Jabra competes with taxies in central Tokyo

Surprisingly, Japan is lagging behind Europe and the U.S. in terms of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones penetration. Not surprisingly Jabra, a well-known Bluetooth headset maker, wants to grab a substantial market share of Bluetooth headsets in Japan while domestic players are still trying to recognize the market opportunity. Well-aware of Japanese consumer buying power Jabra aims at the luxurious segment of the market by selling a designer headset JX-10. However, it is not an easy task to sell to Japanese a brand they know little about. In a move to raise its brand awareness, Jabra is unleashing a small fleet of Jabra-branded eye-catching velo taxies onto the streets of central Tokyo. This promotional campaign will last till the end of July. Knowing Japanese consumers' love for branded products, I would recommend Jabra to partner with top brands like Louis Vuitton or Dolce & Gabbana. Motorola did it with Dolce already.

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.

Contactless payment Suica cards hit a 20 million milestone

The railway company JR East has started issuing contactless rail pass cards dubbed Suica in November of 2001. This month Suica cards hit a 20 million milestone. This number doesn’t include mobile Suica memberships, which accounted for 430,000 phones with built-in FeliCa chips in March. JR East equipped its 2,127 train stations with Suica-compatible turnstiles. Nowadays, Suica cards (16,410,000) can also be used as electronic money to buy goods at about 22,150 shops in train stations in the Kanto area and around 7,000 online stores accept Suica cards as well.

Softbank and Samsung promote phones in Second Life

A while ago marketing teams at every self-respecting company were rushing in to create a MySpace profile to launch viral marketing campaigns. Then came YouTube. It seems that the next destination for audience-hungry marketers will be a virtual community website Second Life. Japanese companies are no different and they also want to follow the trend. The latest example is the creation of Softbank Slim island as a result of a partnership between Japanese third biggest wireless carrier Softbank and Korean handset maker Samsung. The goal of this is to promote Samsung's handsets offered by Softbank in Japan. To attract Second Life users the companies are offering some Second Life-related perks, quizzes and the ability to play with the phones in a show room and even take them back with you...unfortunately not into the real life. Commercialization is killing the beauty of such ideas as Second Life or Google search for instance, - after a while they just become flooded with ads and marketing hoaxes.

Source: IT Media

FON in Japan: 10,000 access points

IT Media reports that after four months of operations FON, a WiFi community whose members share their wireless Internet access points, has expanded its presence in Japan to 10,691 access points as of April 8th - a result that makes Japan third after Germany and U.S. in terms of FON's AP number per country. FON Japan aims to increase the total number of its APs to 75,000 units by year end.

Get Japan CellPhone Edge widget on your mobile

Now we are accessible from mobile devices as well. Jump to this link and download our widget onto your mobile handset. You can also check the compatibility of your handset here. The widget is powered by WidSets, a company owned by Nokia. We also placed a widset button in the left column for an easy sign-up. However, keep in mind that your carrier will be charging you for data traffic generated by the use of the widget. Enjoy!