Business
John Hofilena on May 23 2013
NTT Docomo, Japan’s leading mobile operator, has announced its 12.7 billion yen (around 130 million US dollars) acquisition of MCV,
Guam’s foremost cable TV and Internet provider. In a move to expand its international portfolio, the deal sees the Japanese telecommunications giant acquire in full MCV Acquisition, which is the holding company behind the Pacific island’s largest cable service provider.
Business
John Hofilena on May 22 2013
Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency ordered
KDDI Corp., one of the country's top mobile carriers and operator of the "au" phone service, to desist from using its exaggerated advertising campaign that grossly over-estimated the coverage area of its Long Term Evolution (LTE) high-speed network for Apple’s
iPhone 5, a unit they recently added to their phone catalog.
LINE, the Japan-developed messaging app that has been growing in popularity globally, has made a possible move towards censorship of sensitive Chinese words, as discovered by a Twitter user who analyzed the messaging app’s code. This is a move reminiscent of Tencent’s once highly-popular WeChat messaging app’s censorship of “sensitive”
Chinese topics that its own users were talking about – for which the app got slammed in online circles and declined in popularity.
Business Tech & Science
John Hofilena on May 21 2013
After five months of waiting – maybe for the hardcore
Sony console fanatics – the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) online store will finally be available in Japan starting May 29. Sony announced this on Tuesday, and the browser-based marketplace will now be available in Japan almost half a year after it launched in the United States. Almost similar to Android’s Google Play store, the system enables users to sign in with their
PlayStation Network accounts and buy games, television show episodes, and full length feature films for any Sony device that they own.
Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers
Panasonic is planning to re-enter India’s smartphone market in a big way as it launches its first smartphone in the South Asian nation on Thursday. The Japanese electronics giant is hoping to tap into India’s 5.5-billion-US-dollar handset market after being away for more than half a decade. Partnering with Delhi-based Jaina Group for marketing, distribution and customer support, Panasonic revealed that Jaina Group will also advise the Japanese company on creating a smartphone portfolio suitable for the
Indian market.
Docomo, Japan's largest mobile operator, and
Line, the most popular mobile messaging app in Japan right now, are forming a partnership to offer collaborative services for their Japanese customers. Two apps will be developed under their collaboration, one for the Raku Raku smartphone range and the other for Docomo customers that use Line for Android.
Tech & Science
John Hofilena on May 14 2013
Yes, we believe that the time has truly come to start sniffing our
smartphones – and Japanese gadget company ChatPerf is taking advantage of all of us who want smell our mobile phones with this new phone accessory called "Scentee." The mobile phone add-on is basically a liquid container that emits a perfumed scent that is activated by the accompanying app installed on your smartphone. Hot or not?
Sharp Corp., Japan’s leading manufacturer of liquid crystal displays (LCD), is aiming to strengthen business ties with Korea’s mobile phone making giant Samsung Electronics Co. expanding the latter’s supply of small LCD panels. Sharp is planning these overtures towards the Korean company while still providing small LCD panels to
Samsung’s top rival Apple Inc. Anonymous sources have revealed that this plan will be made public as Sharp looks set to announce its latest earnings today, putting forward a goal to increase annual operating profits to 153 billion yen (1.5 billion US dollars) by March 2016.
Tech & Science
John Hofilena on May 10 2013
By now, it has become a common experience for Akira Morikawa, CEO at Japanese social networking platform
LINE Corp., to be stopped on the street and be asked – through some weird grimace and gesture – to create a new emoticon in the LINE messaging app for some human feeling or non-verbal action that just can’t be expressed in words.
As the Japanese police plays a hide-and-go-seek game with criminal groups who use mobile phones for bank remittance
fraud and black-market financing – most of them rented phone units – the numerous rent-a-phone businesses in Japan’s major urban centers are making the task that much more difficult. And these shifty mobile rental businesses’ carrier of choice is
NTT Docomo, known for their flimsy screening processes which make them vulnerable to such abuse.
