Beijing DG Telecom, a mobile applications and infrastructure provider, has announced an agreement with TruVideo, a Berkeley, California, based company specializing in mobile video solutions, to provide mobile video applications for the greater Chinese mobile market. Freeverse Partners, a Tokyo based company specializing in assisting foreign companies in Asian mobile business development and strategy, facilitated the partnership.
Watch out, iPod! The hottest mobile news on planet Earth this week is KDDI’s announcement of a full-song mobile download service for 3G. If the service launches as planned, the profits could be enormous for carriers and labels alike. But all is not well in Japan’s mobile music land and those pesky FTC raids are just part of the worry.Part 1 of a Series.
Motorola today announced that it has begun deployment of its CDMA2000 1X solution on a 2GHz network for KDDI, the leading carrier for 3G cellular phone service in Japan. KDDI is expected to commercially roll out innovative data and voice services based on its new 3G network in late October 2004. The new packet-based 2GHz network will allow KDDI to leverage additional bandwidth while offering the opportunity to provide more advanced IP-based feature enhancements to deliver new services to its customers.
In his 14 September WWJ Viewpoint, Philip Sugai raised some valid criticisms of the new TV cell phones and points to both technological and end-user behavior limitations that he believes doom TV phones to “DOA” status. Of these, the behavioral problems appear to be the most difficult to overcome. These criticisms, however, seriously underestimate both the technological developments that the devices will undergo in the next 18-24 months as well as the imagination and creativity that Japan’s end-users and broadcasters will apply to receiving and delivering, respectively, useful content via mobile TV (and FM radio).
Part 2 of a two-part series. Previously: MobileTV: Hype or Reality?, by Professor Philip Sugai.)
This may be the exception that proves the rule, but Sony shows that the PDA isn’t quite dead yet (at least not in Japan) with their latest, the multimedia PEG-VZ90. The biggest news is that it’s the first Palm with an OLED screen, but besides that it also plays back MPEG-4 video and both ATRAC3 and MP3 audio (hallelujah!), includes 802.11b wireless, and has a CF card slot that will take both communications and memory cards (plus the inevitable Memory Stick slot. According to Sony’s press release (in Japanese) this unit hits the street here at the end of September.
Japan’s 3G networks enable new types of high-bandwidth mobile content that weren’t viable under 2G for either economic or technical reasons. One of the coolest is mobile manga, delivering full-color comic book magazines to cell phones. There’s a manga stuffed in every Japanese commuter’s back pocket (together with a ketai), so porting manga to keitai could make an awful lot of money for content producers. It’ll also save a bunch of trees. Wireless Watch Japan was at Mobidec 2004 recently held in Tokyo and files this sneak preview from Digital Garage Mobile’s booth.
