Conventional wisdom teaches that Japan’s mobile industry is at least 18 months in front of Europe (and years ahead of the US). That truism is no more, however, as Europe’s cellular carriers, handset makers, and wireless Internet content providers have sweated blood to catch up – and catch up they have indeed. Daniel Scuka is in Germany this fall where he’s helping WWJpartner
Last week the major wireless players in Japan converged in Tokyo’s trendy Aoyamadistrict to discuss future mobile content development strategies, and we were there see DoCoMo’s director for i-mode Takeshi Natsuno and KDDI’s contents general manager Makoto Takahashi keynote speeches. We also sat down to chat with infoPLANT’s V.P and Chief Development Officer, Susumu Taniuchi, about their new camera-phone based marketing research business. With so much potential and controversy surrounding the ketai cams we were impressed to see how a traditional business model can evolve by adopting these new tools and technologies. Full Program Run-time 14:50
DoCoMo announced today that from September 6, 2003 the service area for DoCoMo’s FOMA(R) third-generation (3G) mobile phones will cover 99% of the population in the Kanto-Koshinetsu region. Its eight regional subsidiaries will also expand the FOMA service area to 96% of the population nationwide by the end of September.
Talking to an analyst friend today, we came across the question, how many packets are there in a typical 10-minute video clip encoded for a 3G phone? We asked ourselves this question because, just now, the local press in Japan has caught up with DoCoMo’s plans to roll out HSDPA in late 2004, about a month after WWJ reported on it..!!
KDDI is pleased to announce that the au cellular service provided by KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone exceeded 15 million subscribers as of Friday, August 15. In April 1999, the former IDO Corporation and former DDI Cellular group completed the deployment of a nationwide cdmaOne network, and started providing a seamless nationwide cellular service to customers.
We spent an afternoon at the Symbian Workshop in Tokyo recently and chatted with Nokia’s Gerard Bruen, Director of Series 60 and Alliance Partners. Tune in for a surprisingly candid discussion about what the big push was for this event.. “the Japanese market is sophisticated, the developers have a good understanding, there is a good eco-system already built around financially stable developers and content owners and we should utilize that.. Nokia has the reach to go global, and to take them global”. A must see interview for wireless developers everywhere who are planning their mobile business strategy.
