A new contender lures customers with EM-ONE smartphone

A new contender in the Japanese mobile market E-Mobile reported getting aboard 30,000 subscribers as of end of April 2007. Considering that the service went commercial in March 31, it is not bad at all for a new operator in Japan's nearly saturated market. Apparently, the Sharp EM-ONE smartphone attracted new subscribers at a bigger scale than expected as almost half of 30,000 users bought this HSDPA-enabled MS Windows Mobile terminal.

Softbank last to hit 50% milestone with 3G subs in Japan

Having added 560,100 subscribers to its 3G service in April, Softbank finally passed a 50% 3G penetration milestone for its subscriber base. The leader in conversion cell phone users from 2G to 3G camps remains KDDI au, which has managed to get 97.9% of its total subscriber base to be equipped with 3G phones. DoCoMo so far persuaded only 69.1% of its customers to switch to 3G.

Second Life demographics revealed

Not really related to mobile topic yet, but couldn't resist putting this info about Second Life demographics here. If you want to target Second Life dwellers with advertisings, it will be usefull to know that Europeans comprise 61% of residents as of March, according to ComScore. Another 19% were from North America, and 13% hailed from the Asia-Pacific region. Regarding the total number of active users ComScore says almost 1.3 million people logged into the virtual environment in March 2007. That's up 46% over the number of active residents in January 2007. comScore also reported that 61% of residents were male and 39% were female. According to statistics released by Linden Labs, creator of Second Life, SL had 5.7 million total residents (including people with multiple SL identities) as of April 15, 2007. Of those, 30% had logged in during the previous 60 days and 17% logged in during the previous 30 days.

via eMarketer