Wireless Watch Japan
Search Results for: manga

Search Results for: manga


Tokyo Game Show 2007 Update

CESA posted an update yesterday regarding the Tokyo Game Show 2007 agenda with more details on their popular event scheduled for 20 – 23 September out at Makuhari Messe. They have secured 162 exhibitors, up from 148 last year, with companies coming from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Our video coverage from TGS 2006 has been one of the most popular programs on WWJ and there’s little doubt it will be another fantastic show this year as well. [video from the 2007 event now available Here -- eds]

Mobile Novel Sales Growing

The Economist has caught-on to the growth of mobile novels in Japan noting; “with sales of books in decline, a new market has come as a godsend to Japan’s publishing companies. Sales of mobile-phone novels—books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your keitai, or mobile phone—have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today and are still growing fast.” BusinessWeek ran a good op-ed on this subject last month as well.

First Content for Vodafone live! CAST

Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)

KDDI Designing Studio Unveils Prototype Handsets

KDDI Designing Studio Unveils Prototype HandsetsThe latest models from KDDI’s au Design Project went on display this month following in the footsteps of past designer models like the InfoBar, the Talby and the Penck. Visiting Harajuku’s ultratrendy Designing Studio showroom last weekend we got a peek into the future with several new mock-ups attracting attention. Celebrating what was billed as “Tokyo Designer’s New Concept Model Week 2005,” the phone company unveiled several previously unseen prototypes, including the Machina [.jpg] and the Hexagon [.jpg], which were displayed under glass at a safe distance from fashionistas and tech journalists alike.

KDDI has hired several designers from outside the traditional OEM supply chain to help them develop innovative new models or what the company calls “communication tools that merge fashion with portability.” Takashi Nikaido, a former Casio team leader who worked on the original G-SHOCK watch design is one of them. His ‘Rotary Design’ (photo right), circa 2001, was on view along with the even more futuristic ‘Wearable’ 3-piece concept [.jpg] which he developed the same year. In 2003, Marc Newson created KDDI/au’s Talby based at least in part on an earlier design model, the InfoBar, designed by Naoto Fukasawa, who also produced the Penck. Ichiro Iwasaki, who spent several years at the Sony Design Center, created the Grappa Slider and Wallet styles and Ichiro Higashiizumi also had his two Apollo concept handsets on show.

ACCESS and Abaxia Collaborate to Deliver New Data Capture Paradigm to Mobile

ACCESS announced that it has collaborated with Abaxia to integrate its MobileTag 2D barcode reader solution with ACCESS’ NetFront® Mobile Client Suite, the world’s most advanced, integrated browser-based software solution for advanced multimedia-enabled mobile phones. The joint solution enables a new data capture model between mobile devices and barcode-enabled applications like advertisements, brochures, posters, direct-mailers, or any object that can support a barcode.

KDDI Launches Mobile EZ-Book Portal

KDDI Launches au Mobile Ez-Book PortalOnline 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.

Cell-Phone Soap Opera a Cool New Genre

Love comes to the really, really small screen in a mobile, only-in-Japan, soap opera made exclusively for KDDI 3G cellys. The live-action soap opera, Yokohama 80s, follows the predictable lives, loves, and losses of young, beach-loving Japanese boys and girls back when Madonna was still Like a Virgin. Eighties’ big hair, big shoulders, and big hits have been downsized to tiny, two-and-a-half-minute broadcast bites. The story is adapted from Shogakan Shukan’s weekly Big Comic Spirits-series “Tokyo Eighties” (published as a serial manga) but features all-new original characters and storylines by the same author. Can the mobile laundry soap commercials be far behind?

Not Selling Sex on the Japanese Wireless Internet

We finally filmed the introduction to our latest video program – outside an establishment called “Sexual Harassment Corporation” – one of four or five adult industry vendors, including a brothel and a “Love Hotel” in a side street off the main drag, where prostitutes jump out and routinely proposition drunk salarimen (and the happily married author). There isn’t a station on the Yamanote line that isn’t crowded by similar scenes, and there there’s hardly a carriage on the JR line that doesn’t have, shall we say, full-blown advertisements for adult mags and manga that show Japanese girls seemingly as young as 14 flirting and flaunting themselves. Let’s face it, sex sells in Japan. Which brings us to wonder why Playboy.com is being blocked from the official Mobinet space.