Kyocera announced the successful field-testing of handsets used in a WirelessWallet consumer trial by Cellular South. Equipped with Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, the handsets were used by consumers to make wireless payments and purchases in the nation’s first multi-city trial by a wireless service provider. According to Cellular South, WirelessWallet will become available to consumers in early 2008.
Mobile Content Networks (MCN) has announced the establishment of MCN Japan K.K., a wholly-owned subsidiary of MCN Inc. Concurrent with the formation of MCN Japan K.K. MCN has moved its global operating headquarters to Tokyo to accelerate response to growing demand for MCN’s whitelabel Mobile Search Management platform in Japan, Southeast Asia, China, and India.
Adobe announced the availability of Flash Lite 3 at MAX 2007 in Chicago for handset makers, operators and content providers. Both NTT DoCoMo and Nokia are committed to deliver enabled devices, which will support .flv compatible video, in upcoming releases of handsets. With over 300 Million Flash enabled mobile devices and handsets shipped so far, Adobe expects more than one billion Flash enabled devices to be available by 2010.
Yet another successful event for in the massive Makuhari Messe convention center saw almost 200,000 pass through the gates for TGS 2007. Aaaah.. the chaos, the crowds, the girls games.. how could we resist! A sunny Saturday afternoon brought out the kids – for family day – and plenty of Cosplay actors were swarming between show halls to pose down for the camera’s. But the real action, coming from every major player in the gaming world, was inside. WWJ has been on-hand for this event pretty much every year since 2002, with the first-to-web video of the Sony PSP in 2004, and this time out was perhaps the most impressive yet.
The obvious evolution on display was without a doubt the next gen. motion-sensor enabled Mega Games at the DoCoMo booth. While KDDI rolled-out the heavy armor with Metal Gear Solid and BioHazzard for mobile RPG products, the display which seems to have grabbed the most attention was from SoftBank Mobile. Thanks to Darth and the Tokyo StormTroopers, who un-leashed the new Star Wars PodRacer game, we were hooked from Go!
The 3rd annual MobileMonday Global Summit was held in Helsinki, Finland, on 10 September with an estimated 1,500 attendees; this year included a bonus side-trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, the following evening. WWJ was there once again, as founders of the MoMo Tokyo chapter, along with representatives from over 20 MoMo cities around the world. In addition to our Trip Report, WWJ’s ed-in-chief Daniel Scuka offers these thoughts about the experience.
ACCESS has announced that its NetFront Browser and NetFront Messaging Client are featured in the new Sharp 3G handset that Vodafone unveiled on September 10. The 880SH supports both W-CDMA and GSM and is compatible with HSDPA. The handset, developed mainly for the European market, was recently introduced as part of Vodafone’s Christmas 2007 lineup.
