Matsushita Electric has announced a September 17 market launch of the Home Network Camera BL-C30 is the latest IEEE802.11b/g-compatible wireless web camera. The product allows for built-in tilt and pan control from remote locations and can be set to automatically send e-mail alerts with attached snapshots when motions are detected by the built-in motion sensor.
NEC Corporation today announced that NEC Telecommunications (China), a new company and a business entity established in May 2004 to actively pursue mobile solution business in China, introduced a new branding strategy “Get Personal” (Chinese-English translation) to further expand its mobile business in China. Along with the campaign, NEC reveals its new strategy to enter into the mid-low range product market segment to appeal to a wider range of consumers in China. The three N10X series of products with seven color variations, which are also being announced today, are one of the key products for the new strategy.
The sale of DoCoMo’s F900iC, the only FeliCa-enabled FOMA (3G) terminal, started in Japan the first week of August. Herewith, we present a rough translation of a useful chart showing price breakdowns for all F900i-series handsets now available. We’re (more than a little bit) surprised at how much the upgrade charge (to get the latest model) varies by region. At one electronic retail chain, the new contract price on an F900iC in Tokyo is 33,375 yen; in Osaka, 15,700 yen.
MediaSeek announced that it has successfully developed an optical character reader (OCR) engine designed to be used in camera phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices. The BREW OCR extension extracts and analyzes text image captured with the built-in camera, enabling users to display actual text data on a mobile device’s screen.
Panasonic announced the release of it’s SDK MediaArtist, an MPEG-4 related AV software encoder for the 3GPP/3GPP2 and SD-Video standards, will go on sale Sept. 1st. Designed to operate with the SD memory card in target devices such as a cellphones, car navi systems, television, and camera models which are increasingly being adopted. Configured for the 3G phones of Japan’s wireless carriers and using the 3GPP standard, the original MPEG-4 object model has been significantly extended. Press Release in Japanese.
The latest Mobinet study from A.T. Kearney reports that 41 percent of the world’s wireless phone users expect to be regular or heavy users of data services by 2005. The Index looks at current and planned usage of wireless data services such as mobile email, games, music downloads, photo messaging, and news updates and the strong user demand represents a whopping 200-percent increase over the past year. Have mobile data services finally reached a tipping point?
