Camera
Camera

Camera

Importing Wireless Products from Abroad

Importing Wireless Products from AbroadDo you have BREW contents that you want to put into 10 million cellphone browsers? We know somebody who wants to hear from you. Spun out of trading powerhouse Nissho Iwai and backed by camera giant Olympus, ITX E-Globaledge Corp. is a small company hungry to meet U.S., Korean and European ventures to introduce your BREW content, and your cutting-edge soft- and hardware, to a company with a huge appetite: KDDI. More than just a go-between to help customize ideas for the Japanese market, ITX also creates its own content. More interestingly, it recently put $4 million into a Seattle-based venture blending XML. Full Program Run-time 18:28

Vodafone KK: All Quiet on the 3G Front

Prepare for some grim reading. There wasn’t a lot of good news on Vodafone’s Eastern Front, for the short term at least, arising out of Vodafone K.K.’s November 18-announced first-half financials. It is eerily quiet in the Little V machine gun nests out here on the 3G frontier. Vodafone K.K. faces gently sliding ARPU, wilting subscriber uptake and a long haul launch for a fully-fledged rollout of cutting-edge 3G keitai. “Japan Telecom Holdings (JTH) stock finished down 15 percent for the day after posting first half earnings,” notes CSFB senior telecoms analyst Mark Berman. “The market is essentially saying that it has completely lost confidence in both the competitiveness of Vodafone in Japan, and believes further that the current … management is more concerned with appeasing parent Vodafone than it is with rewarding minority shareholders,” he writes this week. On the other hand, the basis for a big comeback could be on the cards for next summer. We’ll give an overview of these points below, but before we start blazing away. ** We’d like to sincerely apologize to Vodafone K.K. for our mucking up an item in the Happy Packet discount series in last week’s newsletter. For the record, packet rate slashes DO apply to 3G, and we said they didn’t ** Honto-ni, gomen nasai, Vodafone-Sama! WWJ subscribers log-on and in..

How Europe Really Differs from Japan

WWJ co-founder Daniel Scuka reports from Germany

Earlier this month, I wrapped up a 7-city seminar tour, “Mobile Kaizen in Japan.” The one-day MKiJ seminars, co-produced with Mobile Economy, were an in-depth look at the success factors behind the wireless Internet in Japan. Here are some of my own findings..

Attendees included mid- and senior-level people from carriers, content providers, consulting firms, and mobile application houses, as well as several academics, some students, and one or two journalists. All in all, it was a fun, eye-opening experience, and – as best I can tell from verbal and mail feedback – was well enjoyed by our audience.

Tokyo Motor Show: Telematics To Go, Anyone?

Tokyo Motor Show: Telematics To Go, Anyone?Japan is the nation of early adopters for mobile, but there’s one consumer app. that went flat and is now undergoing heart massage by some of the country’s biggest and best companies: Telematics is the name, and subscribers is the game. 2004 is supposed to be the year when Japanese Telematics Ver.2 gets cranked into first gear and out of the highway rest area (it was also supposed to happen this year.. shuuush!) Japanese Telematics comes in three main flavors, and in this program you’ll get a taste of two of them. We managed to go for a ride on Toyota’s G-Book and learn more about their new sense of community offering. And we interviewed Nissan –which has great future plans you’ll get to virtually-virtually test drive– about City Browse. Full Program Run-time 21:58

New Barcode Service for Cell Phones

Mediastick Inc started a new service called “Let’s do MEDIASTICK” for mobile phone users on November 1. The service requires specific hardware and software to read the barcodes, but cell phones that are equipped with decoder software, called “QR Code Decoder,” such as NTT DoCoMo’s F505i, SH505i and D505iS series, also support Mediastick’s system. All types of the 505iS series to be released from November can read the barcodes for the service.

DoCoMo to Introduce P505iS: World's First Auto-Focus Camera Phone

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries today announced the release of the mova P505iS, the world’s first camera phone equipped with auto focus, on November 12, 2003. The P505iS is the second handset model released in the new 505iS series, a series of five PDC (2G) i-mode-capable mobile phones featuring mega-pixel cameras. The model’s 1.28 mega-pixel CCD camera is equipped with auto-focus for sharp, clear photos.