According reports on the Japanese web, Nokia’s luxury brand Vertu models will finally hit these shores sometime in late 2008. Already available in some 48 countries around the world, the company appears to have struck a distribution deal in Japan with 3G units – chipsets may well have been cause for the delay – set to sell through a SoftBank Group agency.
SoftBank announced they have received a permit from the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications to run femtocell trials. The experiment, using 2GHz belt, will be conducted in partnership with ip.access, Motorola, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson Japan, Samsung, Sonas, Ubiquisys and NEC. Femtocell is a micro cellular phone base station that can be set it up in the home or office and offer mobile handsets voice services via existing fixed-line ADSL connections.
SoftBank Corp.’s President Masayoshi Son announced the companies vision going forward during the 27th regular meeting of shareholders held at Tokyo International Forum last week. Topics included an increased focus on contents, as previously signalled by the introduction of Yahoo! Streaming in May, and continued price war on voice services by adding a new total flat-rate calling package between family members to their already popular White Plan. According to their FYE 2006 results SoftBank added 10,000 new 3G base stations over the last fiscal year and plans to achieve a total 46,000 locations – almost on par with DoCoMo – installed by 1H FY2007.
Nuance Communications and Time Warner announced yesterday they have signed a definitive agreement whereby Nuance will acquire Tegic Communications a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL and a developer of embedded software for mobile devices. Tegic brings industry-leading T9 predictive text input software, which has shipped on more than 2.5 billion devices, and next-generation integrated text and touch input solutions to Nuance’s portfolio of voice-enabled applications for device control, mobile search, email and text messaging.
When the TCA subscriber numbers came out on Thursday the champange corks were popping in Shiodome. For the first time ever the number 3 operator (J-Phone, then Vodafone and now SoftBank) gained the most net customers (162,400) on the month beating KDDI’s 138,500 and nearly double DoCoMo’s 82,700. While their Yahoo! portal also added more clients than EZweb and i-mode the company also managed to boost their 3G accounts up by nearly 500,000 month-on-month to total 8.6 million or 50% of their total subscriber base.
Mobikyo KK, publisher of Wireless Watch Japan, announced today it will co-host three popular events in co-operation with Expo Comm Wireless Japan 2007, Tokyo Big Sight, 18-20 July, the largest specialized trade show in Japan dedicated to wireless and mobile network technologies. With over 34,000 industry professionals and 180 exhibitors attending, Wireless Japan is the central meeting point for Asia’s wireless industry. See our video reports for the 2006 event Here
As 3G adoption exceeds 70 percent saturation in Japan, mobile ecosystem players are increasingly aiming to establish partnerships, tie-ups and business deals to deliver their products and services – as well as lessons learned – into emerging markets elsewhere. There has never been a better time for overseas companies to make valuable connections into Japan’s wireless industry and there has never been a better venue than Mobikyo KK’s stellar event line-up at Expo Comm Wireless Japan.
