Matsushita Electric shares fell to a two-year low after Nokia offered to replace as many as 46 million handset batteries produced by the company on concerns they may overheat. Matsushita, the world’s largest consumer-electronics maker – more widely known as Panasonic – saw it’s shares drop 5 percent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange to 2,015 yen which is the lowest closing price since October 2005.
The genesis of today’s Viewpoint was back in March, when we spotted this op-ed referring to Japan mobile that had stated: “What’s different about the Japanese mobile market is that innovation is moving toward business models and marketing tactics instead of technical features and functions.” That op-ed piece in turn cited a new research report on eMarketer, “Japan: Marketing to a Mobile Society,” which insisted: “What stands out in the current Japanese experience is the fact that the center of gravity for getting through to Japanese mobile users has shifted in favor of business models and marketing tactics as opposed to new technical features and mobile phone functions.”
We took exception to both these as serious mis-analyses of the cornerstone role that technological innovation and network infrastructure competition have played – and continue to play – in powering Japan’s mobile success story. After contact with the eMarketer editors, we agreed to write separate opinion pieces, which we would both republish side-by-side in our newsletters, as an excellent way to hash out the topic and let you – our collective readers – decide.
Sadly, the marketing guys at eMarketer quashed the idea, as the subject and the detailed discussion would be “too technical a topic for our [eMarketer’s] newsletter.” But we know that WWJ readers are more than smart enough to figure out for themselves what’s really driving the mobile Internet in Japan! So we wished the eMarketer editors best of luck in the future, again gave thanks that WWJ doesn’t have any meddling marketing guys, and herewith present to you our Viewpoint.
(Subscribers login to access the full article by WWJ editor Daniel Scuka)
Image: Holographic projection demo at NTT DoCoMo R&D Labs, November 2006 ©Mobikyo
The LiMo Foundation issued a statement [.PDF] to announce it has experienced a surge in membership as some of world’s most well-known mobile industry players have joined the Foundation during the past six months. Aplix, Celunite, LG Electronics, McAfee and Wind River have joined as Core members and will participate on the foundation board. Additionally, ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Innopath, KTF, MontaVista Software and NXP B.V. have joined as Associate members.
Tokyo-based Acrodea has made several recent announcements, in Japanese only, concerning the adoption of their Vivid product suite with handset makers across all three operators. The most significant of which would be the inclusive licensing agreement concluded with DoCoMo for their Vivid UI to be deployed on all models scheduled to be released going forward. The companies Panorama and 3D Message middleware is also now available on handsets from Sharp and Sanyo via SoftBank Mobile and KDDI respectively. See WWJ’s hands-on demo. video of the UI in action Here.
Bandai Networks has announced a new mobile phone service that allows cameraphone users to take a photo of a CD cover or poster and search for the information about that artist or band. Users can then click the link in the returned content to easily access a mobile site containing detailed product info. and (hopefully) purchase related products directly from their phone. Those sneaky capitalists!
According to the organisers of TGS, as of today the projected participation for their upcoming annual event is 168 exhibitors occupying 1,708 booths which would make it even larger in scale than the largest past show (148 exhibitors, 1,701 booths, in 2006). This may be due to the fact that this year marks the introduction of software titles for the new game platforms released over the past 1-2 years.
