ezweb
ezweb

ezweb

Napster Japan – The First Six Months

On October 3 of last year, Napster Japan launched the first online music subscription service in Japan with an ‘all-you-can-eat’ model – allowing subscribers to download and play as much music as they like for a flat monthly fee. Accompanied by a massive marketing campaign featuring oversized bar-code poster ads, the Napster Japan launch attracted a great deal of attention and media coverage. When the company announced that over 2 million songs had been ‘shifted’ (downloaded for playing) in the first week after launch, it looked as though Napster might well be on track to replace iTunes as Japan’s most popular online music service. So how have the first six months gone for Japan’s first and (so far) only online subscription music service?

EZ News Flash Hits 1 Million Users

KDDI has announced the number of users for their EZ news flash service exceeded one million people
on Saturday, February 17 this year. EZ news flash launched on Thursday, September 21, 2006 as an
information delivery service, weather news for example with BCMCS to deliver instant and updating multicast information to the standby screen of subscribers mobile phone. The service charges a small information fee while data charge is free.

Cutting Back on Mobile Phone Bills in 2007

NEPRO JAPAN recently published the results of a survey into economising on one’s mobile phone bill. On one day in mid-December of last year they questioned 3,425 people across the three main Japanese carriers, DoCoMo’s iMode, Softbank’s Yahoo! Keitai and au and TU-KA’s EZweb, by means of a public poll available through the main menus of all three carriers’ systems. 44% of the sample were male; 3% were teenagers, 35% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty and over. Similar questions were asked of a similar group around the same time last year, so one can perhaps observe a trend over the past year. Full details with graphs Here.

KDDI Selects Openwave Mercury Browser

Openwave today announced that their Mercury Edition Mobile Browser has been chosen to power KDDI’s EZWeb services. The browser will be the third generation of Openwave software on KDDI handsets and further strengthens the commitment from KDDI and Openwave to deliver the most compelling mobile services available in the Japan market today.

Language Translations Via Camera Phone

MediaSeek has released a new mobile phone OCR-based application called “Camera Dictionary” (Kamera Jiten), which translates English words into Japanese characters by simply scanning the mobile phone’s camera over the word. The characters of a scanned word are then matched to a dictionary database in real-time ensuring that dictionary lookup is both fast and accurate. The application will be distributed via content provider Enfour Inc. on their EZweb menu site “General English Dictionary” (Sougoeigojiten). Also included is a client server facility where the user can access more detailed information such as explanations, examples, and even pronounciation sound files from the main online dictionary.

Japan Number Portability: The Autumn of Discontent

The hottest topic roiling Tokyo’s hot street this month is MNP – mobile number portability.

Details on pricing, dates and procedures that Japan’s carriers will follow to implement the regulator-mandated programme have been posted on WWJ in several items on this topic, including here, here and here.. Analysts, pundits and assorted commentators have all more or less concluded that the net winner will be KDDI/au, while the net loser will be DoCoMo (the jury is still out on Vodafone/SoftBank Mobile). At least some are attributing this pending negative migration to mere probability – as the carrier with the largest customer base, they argue, DoCoMo naturally stand to lose the biggest number of churners – all things being equal. But this analysis is weak and WWJ thinks..