Han Lian, chief executive officer of mobile game software maker BBMF Corp., said entering the Japanese market made him feel like an alien landing on a new world. BBMF, which stands for Big Blue Magic Fire, was founded in 2002 by Lian and a friend, Antony Yip. The Japan unit will be set up in the coming months and 10 titles are scheduled to be offered on KDDI and Vodafone handsets.
With KDDI’s May 2004 announcement that they had developed handsets with embedded digital TV tuners and ample battery life, and with NHK, Mobile Broadcasting Corp., and others promising direct-to-mobile broadcasts, TV is again being widely touted as the “next big thing” for the mobile platform — and not just in Japan. But before we truly see an era of television-keitai convergence, several critical issues must be understood and addressed. Many of these are fundamental flaws in the concept of mobile phone-TV convergence, and suggest that we are simply witnessing the introduction of the “next big hype” for the mobile platform.
(Part 1 of a two-part series. Next week: Mobile TV Rocks!, by WWJ chief editor Daniel Scuka.)
Japan’s 3G networks enable new types of high-bandwidth mobile content that weren’t viable under 2G for either economic or technical reasons. One of the coolest is mobile manga, delivering full-color comic book magazines to cell phones. There’s a manga stuffed in every Japanese commuter’s back pocket (together with a ketai), so porting manga to keitai could make an awful lot of money for content producers. It’ll also save a bunch of trees. Wireless Watch Japan was at Mobidec 2004 recently held in Tokyo and files this sneak preview from Digital Garage Mobile’s booth.
Softbank Corp., Japan’s largest Internet provider, complained that its plan to offer a new mobile phone service could be thwarted by the government’s refusal to provide the necessary bandwidth. Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Softbank, told a news conference Monday that the company wanted to begin offering 3G service utilizing CDMA2000 technology. But he said the telecommunications ministry’s decision to allocate the key 800mhz band exclusively to NTT DoCoMo Inc. and to KDDI Corp., is blocking Softbank from launching the service.
The golden shovels are turning sod in Harajuku today as Japan’s No. 2 carrier plans to open a Flagship store (like Vodafone Shibuya) in March 2005. Dubbed a Communication Institution for the purpose of helping visitors “understand our company, services, and products”.” Sounds like a mega-store to us! Designed by a twenty-something with Tokyo youth culture in mind, it looks like KDDI is pushing hard to market share.
Opera Software today announced it will deliver Opera’s port for the BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) application development platform with KDDI, Japan’s second largest mobile operator. “Opera’s full Internet browser offers the greatest advantage with the high-speed and efficient data communication capabilities of the 3G CDMA network,” says Dr. Seiichiro Sakai, Director, Product Management Department, Service & Product Planning Division.
