Kyocera announced the successful field-testing of handsets used in a WirelessWallet consumer trial by Cellular South. Equipped with Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, the handsets were used by consumers to make wireless payments and purchases in the nation’s first multi-city trial by a wireless service provider. According to Cellular South, WirelessWallet will become available to consumers in early 2008.
Based on the success of the original InfoBar model, the first handset from KDDI’s in-house design team which was released in October 2003, followed by the same candy bar styled Talby by Marc Newson a year later, the AU Design Project has just announced the long-awaited InfoBar2. Available on Oct.31st in four colors, this latest model touts a 2.6-wide inch QVGA organic EL display with a 1Seg digital tv tuner, FeliCa m-commerce and GPS functionality. The full specs (in Japanese) are available Here.
Gartner is reporting that worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users in the second quarter of 2007 reached 270.9 million units, a 17.4 per cent increase from the same period last year. In Japan, sales to end users in the second quarter of 2007 were 12.1 million units, an increase of 10.3 per cent from the second quarter of 2006 but a decline of 17.5 percent from the first quarter of 2007.
The genesis of today’s Viewpoint was back in March, when we spotted this op-ed referring to Japan mobile that had stated: “What’s different about the Japanese mobile market is that innovation is moving toward business models and marketing tactics instead of technical features and functions.” That op-ed piece in turn cited a new research report on eMarketer, “Japan: Marketing to a Mobile Society,” which insisted: “What stands out in the current Japanese experience is the fact that the center of gravity for getting through to Japanese mobile users has shifted in favor of business models and marketing tactics as opposed to new technical features and mobile phone functions.”
We took exception to both these as serious mis-analyses of the cornerstone role that technological innovation and network infrastructure competition have played – and continue to play – in powering Japan’s mobile success story. After contact with the eMarketer editors, we agreed to write separate opinion pieces, which we would both republish side-by-side in our newsletters, as an excellent way to hash out the topic and let you – our collective readers – decide.
Sadly, the marketing guys at eMarketer quashed the idea, as the subject and the detailed discussion would be “too technical a topic for our [eMarketer’s] newsletter.” But we know that WWJ readers are more than smart enough to figure out for themselves what’s really driving the mobile Internet in Japan! So we wished the eMarketer editors best of luck in the future, again gave thanks that WWJ doesn’t have any meddling marketing guys, and herewith present to you our Viewpoint.
(Subscribers login to access the full article by WWJ editor Daniel Scuka)
Image: Holographic projection demo at NTT DoCoMo R&D Labs, November 2006 ©Mobikyo
Verizon Wireless has announced their m-commerce service, enabled as a BREW application from technology partner Obopay as the first mobile payment offering for any major U.S. carrier, will be available in the coming weeks. The Obopay service will allow customers to receive, send and spend money via their mobile phones, check their account balances, collect money owed from other mobile users, view transaction histories and invite friends to use the system.
On 29 May, BusinessWeek ran an article, "Japan: Cheap Cell Phones at What Price" aiming to demystify Japan’s complex carrier subsidy situation. The writer, Kenji Hall, is an astute observer of this country’s mobile scene, but he missed the mark on several key points and it’s worth reviewing these in detail…
