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for March 4-19, 2003 |
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Spring Handsets / Japan's Latest Wireless Trends |
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There was a volume of news last week, hence the bullet point format:
a. There are now 6.09 million 3G users in Japan.
b. A slew of handset announcements: Samsung will make phones for i-mode outside of Japan; NEC released its FOMA P210V 3G phone, the first NEC 3G phone allowing NTT DoCoMo users to email video clips and use memory cards; NEC will launch the n3li camera phone for European i-mode markets loaded with Japanese-style features but specifically designed for Europe; Sony Ericsson is launching the A13015 CDMA2000 1x phone on KDDI; Sony, Sharp and others formed the 3D Consortium to develop technology where 2D images stand out like holograms on phone screens.
c. Japan Media Review has recently published a series of articles covering the social implications of Japan's wireless culture. Tim Clark's "Japan's Generation of Computer Refuseniks" suggests Japanese teens now see mobile phones as the access device of choice, showing signs of forgoing personal computer purchases for handset upgrades. Mizuko Ito's article "A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society" spells out the cultural impact of wireless on teenage social habits. Citing a November 2001 survey by the Mobile Communications Research Group, wireless email usage among college, high school and middle school girls is virtually 100%, while teens overall are sending double the volume of text messages than Japanese twentysomethings.
d. NTT DoCoMo's Takeshi Natsuno was at Silicon Valley's "Game Developer's Conference Mobile" recently, where US gaming companies were reacting to the promise of wireless gaming on the new Sony Ericcson T606 and Nokia NGage devices. One takeaway was Natsuno's statement that i-mode has about 3.7 million paying subscribers for games in Japan, which is about 10% of its domestic subscriber base. This conference and Natsuno's comments were widely cited in US technology press, and are in stark contrast to a research report just released by Jupiterresearch titled "Wireless Paid Content: Prioritizing US Market Opportunities for Content Owners." It says, "European revenues for wireless content providers (including ringtones, logos, alerts and polling) represent a bigger opportunity for content and media companies than do online advertising or paid content. For the next 24 months, wireless content revenues in the US will amount to chump change - less than US$200 million in aggregate consumer spending across all categories." (24 months!) Whether you dispute these numbers or not it certainly highlights the gap between DoCoMo ability to accumulate millions of paying customers for i-mode and the realities US game developers face in deciding whether to roll the dice on the US market.
e. With a little less fanfare than Intel's Wi-Fi chip announcement, Matsushita Electric has introduced a 5GHz WLAN IEEE802.11a and 802.11b chipset capable of transferring video images among home AV equipment.
f. Mitsubishi Corp. is getting closer to launching its Monteran software technology, developd with a Deutsche Telecom subisidiary, that will allow a personal computer or mobile terminal to double as a WLAN base. The service may be available in Europe as early as this year. One terminal can communicate with another within a radius of 40 meters.
g. Two Nikkei (NEAsia Online) articles pointed out two notable hardware trends in Japan. The first being NEC and Hitachi trying to commercialize fuel cells for mobile devices by 2004 and 2005. The second trend is in hard disk drive development-which has been increasingly miniaturized - being overtaken in functionality by more powerful Memory Sticks or SD cards around 2005. Both Sony and Matsushita will release 1GB version of their storage media this spring.
h. Kato-Denki, a Japanese security equipment maker, developed an anti-theft system whereby a terminal installed in the car will use GPS and PHS to contact the owner's mobile if it senses any suspicious activity. If this product ever makes it to the States, Kato-Denki should get David Hasselhoff to do a "Knight Rider" commercial with this product! (for information on "Knight Rider, a 1980s TV shown in the US featuring a talking car, see http://www.knightrideronline.com)
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Archive
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Japanese mobile industry ponders Galapagos Effect |
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Summary (gilesrichter.com)
Japan has a super-powerful mobile ecosystem worth billions, brimming with futuristic technologies, business models, and experiences that the world wants to emulate. But is it a model or an anomaly? And does it only exist because it was incubated in isolat... |
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Surprise? 10 years in, ComScore Discovers m-Commerce in Japan |
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Summary (New Media Age)
That's right. After ten years of leading the world in mobile commerce, Japan has leapt ahead to take the lead again, and it has snagged the attention of the foreign media. This surprising non-news was broken by ComScore at the Mobile World Congress an... |
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Japan slices books into e-reader-sized bytes |
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Summary (News on Japan)
Would you pay $1 a copy to have all the books in your house cut up and scanned to PDF? That's what is happening in Japan, where cramped living conditions and the arrival of the iPad in May have spawned as many as 60 companies offering to turn paper bo... |
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