Today Enfour Group rolled out a new language reference service featuring Houghton Mifflin Company’s AmericanHeritage(r) dictionary titles on Japanese mobile phone networks. This new mobile service – Comprehensive English Dictionary – takes the American Heritage(r) dictionaries into themobile content arena for the first time and services both Japanese and English speakers via official carrier menus.
KDDI is pleased to announce that the au cellular service provided by KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone exceeded 15 million subscribers as of Friday, August 15. In April 1999, the former IDO Corporation and former DDI Cellular group completed the deployment of a nationwide cdmaOne network, and started providing a seamless nationwide cellular service to customers.
If any of you begin to note a slightly limey tone to future Viewpoints, it’s because the WWJ team has a new member, moi – Paul Kallender, as Tokyo correspondent. Take a look at my my bio. below and you will see that I am fully capable of deploying my creative weapons of article construction well within 45 minutes! I’ll be filing weekly with my take on the trends animating Japan’s mobile biz, as well as offering insight you can’t get from our competitors -most of whom either don’t live in Japan or are not actually independent journalists. I can’t follow in ex-editor-in-chief Daniel Scuka’s footsteps (partly because he’s in Germany and I’m in Japan), but I do hope you’ll bear with meas I attempt in my own way to “rip the faceplate” off Japan’s wireless industry. Given my Aikido background, I will be doing my best to at least throw some of the PR pap journalists have to rewrite into the digital dustbin of history. In short, come to WWJ for the stuff you can’t get elsewhere.
KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone will launch ‘Premium EZ Payment’, a new payment collection service where charges for purchases of products through participating online shopping sites are invoiced to end users monthly together with their au cellular service charges.
Mobile Healthcare Inc. today announced the launch of Lifewatcher, a world first in integrated mobile disease management. The new service, which operates over a mobile phone or other handheld device, is the first comprehensive mobile disease self-management system for diabetes or obesity sufferers or individuals with restricted dietary and health needs.
One of the little-reported stories from Japan’s wireless webs is how companies big and small are using mobile for marketing, sales support, and CRM. Today, WWJ goes behind the scenes for a never-before-seen preview of the Java-based m-marketing system built for major auto maker GM’s Opel brand by Tokyo-based BeTrend Corp. Based on a custom version of BeTrend’s BeatCast engine and due to launch next month, the system provides customer support, sales and marketing information – and cool pics of the newest cars. Japan mobile at its most sophisticated – and sublime!
So far, Japanese carriers haven’t really pushed location services as stand-alone products; they’re sold as “part of” a handset and there are no handsets that are sold only as, or primarily for, navi-service capabilities. Sure, KDDI did do a big marketing push when their first GPS-enabled keitai hit the market in December 2001, but now it’s just one more feature onboard their fleet (in the January catalog, KDDI showed six of 11 handsets as having GPS capability). Also: Looks like Japan’s WLAN market – in addition to being highly fragmented – is one of the cheapest.
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.
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.
In Japan, phones and PDAs are viewed within the industry as separate vertical markets. DoCoMo and other carriers – who control the development and sale of cellular devices – have not seen fit to create a hybrid phone/PDA. Is it fear of loss of control over the subscriber billing relationship? Fear of allowing foreign makers – like Nokia – into the market? Is it the lack of Japanese third-party developers who have worked with overseas platforms (like Symbian)? Today’s program looks at a company helping to stir up a market that needs some stirring.
