Mobile chipset developer for WiMAX technologies Beceem Communications received an investment from DoCoMo Capital, the company announced today. The company develops solutions incorporating advanced wireless communication techniques based on IEEE 802.16 standards recommendations, playing an integral role in the WiMAX environment, working with both terminal and base station OEMs on early integration and interoperability testing.
The company announced today they will launch ‘DCMX’ consumer credit services via iD, DoCoMo’s brand and platform for mobile credit cards. Users of Osaifu-Keitai (Felica e-wallet phones) phones will be able to choose from two plans to make highly secure purchases from small to large amounts using their phones as DoCoMo-issued credit cards.
NHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.
The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.
WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.
Despite all the effort WWJ has put into finding and covering software developers that have successfully transitioned out of Japan’s navel-gazing mobile market to markets elsewhere, I must admit we haven’t found thousands. Or even dozens. But one of them is Shinjuku, Tokyo-based G-mode, and this week the Japanese mobile game maker and its Dublin, Ireland-based partner Upstart Games said four IQ-enhancing games, already popular in Japan, would be distributed in the US and Europe via Upstart. The news underscores the profits to be found when forward-thinking mobile players work hard to bridge the wireless culture divide.
Upstart’s CEO Barry O’Neil told WWJ that the company has been planning to launch a brain training game for mobile since the runaway success of the genre in Japan late last year. Ironically, the Irish side was initially skeptical that such a narrow niche could win operator interest in Europe or the US. “We’ve a relationship with G-mode dating back to last year, and their Right Brain Paradise was something we’d looked at in the past, but felt gaining operator support could be difficult. Now that the genre is becoming more widely known we felt the time was right to introduce this mobile series,” he wrote in an email yesterday.
The three-game series, dubbed, “I.Q. Academy” is intended to help get players’ brains in shape by offering games designed to exercise the brain’s right side and improve spatial, visual and cognitive skills in the player. I.Q. Academy is based on G-mode’s hyperpopular ‘Right Brain Paradise’ series, which, according to the company, has sold almost two million downloads. The series is expected to launch in Europe and the US in the coming months (WWJ subscribers log in for full article).
DoCoMo also announced today that it has applied to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications for a license to set up experimental outdoor wireless stations to test WiMAX, which they refer to as a “new wide-area wireless broadband network technology, based on the IEEE 802.16e standard.” According to the statement, DoCoMo, working in collaboration with other NTT group companies, will conduct the test in the Yoyogi area of Tokyo for about one year using the 2.5GHz frequency band.
NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and LAWSON, Inc. have just announced a business alliance that will result in customers using DoCoMo’s Osaifu-Keitai (phones with wallet functions) for a variety of practical mobile services at LAWSON convenience stores beginning by April 30th. According to the press release: “The deal will converge substantial business assets of the two companies, namely DoCoMo’s more than 50 million mobile phone subscribers and LAWSON’s some 8,300 convenience stores nationwide.”
