Lost your forklift in your cluttered factory? Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Cable Ltd have announced they are launching the IEEE802.11b-WLAN/ GPS Hitachi AirLocation system that can locate it. With an accuracy of 1-3 meters, the system works with twin servers and five dedicated basestations to find whatever, for a cost of 5 million yen for the system.
In September, a group of IT professionals visited Japan to roll up their sleeves and find out who are pushing what enterprise applications here. With FeliCa debuting in trial form a few weeks from now, we were interested in hearing their views about Japan’s ready-built business apps. infrastructure. You may be surprised by their findings. Independent consultant (and WWJ subscriber) Donal O’Shea was part of the group that included representatives of a major French airline, an Australian steel company and a UK-based package delivery company, together with Douglas Neal and Piet Opperman of CSC Research Services and Sebastien Bacholet of Cigref. They met with Qualcomm, HP, IBM, NTT DoCoMo, Alcatel/Fujitsu, Telecom France, Nissan, and Hitachi, and toured the Yokohama Reasearch Park. Wow, Big Big Itinerary… In a nutshell, concludes O’Shea, “carriers have never understood the enterprise…”
They’ve gone and done it now! KDDI’s just announced a double whammy; on November 28, the company will offer 3G’s first flat-rate packet services with all you can surf for 4,200 yen (about $37) on the souped-up, 2.4-Mbps (max) EV-DO version of CDMA 1X that KDDI has branded “WIN” (We Innovate the Next) – presumably to beat up on DoCoMo’s W-CDMA-based FOMA. Then, today, it said it was halving the cost of calls from KDDI Au mobile subscribers to KDDI ADSL/ IP home phones on the Dion Service. The knives are out! With three new service innovations, two new terminals, and a data card, the company appears to be following what Kenshi Tazaki, vice president and team manager of Gartner Research Japan, calls a “high risk strategy” (think of all those potential lost packet charges!). Will Big D respond in kind just as it was hoping to glean megabucks from FOMA users? “It’s a very aggressive shot at DoCoMo and stakes out a clear position by KDDI in the mobile market,” says Tazaki.
WWJ was busy shooting video at Makahari Messe in Chiba last week, think telematics, wristphones and international FOMA videoconferencing. But enough teasing: The news we didn’t see elsewhere about the show was that DoCoMo, is – finally – taking telematics seriously, as we found in a quick interview with Hidenori Obara of DoCoMo’s ITS Business Promotion Office. Obara admitted that DoCoMo is “behind” KDDI, with the latter pushing all sorts of mobile-WLAN technologies to potentially hook into a slab of Japan’s 12.3 million in-auto car navigation (car nabi) systems. In a separate development, we heard that Seiko is adding a color screen, but not a camera function, on its Wristomo PHS phone. Unsurprisingly, they are not planning to mount a CCD chip because it’ll make the wearers’ wrist limp from the extra weight, and the extra battery power needed might be another issue. Tune in next week and see it all for yourself when we show FOMA’s first international video call, chat with DoCoMo’s Mariko Hanaoka, and get a peek at Panasonic’s next killer app. for camera phones everywhere!!
Hitachi is to bring a WLAN-based positioning system to market in Japan next month. The rig uses Wi-Fi technology to triangulate the location of network clients to within one and three metres – accurate enough to detect whether a user is within the building the network serves.
Conventional wisdom teaches that Japan’s mobile industry is at least 18 months in front of Europe (and years ahead of the US). That truism is no more, however, as Europe’s cellular carriers, handset makers, and wireless Internet content providers have sweated blood to catch up – and catch up they have indeed. Daniel Scuka is in Germany this fall where he’s helping WWJpartner
Matsushita Electric, best known worldwide for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronics and digital communications products, announced today that it will begin marketing of “Kurashi (Japanese for ‘home life’) Net”, a networked home appliances/housekeeping system to enhance the users’ daily living. The system, to be marketed from September 1, will enable the user to control networked home appliances, such as air-conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines and microwave ovens, through wireless control from the central terminal, named “Kurashi Station,” or from a mobile phone. The system also monitors security and other household conditions, alerting the users by sounding an alarm linked to the “Watchdog Safety Sensor” in cases of emergency.
Hitachi’s BROADNET BOXER is Web-based groupware that provides a suite of e-mail, PIM (personal information management) and messaging capabilities — all geared toward streamlining projects involving several contributors. BROADNET BOXER offers a single source for e-mail, task and meeting management, instant messaging, secure file exchange/storage and more.
KDDI Corp. and Okinawa Cellular recently announced plans to launch five new handsets from the end of May increasing their new lineup of 3G mobile phones (CDMA 2000 1x), a format that enables high-speed data transmission of up to 144 kbps. All the new phones are Movie Mail-compatible, a function that allows users to shoot and send seamless movies. The new handsets scheduled for launch are the A5401CA manufactured by Casio, the A5402S produced by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, the A5306ST and A1303SA both made by Sanyo, and the A5303H II manufactured by Hitachi.
One of the best aspects of working at WWJ in Japan – the country most responsible for creating the post-war consumer electronics revolution – has to be covering the trade shows. October’s CEATEC is one of Asia’s coolest (and largest) electronics showcase events, and Japan’s cell-phone makers rolled out their very best gear. We speak with Sharp about camera keitai (What’s the cost to add a camera-thingy to a phone?), Hitachi about cell phones morphing into computers (cellys now have 133-MHz CPUs – same as PCs used to), and take a look at J-Phone’s first 3G handset from Sanyo. One of our best programs to date!
