Vodafone’s cut-price mobile phone calls and its 680,000 SIM card giveaway in Brisbane last month have combined to give the company a back-office headache. Vodafone Australia chief executive Grahame Maher said the company had been unprepared for the popularity of its $79 and $149 capped price monthly call plans. One Vodafone dealer said: “Before the caps we were losing three customers a day. Now we are gaining an extra six.”
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.
Thrilled to join with nice folks at HP Bazaar to co-host a rocking good MoMo Tokyo debut event on 13 September and it seemed as though most of the unwired digerati within commuting distance of the Pink Cow, in ubertrendy Shibuya, were there. In today’s Portable Reportable, Chief Editor Daniel Scuka quizzes WWJ’s Lawrence Cosh-Ishii on what he saw and heard at the Mobile Monday launch in Tokyo.
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.)
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.
The Mobidec 2004 annual event is back for their 4th year, slated to run Aug. 26 – 27th in Tokyo’s Aoyama Diamond Hall. Discover the future for fusion of cybermoney, music distribution, rich contents, and broadcast. As the cellular phone and mobile web usage are increasingly expanding, this two day seminar will explore the affects of the wireless domain on the real economy. The key players in Japan’s cellular phone business and technology sectors will make presentations, and display company exhibits, of their unique experiance in this field.
