through by late November, the deal will make DoCoMo Tower’s single largest shareholder. The music retailer operates 78 Tower Records stores and 31 Wave music outlets. Tower’s motto in Japan is "The Best Place to Find Music" but will DoCoMo find it the best place to create musical revenue?

Taking the stage at a Tokyo press conference November 8th, Takeshi Natsuno, senior vice president and managing director of NTT DoCoMo’s multimedia services department, and Hiroyuki Fushitani, president and chief executive officer of Tower Records Japan, gave the press few details on their upcoming fusion of telecom and music marketing. Not surprisingly, projects center around DoCoMo’s Osaifu Ketai (mobile wallet) platform for 3G handsets. Users will be able to wave their mobile phones over displays at Tower stores to download coupons or purchase CDs, picking them up at the sales counter on their way out. From this winter phones equipped with DoCoMo’s ToruCa (toru, capture; Ca, card) information-capture service will include Tower reader/writer units to download news on favorite artists, special offers from music labels, ticket reservations, and other music-related information. Tower’s popular redeemable purchase point system will also migrate onto mobile phones.

KDDI's New Trio of 3G handsets

KDDI's New Trio of 3G handsets Japan’s KDDI is promoting three new handsets coming out later this month that they believe mix fun with functionality for a package of business and entertainment features.

The W33SA from Sanyo, W32T by Toshiba and Kyocera’s A5515K each pack a push-to-talk style function. The trio of handsets comes equipped with Hello Messenger, a live audio-chat style service for up to five people that supports voice, image and text simultaneously. Twelve original cartoon-style avatars by well-known Japanese illustrator Kohei Yamashita will frolic on screen as stand-ins for chat members who can type or talk through the conversation over the handsets.

Targeted at young, female users, chat members register each other’s number in their handset to get started. Prices for the service of course vary depending on if subscribers have a flat rate package or not. If not then there is a charge incurred for sending photos or data. A special introductory rate for the audio portion of Hello Messenger until April, for example, will be 1.05 yen per 20 seconds. Scheduled to start service in late November.

Microsoft Scores First Windows Mobile Japan Deal

Microsoft Scores First Windows Mobile Japan DealWillcom, Microsoft and electronics maker Sharp are teaming up to deliver a corporate-targeted PDA WLAN handset for the Japanese market that will incorporate Windows Mobile 5.0 as its operating system. Scheduled for a December release, the W-Zero3 will operate over Willcom’s PHS (personal handyphone system) network.

Equipped for both voice and data, the handset makes full use of its Microsoft connection to juggle an assortment of PC-based functions over its handy slide-out QWERTY keyboard in addition to the standard mobile touch pad. Users can access PC-based email addresses, edit Microsoft and Excel documents on a bright, 3.7-inch VGA touch screen (the unit comes with a PDA-style stylus) and thumb through Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF files.

Can Visto, Vodafone, Nokia Push Email into Corporate Pockets?

Nokia E-SeriesA brief prediction. While idly surfing about the web today, I noticed that Visto, a US-based developer of corporate email solutions, has started a Japanese-language website; there’s no new, startling information, but they’ve translated their product & corporate data, news releases, etc. — presumably, at some cost. Why the big effort? They’ve just announced a deal to deliver push email on Nokia’s new E-series business devices (did someone say "Looks like a Blackberry?"); they are also working with Vodafone in The Netherlands for mobile email.

It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to predict they’ve got a deal cooking with Big Red in Japan. Could Visto and Vodafone, the come-from-behind 3G carrier, have a chance to place a Nokia Blackberry-style device into Japan’s potentially lucrative corporate market, populated by salarymen who have until now disdained ultra-cool email-capable 3G phones for anything other than low-margin voice calls? Until now, only DoCoMo has provided any sort of mail-capable, PDA-type device, and only to mixed results (the devices, notably from Sharp and Motorola, have been rather pricey). December’s shaping up to be an interesting month.

DoCoMo, Rakuten to Form Strategic Alliance in Internet Auction Services

DoCoMo and Rakuten to Form Strategic Alliance in Internet Auction ServicesJapan’s top mobile carrier DoCoMo and leading online mall operator Rakuten have forged a capital alliance to expand mobile auction services. Rakuten will spin off its peer-2-peer (P2P) auction network, Rakuten Flea Market, into a separate entity, Rakuten Auction, Inc from Dec. 1st. DoCoMo will then invest 4.2 billion yen ($37 million) starting Dec. 16 for a 40 percent share of the new firm. The deal does not include Rakuten’s profitable B2C (Business-2-Consumer) Super Auction site, which offers new goods from its huge listing of online mall operators. Rakuten currently has around 17.3 million users; DoCoMo 45 million subscribers.

Anxious to break the news to the media, the planned tie-up was announced at a hastily called press conference in Tokyo’s Okura Hotel with virtually no details on how the two firms plan on tweaking the service to attract DoCoMo users or differentiate it from KDDI’s EZ Web auAuction or even Rakuten’s current somewhat limited mobile auction portal. DoCoMo President Masao Nakamura and Rakuten President Hiroshi Mikitani were ill prepared to answer questions from the media pressing for more details.

Sony Music, Artificial Life close 3G mobile music deal

Sony Music and Artificial Life go for 3G Mobile Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, Inc., creator of hit 3G mobile games and environments, has come to terms with Sony BMG Music Entertainment in a licensing deal to provide music from the Sony play list to its 3G mobile V-disco product. V-Disco is a wireless subscription site combining chat, music streaming and music downloading to mobile phones with interactive 3D graphics and animated virtual avatars. Users and visitors to V-Disco select an avatar for themselves and join the fun. Club-goers choose genres and songs from the club list, listening to their tunes while their avatar strolls along chatting with other party people in real time.

In an e-mail to WWJ, Eberhard Schoeneburg, CEO of Artificial Life, said the company is already in testing with operators in Japan and he thought they were not too long away from launch in this market. V-disco users select songs and 3D animated avatars, watching them funk it up on any of several virtual dance floors. “It is a completely new and very entertaining way of presenting and delivering high-quality music to 3G mobile phones,” Schoeneburg commented in a prepared statement.

Wireless Watch Japan Intelligence from CEATEC

Wireless Watch Japan Intelligence from CEATEC

The Mobile Intelligence Japan (MIJ) team spent Wednesday at the CEATEC show, checking out some of the most innovative mobile tech and services the Japanese ecosystem is currently developing. To start, Hitachi’s methanol fuel-cell handset for KDDI [ close-up image here ] was one of the major announcements made during this year’s event. Several Japanese electronics manufacturers, including Toshiba and Fujitsu, are working on a fuel-cell solution for powering and recharging cell phones and other portable devices; Fujitsu’s rather large (as big as a shoe?) version for DoCoMo provides up to 9 Watt-hours of juice.

There were also big line ups to view the new digital TV cell phones made by Sanyo, Panasonic and Sharp (for each of KDDI, DoCoMo and Vodafone) with plenty of people crowded around the NHK booth to test drive one of the units; all are due to launch by next spring and run for around 2 hours.

Later, we spotted Net2Com’s new IP-and-Skype handset available (since last week) for Livedoor mobile customers and were surprised to see a prototype streaming satellite handset from DoCoMo. The Mobaho! compatible phone — a full FOMA 3G device — will receive music and other programming direct from Mobile Broadcasting Corp.’s bird high above Tokyo and will launch next spring; the Mitsubishi-made device has about 2 hours of continuous playback time and appears intended to steal some of KDDI’s Chaku-Uta-Full thunder. Be sure to watch our latest video program featuring EZ Channel.

Finally, your WWJ crew had a chance to sit down and speak with Dave Graveline to record a radio interview covering some of the show’s highlights to be broadcast on 10 October.

Sony's Newest Aibo has a Nose for News

Sony's Newest Aibo has a Nose for NewsSony’s robotic pup Aibo gives new meaning to the term newshound. In its latest evolution Aibo ERS-7M3/T has the ability for short-term memory mapping and news reads through a version of web syndication– RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. “With one simple voice command Aibo can read the morning’s headline news while its owner folds the laundry,” said Toshi Kawai, senior manager of Entertainment Robot America (ERA), a division of Sony Electronics in a prepared statement. The AIBO Net News reader capability enables the robot to read its owner news or weather from a choice of RSS feeds available on many websites.

Puppy also comes loaded with the AIBO Diary in case owners want to know what he is up to while they are out of the house. Aibo can take pictures and add notes on its daily activities to its diary. (Yes but what if he’s lying?) The diary can be shared by uploading entries directly to a blog site. The dog has its own blog now. Bring on the apocalypse.

Japan's Mobile Digital Terrestrial TV to Launch April 2006

Japan's Mobile Digital Terrestrial TV LaunchWe have signal. Mobile digital terrestrial TV broadcasting hits the wireless airwaves in Japan April 1st, 2006. Japanese telecom carriers and commercial broadcasters will be ready to start simulcasts of hybrid terrestrial digital programming and data feeds to cellular phones in just a few months. “Our handsets will be ready to comply with that date and we are targeting March/April 2006 release of mobile digital terrestrial TV phones,” NTT DoCoMo spokesperson Tomoko Tsuda told WWJ.

No April Fools prank, the start up date was announced by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Vodafone also confirmed to WWJ they should make the April deadline. “We are gearing up production to have handsets ready in time for the start of this new digital TV service,” says Vodafone spokesperson Matthew Nicholson. Details on when other broadcasters will start mobile programming and what contents they plan to spin to mobile should be available soon.

DoCoMo Announces Japan's First Digital Broadcast Cellphone

DoCoMo Announces Japan's First Digital Broadcast CellphoneDoCoMo has developed their first mobile handset to receive terrestrial digital broadcasting and analog TV in one 3G Foma package. The P901iTV handset, by Panasonic, targets the start of mobile digital broadcasting in April, 2006 and will make its public debut at the upcoming CEATEC Japan 2005 trade show October 4 to 8 at Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba. (WWJ will be on-hand to get photos and video!)

The twist-style handset comes with a 2.5-inch, wide-view main LCD screen plus a sub-display, antenna-embedded earphone for enhanced TV reception, and 2.2-megapixel camera. The handset can only handle around 2.5 hours of continuous digital TV viewing; 1.5 hours of analog — ruling out Lord of the Rings style 3-hour viewing marathons. DoCoMo’s Osaifu-Keitai mobile wallet is part of the package as well, enabling the phone to be used as electronic money.

Vodafone and KDDI have had demonstration models of terrestrial digital TV receiver/handsets for some time. Last may their latest versions were up and running at the NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories open house. Vodafone displayed the 801SH Sharp CDMA Qualcomm handset with a hybrid split-screen displaying TV images on the upper half with the bottom reserved for scrolling data feeds. KDDI showed off a similar au prototype handset by Sanyo. Check-out our video report from that event here.