KDDI – au Design Series mobile phones (today: iida brand)
Marc Newson designed Talby phone and user interface for KDDI / au
On 13 October 2004, KDDI/AU announced “talby”, the third phone in their “AU design series”. Volume sales start in December 2004. We expect that “talby” will be similarly successful as “infobar” one year ago.
“talby” is a fully featured 3G phone with camera (640×480 pixel), QVGA display, EZappli/BREW, Chaku-uta, email, EZweb, PIM, GPS/EZnaviwalk,…
NTT investments to defend NTT against challengers KDDI and Softbank
KDDI and SoftBank challenging NTT’s dominating position in Japan’s telecom sector
Softbank is rapidly becoming the third universal telco in Japan, targeting NTT’s most important income streams. KDDI of course is also targeting NTT’s fixed line income.
NTT plans to intensify its defensive battle
On November 2, 2004, NTT announced plans to compete: NTT will invest 5 Chou YEN (YEN 5000 Billion = US$ 45 Billion) over 6 years (2005-2010), i.e. about US$ 7.5 Billion/year. 60% of this investment will be for optical IP networks. NTT plans to build about 30 million FTTH lines.
Prepaid mobile phones are a huge business in Europe.
In Japan prepaid mobile phone numbers are tiny, and NTT’s new CEO just announced that NTT-DoCoMo is planning to stop offering prepaid mobile phones altogether.
Find detailed statistics and market shares per operator for Japan’s prepaid market in our report on Japan’s telecommunications sector.
The government coalition in Japan is preparing a law to outlaw prepaid mobile phones. The reason given is that too many prepaid phones are used for crimes, e.g. the “ore ore” fraud.
The number of prepaid phones in Japan is very small, but it’s not equally distributed. DoCoMo has almost no prepaid users, and has announced to abolish this service. Vodafone has about 10% prepaid users, and TuKa about 20% – so these will suffer when prepaid phones are outlawed.
Prepay phones as a ratio of all mobile phones in Japan compared to Europe and Italy
Update: on 12 November 2004 the ruling coalition decided on a draft law, which will not outlaw prepaid mobile phones, but will make identification requirements more strict. (See update above)
The SonyEricsson mobile phone design team gave a very impressive presentation of their work at the Swedish Embassy yesterday.
Here is Art Director Mr Kawagoi, who created the famous SonyEricsson logo, explaining the messages contained in his creation:
SONY-Ericsson Design Director explaining his thoughts behind creating the SONY-Ericsson logo
Here Swedish Managers of the SonyEricsson Creative Design Center from Lund/Sweden:
SONY-Ericsson presentation at the Embassy of Sweden in Tokyo
My conclusion: expect a lot more great designs out of SonyEricsson. Also, there is every indication it’s a very successful Japan-Swedish cooperation.
[images in this post are taken with a DoCoMo/Sharp SH900i 3G/FOMA camera-phone in 2Megapixel setting, and sent through the air via DoCoMo’s FOMA network. Images are reproduced here in much less than the original 1224 x 1632 pixel size, which would not fit on most PC screens.]
updated most statistics and graphs
added a section on mobile games on i-mode
updated the international section
updated the 3G section
updated the i-mode-FeliCa wallet-phone section
corrected many errors updated the section on Japan’s telecom landscape: added recent transactions, and updated graphics
There is a saying the that the Prophet is not recognized within his/her own country – and I think that the inventor of Karaoke, Inoue Daisuke (井上 大佑) is not as famous in his own country as he deserves – but he was now recognized for his outstanding invention by the “Ig Nobel Prize” committee in the PEACE category.
This years Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on September 30, 2004 to Inoue Daisuke, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.
“Karaoke” means “empty orchestra” (KARAOKE = KARA (= empty) + OrKEstra).
The world’s first Karaoke Machine was named Juke-8, and built by Daisuke Inoue in 1971.
Here is an archived version of Inoue Daisuke’s personal website including a photo of Inoue Daisuke with his Juke-8 karaoke machine:
Today’s top article in Nikkei is about Cable and Wireless-Japan: the article reports that Cable and Wireless is in discussion with Softbank and a private equity firm to sell their Japan operations. Apparently this news article is not confirmed, and it already mentions a purchase prize on the order of US$ 100 million. This article appeared in the top position in Nikkei – but there are several things a bit mysterious about it.
I did not follow Cable and Wireless recently in Japan, but it seems that C&W made a loss of YEN 61.6 OKU on sales of YEN 713 OKU, i.e. almost 10% loss.
Spent all morning discussing with one of the innovation managers of a big European telco. Interesting. Spent afternoon with a US bio-tech company which which is thinking of asking us to build their business in Japan, and in the evening listened to a talk by Tadashi Onodera, the CEO of KDDI. Expected him to talk mainly about mobile – but he did not. His focus was a national VOIP network they are building, attacking the fixed line income of NTT. Got hold of him after his talk and discussed with him for about 10 minutes.
UPDATE: on October 26, 2004, Softbank announced the acquisition of Cable & Wireless IDC. Total cost of the acquistion is announced as YEN 12.3 billion (= US$ 110 million)
Tokyo Game Show 2004: smartphone games, mobile phones games the most exciting topic
Games are one of the drivers for mobile phones – and mobile phones are a driver for games. So the Tokyo Games Show is the place to go…
Tokyo Game Show 2004: Docomo’s mobile game partners
DoCoMo – as usual at most trade shows I attend in Tokyo – had one of the most impressive central exhibits with beautiful corners/desks for 15 selected i-mode game partners, out of over 4000 i-mode content partners thats a very select few:
Outline of DoCoMo’s exhibit at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
Out of the selected 15 few, the makers of Final-Fantasy had the top spot and 3-4 times more space than all others – clearly an enviable spot on i-mode. Not surprisingly Final Fantasy is consistently at the top of the i-mode roleplaying game ranking:
SquareEnix booth at the DoCoMo exhibit of Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
Tokyo Game Show 2004: SONY PSP – PlayStation Portable
Probably the center of the show was SONY’s PSP preview (PSP = PlayStation Portable). With a 333MHz CPU the PSP would have been a supercomputer and subject to serious trade-friction talks between US and Japan trade negotiators not that long ago…. how times change. IEEE802.11b WiFi “HotSpot” connectivity brings the PSP into the serious communication segment – what holds someone back adding VOIP to a PSP, undercutting the business models of most mobile operators… The PSP is clearly disruptive innovation in action…
SONY PSP mockup at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
everyone wanted his/her hands on a PSP:
All hands reach for SONY’s PSP at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
People love car races. I counted at least five stunning car race games. The most impressive display for me was SONY’s “Gran Turismo 4” to be released December 3, 2004. But I am no expert in car racing games – yet.
SONY’s Gran Turismo at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
Mobile phones without NOKIA? In Japan, that’s essentially so. NOKIA tried to enter Japan’s markets several times – I tried a DoCoMo-NOKIA NM502i for a few months. NOKIA had a nice display at the Tokyo Game Show, the emphasis was on helping Japanese game developers enter GSM markets via the NOKIA platform.
NOKIA exhibiting at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
Are these women ATARI’s software engineers?
ATARI at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004ATARI at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
…and ATI:
sATI at Tokyo Game Show TGS2004
If you are interested to purchase our archive report on “Tokyo Game Show 2004” with about 150 photographs, please contact us.
…and our report and analysis on Japan’s game industry with about 140 pages here:
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