According to this article, American broadcasters are quietly planning to beam the stations signal to cellphones, video iPods, in-car DVD players and other gadgets that would be equipped with TV tuners. The high-quality digital tv broadcasts likely would start in 2009. The new effort could pump fresh life into stations that have steadily lost viewers to cable TV, the Web, game players and mobile phones.
Toshiba has announced that they will bring the universe of Japanese manga to the global market with the launch of MangaNovel, an on-line service that allows readers not only to download and read manga in Japanese but to post and offer for sale translations of content in other languages. Apparently the product will be used at MIT to help students study Japanese pop culture and comics.
Yet another successful event for in the massive Makuhari Messe convention center saw almost 200,000 pass through the gates for TGS 2007. Aaaah.. the chaos, the crowds, the girls games.. how could we resist! A sunny Saturday afternoon brought out the kids – for family day – and plenty of Cosplay actors were swarming between show halls to pose down for the camera’s. But the real action, coming from every major player in the gaming world, was inside. WWJ has been on-hand for this event pretty much every year since 2002, with the first-to-web video of the Sony PSP in 2004, and this time out was perhaps the most impressive yet.
The obvious evolution on display was without a doubt the next gen. motion-sensor enabled Mega Games at the DoCoMo booth. While KDDI rolled-out the heavy armor with Metal Gear Solid and BioHazzard for mobile RPG products, the display which seems to have grabbed the most attention was from SoftBank Mobile. Thanks to Darth and the Tokyo StormTroopers, who un-leashed the new Star Wars PodRacer game, we were hooked from Go!
Nokia and G-mode announced at the Tokyo Game Show that they are collaborating to bring more mobile multiplayer games to the global market. G-mode is developing Chess a Moment, an online and turn-based chess game, based on the Nokia SNAP Mobile platform. Players can compete in up to eight live games simultaneously, and have up to 30 hours to ponder their next move. Nokia plans to distribute Chess a Moment on select Nokia handsets, and make the game available for global operator-assisted download, consumers can expect to get their hands on G-mode’s Chess a Moment in the fourth quarter of 2007.
KDDI will analyze the browsing activity of their “au one” customers from this autumn and introduce targeted advertisements that match the history preference of the individual. Mediba and and DAC (digital advertising consortium) will jointly develop this technique and according to this press release it’s introduction into mobility will be the first in Japan.
Nokia and Capcom have announced that Capcom will be publishing games on N-Gage in 2008. Capcom is the first Japanese based publisher to show their commitment to N-Gage, which makes its global debut later this year. Classic titles such as Mega Man, Street Fighter and Resident Evil can distributed over the air through operator networks or over the internet to a user’s PC.
