Satoshi Nagao, executive managing officer of KDDI, said: “We are already in an era of one mobile phone per person, so the market itself is saturated. To make the company grow in such a situation we have to increase our share of the market, by making other companies’ customers shift to us.”
After a two-year business strategy planning pause, BREW finally launched in Japan last month. From the consumer point of view, BREW and Java work more or less the same: you navigate a menu, select an application, download it, then run it. There’s little to chose on a technology basis. But BREW – like 3G – may be able to gain a leg up on Java (DoCoMo’s favored choice) if KDDI can continue to roll out cool, fun, cheap, feature-laden (and BREW-enabled) handsets – much as the carrier has done with 3G. Now that KDDI has finally rolled out BREW, we wonder how competition with Java will unfold in 2003? Ironically, BREW’s future may be intimately tied up with that of 3G.
It’s rare for me to be Oh-My-God! impressed by mobile applications these days (blame it on George Bush and the endless beat of dreary war drums…), but the demo we saw was really terrific. The animations were great, the sound effects weren’t irritating (like they are with a lot of Java applets), and you could access pics of all the latest car models that slide onto the screen from the left or the right. If there’s a better way to sell cars via mobile, this may be it.
The total number of mobile phone and personal handy-phone system (PHS) subscription contracts has neared 80 million, with the number standing at 79.85 million at the end of February, up 0.5% from the previous month, a telecommunications association said Friday. In terms of the three main mobile phone companies, the NTT DoCoMo Inc. group had 43.23 million mobile phone contracts, followed by the KDDI Corp. group at 13.72 million and the J-Phone Co. group at 13.62 million, it said.
Tokyo’s HI Corp. has developed a 3D-graphics rendering engine that was first deployed by J-Phone/Vodafone in 2001. The software allows a cell phone to display very cool 3-D images that can be rotated, spun around, and otherwise manipulated. Now NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have adopted HI’s technology, and the company is keen to boost 3D imaging into markets elsewhere. Unfortunately, Sony, Sharp, and other heavyweights have taken notice. In the cut-throat, mobile technology ocean, will HI Corp. end up as one more little fish eaten by the big fish? Today’s program features Tokyo’s HI Corp., a 10-year-old software house founded by a bunch of students that has created some very cool technology.
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.
