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January handset shipments in Japan reach 2.1 million

JEITA published mobile handset shipment numbers for January 2010. The highlights are as follows:

• Mobile phone shipments in Japan reached 2.1 million units in January 2010, an 8.7% increase YoY
• Among those cellular phones' share accounted for 97.6%, with the rest going to PHS phones
• Mobile phones with one-seg TV chip shipped in 1.6 million units, an 6.4% increase YoY
• Installed base of one-seg phones reached 77.1%

Source: JEITA

Mobile coupons are mainstream in Japan

Using mobile coupons to get a discount is a common thing in Japan and a recent user survey by Update/MMD just confirms that. Out of 4,453 survey respondents 71.6% said that they are subscribed to receive flyers with discounts from a particular business. Among those, 43.5% get coupons from 2-4 businesses. The most popular category of businesses distributing mobile coupons is the fast food chains followed with pubs/restaurants/cafes and CD/DVD rental shops. The top three popular shops among respondents turned out to be as follows:

1. McDonald's (78.3%)
2. TSUTAYA (Japan's Blockbuster) (44.5%)
3. KFC (29.3%)

Source: MMD via Keitai Watch

February update: Japan mobile operator market shares

TCA published its February mobile subscriber numbers for Japan's mobile phone operators. The main points are as follows:

• Japan's mobile population grew by 0.4% from last month reaching 115,686, 400 contracts
• Among all mobile contracts, 96.4% go to cellular phones, with the rest allocated to PHS phones (Willcom)
• Overall cellular operators added 488K subscriptions with DoCoMo being slightly ahead of the pack with 148K adds
• In terms of total subscriber bases, DoCoMo grabs 50% of the market followed by KDDI au (28.3%), Softbank (19.7%) and eMobile (2%)
• Data plan subscriptions account now for 83.1% of total cellular phone market with DoCoMo being above the average with 87.5% of its subscribers using data services
• 3G penetration stands at 96.6% for overall cellular market with Softbank having 97.5% of its subscribers shifted to 3G devices
• Japan cellular market is dominantly postpaid with only 1.2% being still on prepaid; DoCoMo is left with just 0.1% of prepaid accounts

Mobile social gaming's awareness high in Japan but few users agree to pay

A recent user survey of more than three thousand respondents in Japan by CA Mobile and Spire revealed interesting trends about the uptake of mobile social gaming on such sites as mixi, mobage town and gree. Here are some highlights:

• Awareness of mobile social gaming is very high with close to 70% of respondents indicating they have played some kind of game
• Spread of word is the most effective way to get new players onboard with more than 60% of those who played a social game citing friend's invite as a reason to join
• The most popular time for playing social games is just before going to bed (or actually playing when already in bed)
• Almost 60% of respondents spend no more than 20 minutes per access
• Majority of users plays free games, with only 4.2% of core users expressing willigness to pay

Source: Spire

Brother debuts a 9.7-inch e-paper reader

Brother came out with an e-paper reader that uses a low-power thin 9.7-inch electrophoretic gray-scale display. With 15mm of width and 600g of weight the device spots Bluetooth to display documents from mobile phones or PDAs on its bigger screen. It also has an SD memory card slot. The battery is said to last for up to 83 hours - an equivalent of 5,000 read pages. It is good for carrying product manuals or other documentation. It is compatible with Brother scanners allowing direct scan of documents. The problem is that it uses a proprietary viewer format technology.

Source: Brother

Answering your door phone system from a cell phone

Meeting the needs of growing population of households with both spouses working (55% of all households in Japan) Panasonic developed a door phone system connected to mobile phones. The system delivers both audio and color video streams to mobile phone's screen whenever there is somebody ringing your bell door. Panasonic plans to start sales from June 2010. The price tag, including door phone system and mobile phone adapter will be set at JPY114,450.

Source: Panasonic

Quiz: How much of gold can be found in 500K handsets?

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has just finished its cell phone recycle campaign across the country reporting 567,056 mobile phone units collected. The ministry also published some interesting stats about precious metals contained in the colected lot of retired phones. If properly extracted, about 22 kilograms of gold, 79 kilograms of silver, 5,670 kilograms of copper, and 2 kilograms of rare palladium can be recycled. Now, it doesn't say anything about the extraction costs but nevertheless, these are some impressive numbers.


- Posted on the go

Home-grown Ameba Now challenges Twitter in Japan

Freshly from the lab Ameba Now, the twitter-like microbloging service launched in December 2009, is gaining in popularity in Japan registering one million visitors in January, according to Nielsen's data. For the same period twitter in Japan saw 4.7 million visitors with an average user spending about 25 minutes on the site versus 6.5 minutes spent by Ameba user. Interestingly, twitter in Japan looks like a male-dominant service with 64% of its users being males while Ameba Now attracts 54% of female audience. Now, keep in mind that these numbers are for PC users and don't include mobile phone usage.

Cyber Agent, a company behind Ameba Now, is also running a popular blogging platform Ameba Blog. The ability to attract celebrities to use Ameba Blog service was a key factor for its popularity and if the same strategy can work for Ameba Now, it can present a serious challenge to twitter in Japan.

A fan-like user interface from Else-Access

In case you missed this during the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona...Here is an example of innovative user interface running on no less innovative handset - the product of collaboration between Japan's software house Access and Israel's design house Else. Powered by Access Linux Platform the Else handset spots a fan-like UI optimized for the one-hand navigation. I'd love to land my fingers on this phone.

iPhone wins enterprise deal in Japan

Fast Retailing, an operator of clothing chain Uniqlo in Japan, will purchase 1,200 iPhones from Softbank in order to provide its employees with an always-connected means for communication. Besides Softbank providing FMC/WiFi solutions for in-store calling/data usage, Uniqlo employees will be able to view customer data without storing it on device and search company directory - all cloud-based.

- Posted on the go

mixi abandons invitation-based registration

In a long awaited move mixi, Japan's biggest social network in terms of registered users, changed the rules for new member registration. Before, in order to register you had to receive an invite from your friend who was already on mixi. As of March 1st, it is no longer required. With this move mixi repeats the steps of Facebook and hopes to boost its memberships beyond of reach of the competition. It worked handsomely for Facebook and should work for mixi as well. However, it might backfire if Japanese users find it intrusive given their appreciation for privacy. Call it a cultural thing but some might hate to a higher degree than in the wedt the idea that their profiles can be searched by random people.


- Posted on the go

Japan social networks lure developers

Availability of games is the key differentiator for social networks in Japan. Before now they relied on in-house development or "selected" developers to launch games on their platforms. However, the situation is going to change as the likes of mixi, mobage, and gree are about to release their APIs and development programs. The site that will manage to lure more developers will get the competitive advantage over others in terms of the number of applications available to its users. In the latest news, gree went campaigning for developers promising among other perks funding from the newly established gree fund to the brightest of their kind.

- Posted on the go

Napster to shut down in Japan

It was reported (via Keitai Watch) that Napster would discontinue its services in Japan due to the shift to DRM free strategy of its American parent and inability to support development costs required to implement such change in Japan. It was also mentioned in the article that Napster would become profitable in Japan in near terms and hence, the decision to stop providing services because of the additional development costs associated with DRM free platform looks, to put it mildly, strange. Napster Japan is a joint venture between Napster and Tower Record with NTT DoCoMo being involved as well. DoCoMo users are going to be affected as Napster To Go service is being offered on DoCoMo handsets.