If at first you don’t succeed, then try again – or so says NTT DoCoMo. I-mode, NTT’s mobile multimedia messaging service, was launched in Germany, Holland and Belgium almost a year ago by network operator KPN NV (KPN), but consumers weren’t keen. Now, the Japanese mobile network operator is launching i-mode in France and Spain, and is hoping this second European push succeeds.
The past couple of weeks saw two lavish events at trendy Tokyo venues hosted by carriers NTT DoCoMo and J-Phone to fete their content provider communities (so, yes, there was a lot of overlap in the guest lists). One attendee at the J-Phone event, held at Zepp in Odaiba, reported that it was a sweaty, raucous evening with content community punters packed in six deep. “There was a lengthy line-up of folks waiting to exchange meishi business cards,” she said, adding that a good time was had, evidently, by all.
A regular WWJ reader who requested anonymity (for obvious reasons) send me a blast panning the new Toshiba BREW-enabled CDMA 1X handset. “Just thought you might be interested. I bought a A5304T with BREW last week, and it is crap! Actually, the BREW part and the camera are all right, and the phone design itself is nice; but the user interface and display suck.
Even mobile e-commerce – which has been a bust elsewhere – is starting to take off in Japan. More than a third of mobile Net subscribers have used their phones to buy such goods as CDs and concert tickets, according to the Mobile Content Forum, an industry trade group.
Japan’s largest newspaper Web sites get hundreds of millions of page views per month. But many new media pioneers are still unsure where news sites fit into the media mix in Japan — and whether they’ll ever make a profit. A man walks by a bank in Osaka just as it erupts into flames. He pulls out a camera-equipped cell phone — one of 10 million in use in Japan — and snaps a photo.
A man has been arrested after he used tear gas in a futile attempt to escape from a Tokyo video store where he had been caught filming up a woman’s skirt, police said Saturday. Police said that the man used his camera-equipped mobile phone to film up the skirt of a 20-year-old woman who was browsing through videos and CDs in the shop.
