Japan is hooked on Tetris

sSecond year in the row Tetris named the most popular game on mobile phone in Japan, according to G-mode's study. Well, at least 1,200 survey respondents chose Tetris as the most addictive game they have ever played. The top 10 list includes some other famous titles as well:

1. Tetris (puzzle)
2. Puyo Puyo (puzzle)
3. Solitaire (board game)
4. Sudoku (puzzle)
5. Osero (board game)
6. Tsuri game (fishing)
7. Zoo keeper (puzzle)
8. Dragon quest (role playing)
9. Millionaire (board game)
10. Hakoniwa (other)

Source: g-mode

Push-to-Talk failure in Japan

Mesmerized by the US Nextel's success with its PTT service running on Nextel's proprietary iDen network in early 2000's, Japanese carriers including DoCoMo and KDDI au also introduced similar services utilizing existing cellular networks in Japan in 2005. However, the concept never really took off in Japan. According to DoCoMo, about one hundred thousand users use the service on a monthly basis. As the result, both carriers announced the pending retirement of PTT services with KDDI au shutting down its in August this year, followed by DoCoMo with the plans to close the service in September next year.

Source: IT Media

Advanced Media launches voice-to-text Email app for iPhone

Tokyo-based Advanced Media has released beta voice-to-text Email application for iPhone. Since the application is in beta, it is distributed free via iPhone store. Advanced Media intend to charge for the app once Apple releases iPhone OS 3.0. The app on iPhone is just a nice interface to establish a connection to the server where all the heavy-lifting is done. Advanced Media has developed an in-house speech recognition engine Amivoice, which learns end-user's speech patterns and allows to record geographic and personal names in advance. It is one of the fewest apps out there to cater to users with a need for voice-to-text emailing in Japanese. Good news is that Advanced Media plans similar app for Android and Windows Mobile platforms.

Source: Advanced Media press release

KDDI au signs up one million fitness fans

In penetrated markets you need to dig deeper past the usual gender and age demographics to uncover untapped user segments. The proven method is to utilize a lifestyle marketing catering to different user needs. The first thing that would come into mind is probably sport and fitness lifestyle. And KDDI au recent endevour with au Smart Sports service shows that it works - the carrier has just announced one millionth subscriber. The au Smart Sports service offers two options Run & Walk and Karada Manager (Body Manager). With Run & Walk compatible phones you can set various modes like running or cycling mode and track and upload the data onto the web. Karada Manager offers means to set your personal health goals and provides advices on achieving them. KDDI au also partnerd with Adidas to provide branded phone pouches for au Sport Smarts users.

Source: KDDI au press release

Nico Nico Douga finally launches iPhone app

Given the fact that Nico Nico Douga is considered to be Japanese YouTube, it took awfully long time for them to release iPhone application. What is interesting is that iPhone is not even the first device to be optimized for Nico Nico Douga Mobile experience. Users of various models from DoCoMo, au and Softbank had the opportunity to watch videos and leave comments for some time. Actually, the mobile service accounts for about 3.2 million users. Now, when it is iPhone's turn to foray into Japan video sharing marketplace via Nico Nico Douga Mobile, users have a broad set of functions embedded into iPhone app, including the ability to leave comments, search, rank and tag videos. And yeah, it's free. Just type Dwango in iPhone App Store search to find it.

Source: Niwango press release (pdf) via Keitai Watch

Toyota, KDDI link phones with car navigation systems

Driving Toyota has just become funnier as the company partnered with KDDI au and Navi Time to provide EZ Navi Link service bridging mobile phones with car navigation systems. With EZ Navi Link service, au users can search for driving destinations on their mobile phone and then push the search results to car navigation via Bluetooth connection, which should improve the user experience with Toyota cars and au phones and save time by not typing in destination address. The service is free but users will access mobile web search services that will contribute to au's data revenue stream.

Source: KDDI au via Keitai Watch

SoLiVE24 launches a 24-hour weather streaming service

Weather info is always in demand and now Japanese Internet and cell phone users will be able to access the latest weather updates in real time 24 hours a day. Weather News and Fuji Television are launching SOLiVE24, an Internet weather info streaming service that offers a desktop Adobe Air widget for download. It also has an interactive feature like chat. Besides getting pushed weather updates, mobile phone users will have an ability to report back weather conditions from their locations, which will make possible to pint point the rain spread in almost real time. In addition to a very clean and nice UI, the SOLiVE24 hired a team of weather ancorwomen who can surely make the gloomiest weather forecast a little bit brighter.

Source: IT Media

Mobile marketing primer: coupon service Toruca in baseball promo

Local baseball team Seibu Lions claims to be the first in Japan to implement a mobile content distribution system to please their fans. The system is using NTT DoCoMo's Toruca service, which allows Seibu's fans to get players' pics, their profiles and team schedule onto the phones via NFC terminal installed at the fans booth in the stadium. All they need to do is just to wave their Toruca-compatible phones in front of the reader and the data will be pushed wirelessly to them.

Source: Seibu Lions

One millionth user subscribes with DoCoMo's iConcier service

In five months after the launch of iConcier service, DoCoMo boosted its number of subscribers to one million. iConcier is a content push-type service delivering various information to user's phone screen. It updates local, traffic and weather information along with the integration of DoCoMo's other services including Calendar, coupon service Toruca and Address Book. It costs 210 yen on a monthly basis and can be personilized with a mascot of your choice.

Source: IT Media

Japanese are quick to feature Obama's dog in mobile game

Japanese game maker Hudson Soft quickly reacted to the news about Obama's dog by releasing a free Flash game for DoCoMo's FOMA handsets featuring Obama himself and his pet cheering up the player to finish the game successfully. The White House is yet to issue an official statement in regard to this matter.

Source: Hudson Soft via Keitai Watch

Blogs and social networks are popular among Japanese mobile phone users

Survey takers at Impress R&D discovered that over 28 percent of respondents in Japan access blogs only from mobile phones. At the same time, over 15 percent of users access social networks using cell phones as their mere tools. 

Source: Impress R&D

Hudson wants to become a number one app developer for iPhone

Gaming powerhouse Hudson from Japan is eyeing the lucrative market of iPhone/iPod Touch applications. Recently one of its executives laid out ambitious goals for the future in the interview to local media. While it lacks brand awareness beyond Japan, Hudson is determined to expand internationally. Watch out for the new competitor! Below are some interesting points from the interview:

• During next six months Hudson intends to get into ten best content providers for Apple’s App Store and even become the top producer, if possible.
• As of now, 10 applications from Hudson are available through iTunes to iPhone/iPod Touch users, five more to be added soon.
• Hudson's so far best record in App Store was Bomber Man title ranked 16th at the time of the interview
• Typically 20 developers can come up with an iPhone app within less than a month at Hudson
• Games released by Hudson are priced from $0 to $7.99
• Hudson sees potential in networked games as they can become a building element for iPhone-based gaming communities

Source: IT Media +D

Phone calls will reach you even in Second Life

It seems that Second Life’s popularity has peaked some time ago but the “aftershock” attempts to commercialize it don’t stop. The recent idea from SUN (not Sun Microsystems) and Link Inc. is to enable Second Life users in Japan to call each other from their mobile phones without revealing your real phone number and name. The service called Avatar Keitai will provide users with phone numbers they can share with their Second Life buddies and charge the unspecified amount for the used minutes. You don’t need to be logged in Second Life to receive a phone call. While the idea of connecting mobile phones and online identities is not new (Jangl, Jaxtr and a bunch of other startups are in this niche), Avatar Keitai seems to be first to offer this capability to Second Life users in Japan. The question is will Second Life users adopt this service? Didn’t they escape into Second Life in order to cut any connections with real life and enjoy their dreams without being bugged with phone calls in the first place? However, I can see when Avatar Keitai can come in handy – to call your offline avatar-friend and verify when he will be able to be online again.

Source: +D IT Media

KDDI au’s Full Game: 10MB games targeted at mobile users

KDDI au, one of the biggest supporters of Qualcomm’s BREW platform outside of United States, took the advantage of BREW 4.0 capabilities and deployed a mobile game service called Full Game that provides high-quality 3D mobile games for download. The Full Game service is based on the precise rendering capabilities of KCP+ platform (KDDI Common Platform) based on Qualcomm's MSM7500 graphic chipset. To deliver a smooth 3D gaming experience the game’s file size reaches 1.5MB plus up to 8.5MB of supporting data. There are six Full Game-compatible handsets, including the W56T、W54S、W54SA、W61SA、W61T、and W61S models with more to follow. Initially, there four titles, which will become available for download from February 28.

Source: KDDI press release (Japanese)

DoCoMo-Google partnership: i-mode on Google steroids

In January, Google Japan and NTT DoCoMo announced their intention to work together to bring Google search, AdWords advertising platform and other Google apps to DoCoMo’s i-mode phone users. While Google already has relationships with KDDI au, the deal with DoCoMo goes beyond a simplistic inclusion of Google search box on the top page of i-mode portal. DoCoMo is about to stop playing a gatekeeper role as its users will search and browse beyond the operator’s own portal. So what are the changes that Google brings to DoCoMo i-mode?

Search results are fetched from three sources
Google search engine indexes three web domains for results: 1) i-mode sites approved by DoCoMo; 2) non-official i-mode sites; and 3) generic Internet websites. Before, users couldn’t perform searches that included non-official and Internet websites from i-mode portal.

Search results are grouped by three types
The way search results are displayed on i-mode portal is also will be changed to reflect the addition of non-official i-mode sites and Internet websites. Based on the source, Google and DoCoMo will group the search results accordingly.

Google keyword-based ads are integrated into search results
A big win for Google is the decision to integrate its AdWords advertising platform into i-mode portal. Now, keyword-relevant text ads marked with a [PR] sign will be placed in up to three locations across the page with search results with a total number of ads not exceeding four. No word about the revenue-sharing model between Google and DoCoMo though.

Display ads to compliment text ads
While details are not clear, there are some reports that Google AdWords platform will also be used to serve display ads such as banners across a bunch of DoCoMo’s services including i-mode portal, Message F (free), G-guide and others. DoCoMo’s D2Communications ad agency will work with Google on implementation of this new mobile marketing structure.

More Google apps to be preinstalled on DoCoMo handsets
Two companies agreed to preinstall a set of Google apps on DoCoMo handsets in near future. The first app to be preinstalled is Google Maps. The Fujitsu F905i and NEC N905i handset already spot Google Maps. All future handset models will be equipped with Google Maps, according to DoCoMo. Having started with the integration of Google Maps, the companies also plan to make Gmail, Picasa, YouTube and Google Calendar optimized for i-mode usage. The idea is to enable all kinds of mashups between these apps and search results like having a link from search results page to Google Maps for example.

Google to become a default page for DoCoMo Full Browser
It was decided that DoCoMo’s all future handsets with a full browser installed will have Google’s top page as a start page by default.

DoCoMo’s Android plans
It seems that DoCoMo wanted to ensure both the i-mode services and Android working seamlessly on its handsets when it joined Google’s led OHA initiative. We can expect i-mode handsets optimized for Google services rather than a complete shift to one platform – Android. Thus, DoCoMo’s handsets based on Symbian MOAP and Linux MOAP platforms will be optimized for Android experience, while some new Linux-based Android handsets will be optimized for i-mode service.

Related articles on Google's mobile strategy in Japan:

• Mobile Google localization primer: emoji and mobile Gmail
• Google Japan intros new single portal for domestic mobile operators
• Google befriends with KDDI, plans global expansion from within Japan?

Google Japan intros new single portal for domestic mobile operators

Now mobile phone users of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode, KDDI au’s EZ Web, and Softbank’s Yahoo! Keitai data services have one uniform URL they should use to get to Google Mobile - google.jp. Google Japan redesigned the mobile search method by getting rid of radio buttons with Web, Mobile and Images search options, leaving it to just a simple universal search. Google also report they optimized the local search and display of maps on mobile handsets. While this announcement is a step ahead for Google Mobile in Japan, it looks like the Japan’s team has a lot of localization work to do when comparing the array of mobile services available in the U.S. with those few offered in Japan (see image above).

Source: Google Japan Blog

Do I look like Britney Spears? Mobile phone has the answer.

Mobile application developer J-Magic hit a jackpot when released “Kao-Cheki!” service back in August. Based on a face recognition algorithm, the service matches user’s photo taken by and sent from a cell phone to J-Magic’s servers with the faces of Japanese celebrities. The matching results are then sent back to user’s cell phone with the ability to click on the names of matched celebrities to get more information about them. The service proved to be a major hit with Japanese users playing to their psychological aspiration to be like a celebrity. Flattered with the pop idols’ resemblance, users flocked the mobile phone networks with email traffic. Knowing that Hollywood stars are very popular in Japan as well, J-Magic also started offering to match Japanese cell phone users’ faces with resembling looks of famous dwellers of Beverly Hills. Riding on the wave of success, J-Magic didn’t hesitate to exploit the popular theme by adding an element of monetization – elegant at first, bizarre at the end. It started by adding fragrance recommendations based on analysis of users’ faces and linking the recommendation results with mobile shopping site selling, well, of course, fragrance. Then, Pizza Hut’s promotions came, suggesting pizzas based on the characteristics of user faces. This week, J-Magic announced “Kao-Cheki! Market”, a mobile shopping service, which would recommend all kind of goods (more than 400 items) to users based on their photo’s analysis (yeah, right). J-Magic explains it is just a fun way of doing mobile shopping.

The success of J-Magic prompted others to come to take advantage of popularity of celebrity matching services. I’ve already covered in my previous post a service that matches celebrity hairstyles with user’s photo. Now, there is a service dubbed Koe-Cheki and developed by Advanced Media that matches user’s voice with similar voices of celebrities. There are two phone numbers to call, one for male and another for female users. After leaving a short pre-defined message, users will get the matching results, selected from a database of pre-recorded 500 celebrity voices, by mobile email.

Teacup connects mobile users with Second Life

Software developer teacup introduced a technology that allows Internet users to chat in real time with Second Life dwellers without being logged in into Second Life world. There are two conditions in order to be able to do that: first, you must point your PC or mobile phone browser to teacup’s run community chat; second, at the moment you can only communicate with those from Second Life who are currently staying at Japan Resort virtual island, the fifth place in Second Life in terms of traffic, according to teacup. Teacup says they created a special avatar in Japan Resort that serves as a medium to establish connection between Second Life and the outside world users.

I went to teacup’s Second Life chat room to see how it works and was pleased with the results. All you need is to enter your nickname before entering the chat room. Inside, it looks rather like a very simple text chat room with multiple users shooting up messages at each other at once. At the time there were around six people chatting, two were from Second Life and the rest accessed from mobile phones.

I can see one huge benefit of this service – to be able to chat with your Second Life buddies on the go or at least away from your home PC, if you dare to do it on your work computer.

Source: Teacup news release (Japanese)

Celebrity hairstyle: use your mobile to see if it fits you

Japanese mobile phone users got a fun application I would also like to have on my cell phone. The application, dubbed as Hair Chen, allows you to select trendy hairstyles from a sample database and apply them to your own picture to see how you’d look with that new hairdo. You’ll find a lot of Japanese celebrities in that database as usually they are the trendsetter for hairstyles. For starters, the sample database will contain around 80 virtual wigs to try on, but eventually it will grow with the time.

The Hair Chen application is not offered as a standalone, but rather serves as a bait to lure users to the same-named portal that aggregates nationwide data about hair salons and related information. The portal relies on a subscription-based model to make a profit, charging JPY315 (USD2.67) a month. While KDD au users had this application at their disposal from 2003 DoCoMo users got access to it only recently. The application developer Rstream partnered with hair salon operator Taya to feed the portal with the relevant data.

Source: Source: Rstream (Japanese)

Mobile social network myMTV selects Japan for debut

Viacom decided to test mobile social networking waters in Japan with a bang - claiming to be the "first in the world to offer simultaneous video and page-browsing on mobile." I'm not sure how it works in reality but can suggest it splits the screen in two parts.

Among other perks users will be allowed to use artwork by Japanese designers to decorate their personal pages and provided with access to the feature programming from "MTV's library, such as Pimp My Ride, and Japanese productions such as Usavich."

"The service is ad-supported and free to consumers, and is available on all three of Japan's mobile operators, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank Mobile," according to C21Media.

Image recognition search engine fetches music results onto mobile screens

There is a one more way for Japanese mobile phone users to search for and buy ringtones and music. Bandai Networks just launched a new mobile phone service called “Search by Camera! ER Search” that allows cameraphone users to take a photo of a CD cover or poster and search for the information about that artist or band, using image recognition technology provided by US-based Evolution Robotics.

Evolution Robotics ViPR technology detects and recognizes visual patterns by applying specially developed algorithms to look-up an extensive database of candidate objects residing on a remote server. The object ID is then used to select the associated content to be sent back to the user’s cellular phone. Users can then click the link in the returned content to easily access a mobile site containing detailed product information or, if mobile commerce is available, purchase products directly from their phone without having to type in a product code.

Having partnered with music label company Label Mobile, Bandai Networks digitized more than 150 thousand of label’s CD covers, which cover the large part of the domestic market. The service is oriented at DoCoMo cameraphone users and available at no charge to them. To start using the service users need to download a Java application – iappli – that is compatible with DoCoMo’s handsets only at this moment.

Source: Bandai Networks

20,000+ joggers take notes with JogNote

Health and lifestyle-related mobile services are rapidly gaining attention of various companies willing to capitalize on the emerging trend. The opportunities are there and it is good for everybody. Japan is not exclusion. Eighteen months ago the internet company Wing Style came up with an idea of niche social network for joggers called JogNote. Now they are reporting more than 20,000 members under their “wing” (pun intended). To be a successful Web-based service in Japan, one needs to address PC and mobile users’ requirements at the same time, which Wing Style did. Cell phone users can input their running records, post blogs and leave comments to fellow joggers’ blog articles. The core features of JogNote are as follows:

• Socialize with fellow joggers
• Keep personal diary/blog
• Set your milestones and track your progress towards them
• Share your favorite running tracks with other members
• Find fellow joggers to run together
• Create maps with running routes

The service also links with Google Earth and imports data from Nike + iPod sports kit. For a niche social networking service they are doing OK, but I see a room for improvements such as allowing cellphones automatically transmit the running data to Wing Style servers or getting GPS data uploaded as well, if GPS is built in a phone. In the U.S., Bones in Motion or Garmin work on the similar services.

Source: Biglobe News (Japanese)

First time in Japan: mobile maps in Flash Lite

The mobile version of Japanese popular Internet portal goo has rolled out a three month trial to test new UI using Flash Lite. Empowered by Euretechnos’ image automatic conversion technology goo will enable users to access existing maps undergone a conversion into Flash Lite format that gives user an ability to zoom in/out and scroll/move on-screen map in different directions without a need to reload a page, which was a case in previous pre-Flash Lite maps. goo claims to be the first domestic mobile portal to implement such technology. The service works on 3G handsets with Flash Lite 1.1 support from all three national operators.

Source: IT Media (Japanese)

Mobile Wikipedia race in Japan

EA Inc. just released a beta version of mobile Wikipedia called WikiMo. The website is free to use and accessible at http://wikimo.jp/ for cell phone users from all Japan's mobile operators. The service includes only documents from the Japanese-language version of Wikipedia, which are searchable from the top page.

In separate news, NTT Resonant, an operator of Japanese Web portal goo, launched a mobile version of Wikipedia that can be viewed and updated from a mobile handset. Similar to WikiMo, the service indexes the Japanese-language pages of Wikipedia. As an additional perk, the top page shows the current five most searched for terms. The service is dubbed as goo Wikipedia and accessible at http://wpedia.mobile.goo.ne.jp/.

Market reports: What's hot in Japan?

According to some market reports, the hot topics in Japan are the rise of mobile advertising spending and the high penetration rate of quick response (QR) code technology.

Mobile advertising revenue in Japan will more than triple by 2011, according to the "2006 Advertising Expenditures in Japan" report by leading advertiser Dentsu.

Japan has become a leader in developing QR code technology for inputting product or service information into the phone. An NPD Group report titled "Japan Consumer Wireless Study" found that that barcode readers had eclipsed location-based services and radio applications as the mobile features most commonly used by consumers in Japan.

Source: eMarketer

Latest survey: mobile Internet usage in Japan

Video Research Interactive has published the latest results of its survey of mobile Internet usage in Japan. When compared with the results of last year’s survey, it is obvious that the cellphone users of both sexes and different age groups are increasingly getting accustomed to mobile web surfing. At present, around 54% of cellphone users access Internet from a mobile phone at least once a week, while last year only 40% of users did so. The crown of the most active mobile Internet users belongs to the group of 12-19 year old school girls.

KDDI au grabs 60% of one-seg handset market share

If you stop somebody at the streets of Tokyo who is watching digital broadcasting TV on his mobile handset and ask who is his carrier provider, chances are high the answer will be KDDI au. Having started selling its first one-seg model – the Sanyo W33SA (discontinued) – in December 2005, KDDI au expanded its one-seg portfolio to 12 models, resulting in two million units sold as of February 23, 2007. According to GfK Japan, au group has sold more one-seg compatible handsets than its rivals, grabbing 59.96% of the total market share. The early start and variety of one-seg models predetermined its leading position. In related news, the U.S. based MobiTV announced that it has crossed the two-million subscriber mark. It took some seven years for the company to get off the ground and sign up its first million customers, which it announced last April. Scoring its second million took just 10 months.

Bookmark service sends only text content of webpage to your mobile

Sidefeed released an email-based free bookmark service (http://toread.cc/mindex.php) optimized for mobile users. It converts web page into text-only content, and sends it to a cellphone. It has both Japanese (dubbed as "Ato-de yomo') and English ("tomobi") versions. For example, when a user wants to bookmark the web page he is currently on for later reading or he just wants to save some information from a web page like driving directions or business telephone number he can easily send it to his mobile email. This service reminds me of Google Toolbar's "Send To" button that allows you to share an excerpt from the page by simply selecting the section of the page and sending it to Gmail account, Blogger or SMS.

ScanR goes to Japan targeting cameraphone users

In an unusual move, the US-based company is going to bring its mobile technology to Japan. A start-up called ScanR provides business users with a capability to capture an image of a document, business card or message on a whiteboard with their cameraphone or digital camera and send it to their email via the ScanR’s servers that do the job of converting the image data into pdf or vCard formats. ScanR relies on a proprietary image processing and data refinement technology that is designed to work with any mobile phone platform. During the image to text recognition process, ScanR identifies keywords from the file and assigns them as tags that make the file searchable through ScanR, Google desktop or Vista desktop search. It’s also possible to send the captured images to fax machine or email as well. ScanR plans to go with a commercial rollout of its membership-based service in 2Q07, allowing up to 5 uses per month at no fee and charging around JPY300-700 for unlimited usage.

The choice of Japan for their first commercial rollout can be explained by the fact that the Japanese cameraphone market is predominantly penetrated with megapixel cameras, while the U.S. is still in the transition from VGA to megapixel camera capacity.

Source: K-tai Watch

Mobile search engine uses lyrics to find songs and artists

Developed by Axel Mark Labs, Uta-ken mobile search engine is capable of searching for artists and song titles by using fragments of song lyrics. Cellphone users can access and use Uta-ken freely on mobile web (http://utaken.ax-m.jp/). While the search is available free of charge, Axel Mark came up with a genuine way to monetize its know-how. The idea is to link the search results with its Best Hit J-Pop music portal, allowing users to download music onto handsets. At present, Uta-ken contains around 3,000 searchable titles and Axel Mark plans to expand its song database gradually.

Willcom sells W-ZEZO3 smartphone in package deal with Slingbox and Sky Perfect TV

While U.S. carriers are fearing that Slingbox or Orb will congest their networks with bandwidth-hungry live TV content streaming, Japanese PHS carrier Willcom teams up with Sky Perfect TV and Slingbox to offer its subscribers a package deal, containing Slingbox and Windows Mobile W-ZERO3 smartphone for JPY49,800 ($414). Besides the hardware discounts, Willcom offers an attractive monthly voice/data service plan for JPY3,950 ($33). If users exceed the allocated 12.2MB of data they will be automatically switched to unlimited data plan that costs JPY6,700 ($56). This measure will guarantee the maximum users would pay won't go over $56 dollars. Besides, the W-ZERo3 can connect to public hotspots via WiFi. The promotional campaign will run until February 15. And yes, you also need to be a customer of Sky Perfect TV.

Source: Willcom press release

KDDI au auction site hits 500,000 milestone

KDDI au auction site has finished 2006 with 500,000 subscribers, paying subscribers (JPY315/month). It took two years for KDDI to hit this milestone and before October 2006 the auction was strictly mobile-only. Now, it offers the PC version as well.

Source: IT Media

G-Guide hits 10 million milestone

The TV programming guide for mobiles, G-Guide announced a new milestone – its subscriber base reached 10 million users. In March, Japan’s Cellphone Edge reported 5 million subscribers for G-Guide Mobile service. G-Guide Mobile is a Java application loaded onto the majority of DoCoMo's phones. The guide provides airing schedule of all major Japanese TV channels and serves as a remote interface for scheduling the TV program recordings on some DVD players with the DVR functionality. G-Guide also became available to Softbank customers from October this year. Since that, the subscribership rate jumped to achieve one million subscribers in one month totaling in 10 million subscribers at the end of October.

DoCoMo reports three million i-channel subscribers

In nine months from the launch in August 2005 DoCoMo's push-type news service i-channel (search our glossary for details) added three million 3G subscribers who opted to receive automatic news and weather updates for a monthly service fee of 157.5 yen, which also includes data communication fee.

KDDI reports one million GPS users

Credit: IT Media

KDDI au announced that its paying user base of mobile GPS services had reached one million. KDDI started offering GPS-enabled cellphones in 2003 when it introduced a navigation service oriented on pedestrians. The service was able to pinpoint user’s current location and navigate him to the desired destination point by providing voice and on-screen instructions real time. In 2005, KDDI added another navigation service, targeting car-drivers with the ability to announce crossroads and re-calculate the route. Both services were developed by the company called Navi Time Japan.

G-Guide Mobile service signs up 5m users

NTT DoCoMo reported 5 million subscribers to its free interactive TV program guide service called G-Guide Mobile. G-Guide Mobile is a Java application loaded onto the majority of DoCoMo's phones. The guide provides airing schedule of all major Japanese TV channels and serves as a remote control for TVs on some models. Additionally, users of cellphones with analog or digital TV tuners built-in are capable to start watching a program they highlight in the TV guide by pressing a soft key. Rolled out in December 2004, the application supports 52 DoCoMo's handset models.

GPS helps to pinpoint first sakura blossoms with mobile phones

Owners of KDDI au phones with a built-in GPS feature now can access DuoSnap website to view or to send pictures of first cherry tree blossoms in Japan.

Every year the blooming season of the cherry tree is celebrated in Japan with millions of Japanese going out to view the intensity and beauty of blossoms and to enjoy a picnic, called hanami party in Japanese, under the blooming trees. However, the blooming time differs from year to year depending on the weather. And usually the mass media covers the first blossoms of cherry tree throughout the country as the blooming starts in the southern parts of Japan and spreads further to the north. But now, cellphone users can be the first to notify their compatriots about the beginning of sakura blooming. All they need to do is to snap a picture of the local blossoms and email it along with comments and embedded GPS data to DuoSnap website. Later, people can access the website from a cellphone or PC and check the areas where the blooming has actually started by viewing the sakura photos uploaded by other users.

Multilingual mobile mapping app targeted at foreigners

(left: Spanish; right: English)

If you are going to visit Japan soon, you will probably find it helpful to have a mapping application on your cellphone written in your native language instead of Japanese. Well, Shobunsha Publications together with Techno Planning developed a multilingual mapping application with maps covering Japan territory entirely, in order to help foreigners better navigate in Japan.

At the moment, the application is written in BREW1.3, thus limiting its use only to KDDI au BREW-compatible cellphones. And the number of languages is set to seven, including Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish.

Source: Shobunsha Publications via IT Media

List of Japan's mobile apps with potential for adoption in US

The NPD Group conducted survey of Japan's mobile phone consumers in order to uncover potential strategies for the US market. The research concludes that Japanese "use their mobile phones differently than Americans". In a nutshell, the main difference is in more extensive use of mobile data by Japanese than by Americans.

"76 percent of Japanese consumers use their phones for Web browsing, compared to just 12 percent in the U.S. market. "

There are many reasons why Japan is ahead at the wireless forefront and I had a recent blog dedicated to this topic. Also, John Sun at Mobile Analyst Watch made a nice comment about the NPD Group's findings:

"Although not mentioned, one of the key reasons mobile web browsing via the handset is so high in Japan is because home PCs are less common than in the U.S. For many Japanese, the cellphone is their primary Internet device, which might help explain some of the survey's findings... "

While the results of The NPD Group's survey may be of no surprise, at the same time they shed light on emerging mobile features that "display a strong growth potential for the consumer wireless market in the U.S."

Voice recognition simplifies access to mobile blogs

Credit: CNET Japan
Voice Domain Service (VDS), a subsidiary of Advanced Media, announced a voice recognition service for mobile handsets. Dubbed as “Voice Domain Blog Service”, the new service will help users connect to the desired blogs from a cellphone through the voice commands. Blog owners must register their blogs’ names with VDS in order to be recognized when users shout the blog’s name into the speaker.

Business model

• Free of charge for cellphone users (users pay for the connection time)
• Blog owners to pay 19,600 yen ($167) for the registration and annual service
• First 1,000 registered will pay half – 9,800 yen ($83)
• From the second year the service fee goes down to 9,800 yen per year

The company hopes to sign up 2,000 blogs by March 2006 and to increase that number up to 25,000 before March 2008.

Value

The main idea behind this service is to simplify the access to blogs from cellphones by saving user’s efforts and time to type hard-to-remember URLs. For blog owners, the service brings a new way to be discovered by users in an innovative way.

Marketers will welcome the service as it allows them to use catchy phrases to promote products and services. Indeed, a blog can be created to promote a special event or to advertise a new product. Advertisers will need just to let customers know the phrase they need to say into the speaker in order to get a link to the promotional webpage from a cell phone. However, I still find the access method to this service cumbersome.

Access method from a regular cellphone:

1. Access vd-s.jp site
2. Select Voice Domain Search link to initiate a call to the server
3. Yell into speaker the desired blog’s name
4. Select search results link to view the found links
5. Select link to visit the desired blog

Access method from Symbian OS smartphones:

1. Start the launcher application
2. Yell into speaker the desired blog’s name
3. The launcher application will send the digitized command to the server and receive the search results
4. Select the desired link to launch browser to visit the blog

Japan: cellphone stock trading rakes in billions of value

Business Week says cellphones played an important role in Japan's recent "three-day sell-off, which had dragged the Nikkei index down 7% by Jan. 18 and strained the Tokyo Stock Exchange's trading system to the breaking point." How? Well, apparently thousands of amateur Japanese investors panicked on the stock news and immediately took their cellphones to "shed shares as fast as the professional brokerage traders." It turns out that stock trading via cell phones is getting very popular among ordinary investors in Japan, bringing billions in value of transactions.

In November, the value of trades made via mobile phones by brokers Matsui Securities, E*Trade Securities, and Monex -- three of Japan's major online brokers -- hit 1 trillion yen ($8.7 billion) for the first time, a rise of 90% over the year before.

Once again, the example of cellphone trading proves the point that mobile Internet has more appeal to Japanese than the fixed-line connection.

Why is wireless becoming the way to go for Japan's market junkies in Japan? Much of the answer lies in the way the country's mobile industry evolved in the 1990s. Back then, pricey per-minute charges over regular phone lines discouraged consumers from getting Internet access at home. Many Japanese simply found it cheaper to sign up for Web-enabled cell phones instead, which had an added benefit for city dwellers who spend an average of two hours daily commuting to and from work.

E-books find popularity among mobile handset users

If a couple of years ago PCs and PDAs were the primary targets of e-book content, now it is the handsets that start grabbing a bigger share. The market research company mReport found out that, in Japan, the flat-rate data plans encouraged mobile users to download more e-books onto their handsets.

KDDI au was quick to recognize this trend by establishing “EZ Book Land!” -- a mobile e-book portal -- in April 2005. KDDI subscribers can browse the library of e-books (EZ books in KDDI’s slang) within the portal and download at no charge the snippets of ones they liked. If they wish to purchase the actual book, it is easy to place an order via a cell phone. According to KDDI, there were 5.5 million of e-book snippets downloaded from the EZ Book Land! portal as of September 2005. What a great promotional tool for new books releases!

In the US, mobile phones are just starting to gain some recognition as a marketing channel for books. This week, Stephen King’s new horror novel Cell will be promoted through mobile phones. The marketing campaign will include the sale of two “talk-tones” by Mr. King. Cover art from the novel will also be for sale as cell phone wallpaper.

Source: Japan.Internet.com

Four reasons for high mobile data usage uptake in Japan

Wall Street Journal (WSJ) had this lengthy article (note: subscription required) about mobile marketing in Asia. The article pointed out to some cultural differences between West and East that should be well taken into marketers' minds when replicating Japanese mobile marketing campaigns. In a nutshell, the following are key drivers that led to the high uptake of mobile data usage in Japan and that can’t be applied in North America:

• Lack of alternative communication means at home led to the heavy data usage of cellphones for Internet surfing and email. As WSJ put it, “Cellphones were adopted early on in Japan by girls living in cramped households, because they lacked other private communication, such as personal telephones and Internet access”.
• While people in Japan don't mind thumb-typing text messages, that might not be the case with users in North America.
• Japan led Asia's phone-text revolution, largely because of taboo against talking on phones in public there.
• From myself, I’d like to mention another well-known fact that Japan is a heavy train-commuter nation versus car-commuter of North America. During the commute time, Japanese keep themselves occupied with texting, playing games and surfing the Internet via their cellphones, while Americans prefer to drive cars, limiting themselves to voice calling or listening to the radio while driving.

Wine Labels Database

Photo Navi Wine by Zeta Bridge Corp. is a great example of service utilizing the cellphone's ability to take and send pictures over the cellular network.

You don't know anything about wine, but want to impress your friends with the extensive knowledge about the every kind of wine you taste at the winery? Well, in Japan all you have to do is to take a picture of the bottle's label and send it to the designated email provided by Zeta Bridge. In 15-20 seconds you will get an email back, containing the basic information about wine's kind, maker, year, etc. Moreover, it is free of charge.

Value
The company created a database, containing images of more than 3,000 wine labels stored with the corresponding data. Zeta Bridge also holds a know-how in image recognition technology, which allows to quickly identify images taken in low-light or bad conditions. The basic service is available to the clients of Japan's three major carriers.

Business Model
Zeta Bridge offers membership for about $2.70/month to be able to receive more detailed information to the wine requests. Besides, the company is engaged in m-commerce, enabling users to place orders for 500 labels out of its database via a cellphone.

Source: Asahi.com

KDDI to introduce mobile e-flyer

KDDI announced a new mobile marketing service, targeting small businesses. Dubbed as Mobile Electronic Flyer Service, the new initiative offers small business owners to target their registered customers with electronic flyers sent onto their mobile phones.

It should be mentioned that flyers are popular way of marketing in Japan. You can see marketing people distributing flyers, often written by hand, on every corner of any crowded street in big Japanese cities.

The major difference from e-mail is that the e-flyer can be handwritten, including custom drawings and maps. KDDI bets that the novelty effect will gather customers’ attention to this new service.

Small business owners need to send a Fax to KDDI that will notify users by e-mail about the new flyer available for download. The users may click on the enclosed in the e-mail link to see the actual flyer stored on KDDI’s server (they need to set up a special free-of-charge software on their handsets to use the service first).

The service trial will be conducted from mid August to the end of November 2005.
Source: KDDI

DoCoMo enables access to PDF files from FOMA cell phones

NTT DoCoMo and Adobe Systems reached an agreement today to integrated Adobe Reader LE software into DoCoMo's 3G FOMA cell phones.

The companies didn't release the exact date when this would be available. However, DoCoMo plans to enable all future FOMA phones with this capability. According to DoCoMo, users will be able to open and read PDF files while browsing mobile websites. Adobe Systems will work together with Access, a mobile browser developer, to develop the technical solution.

While some DoCoMo's users who own Sharp's FOMA compatible SH900i and SH901i cell phones can already view PDF files on their phones, they use a special software called Document Viewer, which is stored on their cell phone's miniSD memory cards.

What's new in Japan: review of wireless data services

Among the new data services introduced in Japan this week, there are few that are worth mentioning here. They are distant learning service for realtors offered by Nippon System and Management, Inc. and e-book service for cellular users from Impress Holdings.

Keitai-de Takken: realtors get an opportunity to learn on the move
Professionals, who are planning on taking a realtor's exam in Japan, now have a wireless service that will help them to get prepared for the test. Cell phone users can choose either a beginner course or a master course for JPY3,000 to go through 700 quiz questions in each course. There is also a JPY5,000 package option that combines two courses in one. The service will be offered until October 2005, a month when the next realtor test will be held.

eBookSpot: find out about new e-books and post your comments
The service, called MY CAFE eBookSpot, aims young women and introduces new e-books and comics for cell phones on a weekly basis. Users can check the latest content offerings and exchange opinions on them. The service is free to use, but it provides an easy access to buy-links to purchase the desired content.