For some strange reason NTT DoCoMo seems reluctant to sink more cash into loss-making AT&T Wireless – the most grumbled about carrier in the North American market – two years after seeing the value of its $8 billion investment in the “struggling” carrier come to zilch. At least DoCoMo has a footprint in the U.S. market, well one anyway, a demonstration room with a FOMA (Freedom tO Move Away from AT&T?) base station.
“The single biggest benefit that was discovered in Japan was that you need to be fair in sharing the revenues with the content developer. It is not fair to say to a Disney or a CNN, ‘Give me half your money, and then I will put you on my network.’ DoCoMo approached this with the rough idea they would like to keep 10% and give the content developer 90%,” says Tomi Ahonen, a long-time industry watcher, prolific mobinet author, and ex-Nokia consultant. He points to Japan’s stark contrast with Europe, where operators took a 50/50 or 60/40 approach. “Under these terms, [European operators are] very unlikely to attract a large community of developers.” He also has a pretty good ideas as to what EU and the US must do in 2004 to establish successful 3G services. Log on to hear these comments and much more in this lively interview.
The former J-Phone lost considerable ground to DoCoMo in particular in man-machine business applications. The idea of being able to pay for stuff from your phone from Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines (24-hour booze, cigarettes and some really exotic stuff too) is old hat here. But, now, here’s a move that could presage a Vodafone move to remote monitoring business. Vodafone K.K. today announced that it would begin selling a remote module (the VRM301R) to industrial and business machine manufacturers.
With the launch of Casio’s A5403CA for KDDI, Sharp’s SH505iS for DoCoMo, and our old friend the V601SH from Sharp to Vodafone, Japan has truly entered the 2-megapixel era. Beyond this, KDDI is planning A5502K with a xenon lamp flash unit this month. With two megapixels and onboard electronic flash, photography with mobile phones will make major inroads into digital camera territory.
JCB Co., Ltd., the international payment brand, is offering a trial service for Mobile OfficaTM, a contactless chip and mobile solution that offers corporations cashless payment and office access control functions through ‘NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode(R) FeliCa Preview Service’ for mobile phones. The trial service, available until July 2004, marks the first time that a credit card payment service has been made available for mobile phones with a contactless chip in Japan.
Well, the cat is really among the pigeons now as former fixed line monopoly Big Brother NTT just announced plans to launch a challenge to the FeliCa smart-card standard promoted by DoCoMo and Sony. NTT said it will support FeliCa, a major boost to the FeliCa standard. But in a classic case of Indian giving NTT has decided to also develop a smart card supporting the government’s terminally unpopular and constantly personal-data -leaking national registry network called “Juki Net.”
