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Our 5th Birthday!

Our 5th Birthday!This week marked a major milestone for WWJ! In one form or another, I’ve been writing this email newsletter for five years — and what a five year term it’s been!

I spent a couple hours last night looking over past WWJ newsletters, and was struck by how much Japan’s mobile scene has changed. In 2001, when I started writing a weekly mobile-focused newsletter for J@pan Inc, i-mode had just celebrated its second birthday, KDDI had yet to roll out CDMA 1X services and the No. 3 competitor in the market was known as “J-Phone.”

Today, DoCoMo is far in the lead with their 3G FOMA service and music and TV are the new hot trends; i-mode itself has become almost dasai (uncool). KDDI have created one of the mightiest and most unified mobile platforms on Earth, with GPS-based blogging, shopping and PC Internet integration drawing huge usage. The company formerly known as J-Phone is about to become the company formerly known as Vodafone as Masayoshi Son attacks 3G mobile with the same successful discount focus with which he attacked NTT and home broadband.

Bonus ‘those were the days’ tidbits via the WWJ Newsletter after the jump!

Vodafone Japan's Final Media Briefing: Out with a Whimper

Vodafone Japan’s Final Media Briefing: Out with a WhimperFor Vodafone Japan, the end came not with a bang, but with a whimper. When we arrived at last Monday’s press event – the final one, it turned out, before news of the Japan sell-out hit the Web – the smell of pending doom hung in the air. Ironically, the media briefing bore an optimistic title: the “Future Direction of Product & Service Development.” It was also surprising to see that President Bill Morrow and Chairman Tsuda-san would attend for the 3G roadmap briefing to be given by former J-Phone super-star Ohta-san; WWJ has never seen three Vodafone Big Guys in one room together for a media briefing (perhaps there is safety in numbers)? But when the talk from all three turned out vague and totally avoided any mention of new MVNO’s signing up to resell Vodafone 3G capacity — widely considered to be one of Big Red’s few viable options in Japan — we suspected something was up.

And when we learned that a $49 bn write-off had been announced by London on the same day, it was obvious that the clock had already started ticking down for the carrier’s long-speculated Japan exit. Thus ended, after some five years of trying, what could have been one of the most brilliant tie-ups between a global brand name and world-leading Japanese mobile know-how.

Consortium to Trial Train TV Broadcast

Nippon Television Network, Japan Telecom and the East Japan Railway Co. group announced that they would start a joint experiment to air TV news inside trains. Japan Telecom will transmit the news to monitors inside trains via wireless LAN (local area network) devices installed at JR East stations. The partners plan to begin commercial operations from around July this year.

3G Mobile Future: Exclusive Interview with Tomi Ahonen

3G Mobile Future: Exclusive Interview with Tomi AhonenTomi Ahonen is a smart guy who’s done a lot of observing and thinking about the 3G future. He reports that planet Earth has 2 bn mobile phones, with more phones in use than cars, credit cards or televisions, and that advertisers, businesses and governments are all trying to understand how the mobile future will download. For a glimpse into the future, Tomi was in Tokyo last month for the 3G Mobile World Forum 2006 where he observed that Japan already has the handsets, the networks and users who have migrated to 3G, while “the rest of the world is just starting to understand and discover this opportunity.”

He points out that in Japan, roughly 30 percent of all mobiles are 3G phones, compared to the UK, where it’s only 8 percent. “We have a long way to go to catch up.” WWJ’s Lawrence Cosh-Ishii caught up with Tomi for a tightly-focused interview covering 3G, 3.5G, consumer service definition, key technologies and how marketing and advertising are starting to recognize the potential of mobile.

KDDI's Competitive Edge in Japan

Over the past 12 to 18 months the mobile division of KDDI, known here as ‘au,’ has been leading the way in Japan’s cellular marketplace. During a recent interview at the 3G World Forum, one European visitor asked the seemingly obvious question, “What is the main reason for their success?” KDDI au's Competitive Edge in Japan by Mobikyo KK

The reasonable answer is that it’s actually a combination of several factors, but one thing stands out. Compared to the NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone business models, au has a very tight focus on the domestic market. Their attention to detail in customer service and product offerings is not challenged by how the product mix and content offerings might fit into the company’s global strategy — and it shows. This has allowed au to take the lead in areas like GPS, flat-rate data and faster networks, all provided to the consumer on affordable price plans. The carrier now offers a full suite of popular and useful services ranging from Navitime, EZ auctions, EZ book, EZ channel, EZ games, and EZ FM to (recently introduced) mobile IM (‘Hello Messenger’), mobile blogging (‘DuoBlog’) and Lismo.

Looking again at au’s recent blitz of cutting-edge models at Designing Studio last week, just in time for Japan’s peak spring sales season, we were truly impressed; it will be a tough choice for shoppers. The phones and services strongly illustrate one of the most fundamental and important learnings about Japan’s mobile success that we’ve been trumpeting for years.

Vodafone Japan New 3G Phones: Details, Audio Interview

Last week was a rare clean sweep in Japan’s tooth-and-nail handset race as each of the Big Three carriers in turn announced multiple new 3G models at splashy press events. Across the field, we saw an onboard 4-GB hard drive and a digiTV phone from KDDI, the 702i ‘designer’ models from DoCoMo and Japan’s first Samsung phone and new 3G data services from Vodafone. Vodafone Japan New 3G Phones: Details, Audio Interview

It’s no simple coincidence that this week the carriers are announcing their third-quarter financial results: it’s super vital to have a flashy new set of handsets to point to when presenting your report card to the analysts in Tokyo and London. Also, spring is the premiere mobile sales season in Japan and the models announced last week should hit the streets around cheery blossom time.

If Vodafone Japan’s market troubles in the past couple of years can be blamed on handset mix, then the new phones may go a long way to to fixing Big Red’s market position. Today’s WWJ Portable Reportable MP3 audio report features an interview with Vodafone Japan from last week’s press event with in-depth details on their new 3G models, which include phones from Samsung, Toshiba, Sharp and NEC, and comments on competitive positioning in the market.