Today, TechFaith employs 1,800 designers and hardware and software engineers, occupying four floors of an old TV factory in a grubby industrial district near Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road. The company has developed more than 100 handset designs for 9 of the top 10 Chinese manufacturers as well as Japan’s NEC, Kyocera, and Mitsubishi.
On Friday, the MIJ team wrapped up the October mission to Tokyo and headed home to the Heartland for happy hour and some relaxed networking; everyone was pooped but delighted with the program (so said the team, not me the organiser!).
After a full day Wednesday at CEATEC to view fuel-cell mobile batteries, digital-TV handsets and a super new satellite pocket rocket from DoCoMo, we spent Thursday and Friday back on the MIJ agenda, meeting with, respectively, an LBS application developer, a major content aggregator, an alternative mobile payment provider (to find out what to do when your content is just too pricey for the official menus), a mobile marketing manager and a 3G carrier, among others. Thursday evening was another highlight as we met with Andrew Shuttleworth, one of Tokyo’s most knowledgeable and opinionated mobile application usability gurus, and a trio of young, female, non-tech Japanese college students who utterly tore apart preconceived notions of why Japanese use mobile like they do. (What? You mean you don’t like to pay for content??)
Listen to WWJ’s Lawrence Cosh-Ishii and Daniel Scuka begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting on Dave Graveline’s “Into Tomorrow” live at CEATEC; from 11:00-mark via MP3 Here.
The Mobile Intelligence Japan (MIJ) team spent Wednesday at the CEATEC show, checking out some of the most innovative mobile tech and services the Japanese ecosystem is currently developing. To start, Hitachi’s methanol fuel-cell handset for KDDI [ close-up image here ] was one of the major announcements made during this year’s event. Several Japanese electronics manufacturers, including Toshiba and Fujitsu, are working on a fuel-cell solution for powering and recharging cell phones and other portable devices; Fujitsu’s rather large (as big as a shoe?) version for DoCoMo provides up to 9 Watt-hours of juice.
There were also big line ups to view the new digital TV cell phones made by Sanyo, Panasonic and Sharp (for each of KDDI, DoCoMo and Vodafone) with plenty of people crowded around the NHK booth to test drive one of the units; all are due to launch by next spring and run for around 2 hours.
Later, we spotted Net2Com’s new IP-and-Skype handset available (since last week) for Livedoor mobile customers and were surprised to see a prototype streaming satellite handset from DoCoMo. The Mobaho! compatible phone — a full FOMA 3G device — will receive music and other programming direct from Mobile Broadcasting Corp.’s bird high above Tokyo and will launch next spring; the Mitsubishi-made device has about 2 hours of continuous playback time and appears intended to steal some of KDDI’s Chaku-Uta-Full thunder. Be sure to watch our latest video program featuring EZ Channel.
Finally, your WWJ crew had a chance to sit down and speak with Dave Graveline to record a radio interview covering some of the show’s highlights to be broadcast on 10 October.
Motorola confirmed that it has acquired a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Melco Mobile Communication Europe (MMCE), and it’s European team of i-mode design employees and a research center in western France. The Rennes facility will become a European i-mode focused development center for Motorola, continuing to operate in its state-of-the-art research and design center in Cesson-Sevigne (Rennes), France. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Renesas Technology Corp. today announced it has started shipping evaluation samples of a single-chip LSI, jointly developed with NTT DoCoMo, Inc. for dual-mode mobile handsets supporting W-CDMA (3G) and GSM/GPRS (2G) systems. Evaluation samples have been available for customers since the end of July 2005. With technological development investment from NTT DoCoMo since July 2004, the jointly developed LSI is expected to promote the global use of FOMA(R) and similar 3G mobile handsets. It also reduces costs by incorporating a dual baseband processor handling W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS systems together with a Renesas Technology SH-Mobile application processor.
DoCoMo announced today that they will launch “i-channel,” a news and information service, and compatible handsets, the 3G FOMA 701i-series. The service will be launched concurrently with three FOMA 701i models, which are to be released shortly. The three new 701i handsets (from Mitsubishi, NEC and Panasonic [.PDF]) will be compatible with the i-channel service and all standard FOMA services and functions, including videophone, Chaku Uta ring songs, Chaku Motion ring videos, Deco Mail (HTML mail), i-appli (Java) and Macromedia Flash applications. DoCoMo also introduced two hybrid units today; the ‘fashionable’ FOMA DOLCE and the GPS-enabled SA700iS from Sanyo.
Subscribers to i-channel will automatically receive various content, such as news, weather, entertainment reports, sports news and horoscopes, delivered to the phone’s standby screen as telop text. By pushing the i-channel button, a Flash-based UI channel list will appear and the user can select the channel they want to view.
Ecrio Inc., a global provider of advanced software for mobile phones, today announced that Diamond Capital Company Ltd., the venture capital arm of Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group Inc., has invested $3M in its new strategic investment round. They join current investors Nexit Ventures, Cypress Ventures/CIR Ventures and CDB Webtech. “We are very impressed by Ecrio’s technology and the traction the company has generated in the mobile phone software market for advanced 3G services,” said Mr. Tetsuya Mori, Director of Diamond Capital.
Japan’s PoweredCom announced the start of a Video on Demand (VOD) distribution service over high capacity fiber optics broadband networks. Powered Theater will soft launch August 11. Full service should begin in mid-September. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is a partner in PoweredCom and very interested in seeing more traffic on their fiber optic networks. For this project, the company tied up with cell phone content provider Index Corps’ subsidiary Neo Index and Mitsubishi as a technology/programming partner.
In a separate development Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) and Culture Convenience Club, parent company of video rental giant Tsutaya, have put together a joint venture to distribute programming over Internet broadband networks, original DVDs and through mobile phones. Though few details are available the new company should start at the end of October. TBS owns a controlling interest of 51 percent and CCC 49 percent. TBS also recently partnered with ColorZip Japan for a late-summer launch of TV applications using ColorZip’s server based ColorCode code recognition system linking TV broadcasts to related digital content for sponsored websites, music samples, contests and prize drawings.
ACCESS announced that its NetFront full Internet mobile browser has been selected by NTT DoCoMo for deployment in its 3G FOMA N901iS handset. The N901iS is part of DoCoMo’s 901iS Mobile Wallet series—the most advanced handset series ever developed by DoCoMo. In combination with ACCESS’ NetFront browser, the N901iS handset’s advanced functionality expands to deliver support for both i-mode as well as full Internet browsing. ACCESS’ NetFront browser provides N901iS end-users with a rich, full Internet mobile browsing experience that includes the ability to scale down standard Web pages to fit the width of the phone screen, thus eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling while significantly facilitating the mobile browsing experience.
ACCESS announced the availability of the English language version of NetFront® v3.2 for Pocket PC 2003/2003 Second Edition (SE) which supports Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 SE. NetFront v3.2 for Pocket PC 2003/2003 SE builds on the success of ACCESS’ award-winning NetFront v3.1 for Pocket PC browser by providing support for key new technologies and features including JV-Lite(tm) 2 CE edition, ACCESS’ Sun authorized Java virtual machine which supports the Connected Device Configuration (CDC) standard, and native support for Macromedia Flash(tm).
