Nokia
Nokia

Nokia

IC Mobile Payment Reaches Mainstream

WWJ Portable Reportable MP3 audio report
Of the 10 mn Japanese using some form of the FeliCa contactless IC payment system as of 1 April, 700,000 are already mobile-enabled, according to Tokyo’s bitWallet, the joint-venture set up to commercialize Sony’s FeliCa technology. In today’s WWJ Portable Reportable, we speak with Norihiko Fujita, a bitWallet manager working on extending the FeliCa-based “Edy” payment service into mobile platforms. After NTT DoCoMo launched their own-branded “i-mode FeliCa” service last summer, Vodafone and KDDI are playing catch-up in 2005, and they’d better hurry: with 20,000 merchants already accepting FeliCa-based payments, there’s money to be made from mainstream users. (“Edy” stands, somewhat hopefully, for “Euro, Dollar, Yen”).

Sanyo to Supply DoCoMo 3G Phones

Sanyo Electric Co., seeking to recover from a record loss last year, said it will resume supplying handsets to NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s biggest mobile phone operator, for the first time since 1999. Sanyo will provide a handset for high-speed, or third- generation, service to Tokyo-based DoCoMo this year, said company spokesman Akihiko Oiwa, confirming a Nihon Keizai newspaper report. The Osaka-based company expects to ship 1 million of the handsets annually, and supply two other models starting next year.

DoCoMo to Sell Nokia 3G Phones

NTT DoCoMo will start selling Nokia Oyj phones as early as October, getting its second foreign handset maker after Motorola Inc. for its high-speed network. Nokia, the world’s largest mobile-phone maker, will produce a model for DoCoMo’s 3G network, which allows users to download music and video clips and access the Internet at a faster rate than older phones, Chief Financial Officer Yoshiaki Ugaki said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday.

ACCESS and Abaxia Collaborate to Deliver New Data Capture Paradigm to Mobile

ACCESS announced that it has collaborated with Abaxia to integrate its MobileTag 2D barcode reader solution with ACCESS’ NetFront® Mobile Client Suite, the world’s most advanced, integrated browser-based software solution for advanced multimedia-enabled mobile phones. The joint solution enables a new data capture model between mobile devices and barcode-enabled applications like advertisements, brochures, posters, direct-mailers, or any object that can support a barcode.

April Subscribers: Vodafone Gap Widens

The April subscriber numbers are public and the news is mixed, at best, for Big V. Vodafone KK suffered a loss of 180,800 2G subscribers but only gained 141,300 3G users, for a net loss of 39,500 subs. This has got to be disappointing given that the March’s loss had fallen to a mere 7,400 and company management were likely hoping April would see a turnaround with the net change moving into the black.