http://www.infinita.co.jp/ en Copyright 2010 Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:24:22 +0900 http://www.infinita.co.jp/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification It was brought to my attention today that Navitime, one of the leading navigation service providers in Japan, since May ‘07 has been offering a few extremely thoughtful and useful route customization options. The one that I am most impressed with - since it’s been pretty much raining day and night for the past week or so - is have it calculate a route with “as many roofs along the way as possible” (i.e. along overpasses and through buildings rather than around them). What’s cooler still is that the application synchronizes with real-time weather information, so when it’s pouring it’ll actually serve up the driest possible route automatically.
Just what Tokyo girls need when they take these or these for a walk this time of the year - especially because Navitime offers a “show route with as few stairs as possible” option as well. Excellent stuff!
There’s an overview of this here (in Japanese, but you get the picture).]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/06/weatherdependent_mobile_naviga.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/06/weatherdependent_mobile_naviga.html Infinita Scope Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:22:40 +0900 Reuters reports that Softbank Mobile will be the carrier launching the 3G version of the iPhone in Japan before the end of the year.
A Softbank Mobile press release confirms this.
OK, it doesn’t say officially that it will be the 3G version, but in a country where *none* of the handsets currently on sale are 2 or 2.5G, it’s very hard to imagine it would be anything else. Guess we’ll find out June 9.
Note: Our friend Lars Cosh-Ishii at Wireless Watch Japan has been predicting this for a while, and as usual, it seems he’s been right.
However, I don’ t see any part of the press release that says this is an exclusive arrangement, and taking into account Apple’s recent announcements, I could at least theoretically see it appearing on NTT DoCoMo as well (although that would indicate a major paradigm shift in the Japanese market, where handset models traditionally are exclusive to one carrier).]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/06/3g_iphone_to_launch_on_softban.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/06/3g_iphone_to_launch_on_softban.html Infinita Scope Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:03:04 +0900 SUGUSOCO (“right there” in Japanese) solves several at once. Let me give you a worst case scenario:
Say you are a guy on your way to a really crucial date, you’re running short on time, and the sole of your shoe just came off. Also, you obviously just now thought of the fact that you can’t show up without some flowers. You need to pee terribly because you rushed out of home, and all this stress has you desparately longing for a smoke.
Whip out your phone, access the site, locate your position via GPS or map immediately get listings for spots that will help you get out of your predicament right there and right then: publicly accessible toilets (inside department stores and convenience stores), smoking areas (as smoking is banned in many public areas in Japan), flower shops, Mr Minit-type places that will fix your shoe in a couple of minutes, as well as bicyle parking garages (an issue in Tokyo as you risk a parking ticket for leaving your bike in a non-assigned area). While taxi stands would be a good additional category not yet available, at least they list the contact numbers for all taxi companies.
But what makes the service really useful is the additional information they provide for the search results: For example, in the case of the toilets, users are able to check whether heated toilet seats are available (one of many Japanese particularities, but one I definitely miss every time I leave the country), get a cleanliness rating (x out 5 stars), get information on the number of available Western-style vs. squat-style seats and even check out pictures of the toilets. Better still, you can leave virtual toilet graffiti, up to once a day.

Possibilities for adding social web features to the whole thing (“connect with other users who frequent the same toilets as you”) are obvious, but not necessarily desirable. Integration of real time data (“Current waiting time at this toilet/flower shop/taxi stand is x minutes”) would be the more useful feature that immediately comes to mind.
While you will hopefully have noted a generous helping of tongue-in-cheek in this post, I actually do think there are a couple lessons to be taken away from this: For one, this location-based service provides information that is indeed not only useful, but can become very necessary when on the go (as opposed to, say, the often-cited restaurant finder example which overlooks the fact that people do tend to decide in advance where they are going to eat). And secondly, it smartly bundles the solution to different manifestations of the same problem (short on time, not familiar with surroundings, suddenly occuring mishap) in one service.
So what is the business model of this, you ask? We wish we knew! The company behind this, Power Technology, is active in the Web and Mobile Search Engine Optimization field, but that is about all we have been able to find out. But we sure know this thing is useful.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/find_a_clean_toilet_now_and_ot.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/find_a_clean_toilet_now_and_ot.html Infinita Scope gps lbs search Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:57:35 +0900 CNET Japan article reporting on the January 24 DoCoMo press conference published last Friday (source in Japanese), Kiyoyuki Tsujimura, Executive Vice President and Managing Director Products & Services Division NTT DoCoMo was quoted saying the content filtering system (designed to protect minors from mobile sites with potentially harmful content) in use today is insufficient and does not meet user needs.
According to Tsujimura, the current blacklist system employed by DoCoMo, under which all sites deemed as potentially harmful - including all “inofficial” (off-portal sites) and even some “official” (on-portal) sites enabling communications, such as mixi - are filtered out by default, is not granular enough since, for example, schoolchildren using handsets with the filter set to “on” cannot even access their own school’s mobile site anymore.
Thus, Tsujimura states DoCoMo is currently evaluating a “customizable whitelist” approach which would let parents select the sites they allow their children to see.
Takeshi Natsuno, the “Father of i-Mode”, adds some additional information regarding DoCoMo’s recent announcement to use Google as its official mobile search engine, which so far had remained unclear: For users browsing the web on handsets with the filter activated, Google will only display search results from sites that are not considered potentially harmful.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/docomo_current_filtering_syste.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/docomo_current_filtering_syste.html Infinita Scope Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:18:35 +0900 official company line, they are “extremely confident” about this endeavour - and we believe they have every right to be.
Whereas dead or barely holding-on bodies of past MVNO’s line the roads in many a country - Disney Mobile USA, Amp’d Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Helio to name a few - these cases are mostly owed to a lack of compelling content/service offering and/or weak distribution. Disney Mobile seems to have solved both these issues textbook perfect for the Japanese market, taking a very different approach from what they tried to do in the US with its MVNO on the Sprint network before. Contrary to many reports in international media, it is not at all a “similar service” to what they tried before.
In Japan, Disney will simply throw in their brand value and content, wisely staying out of the devilish details of trying to be a mobile network operator, something it has no experience in (cf. their US failure for details on how well that worked out the first time around) and leaving that whole part to SoftBank Mobile, which certainly does have its fair share of clout, ties to handset makers, distribution power and armies of customer service reps.
So tight is the cooperation that the Disney Mobile site on the PC web actually looks, works and feels almost exactly the same - except it’s white - as the SoftBank Mobile one.


It could be argued that Disney’s model is working so closely with the operator (by not running their own infrastructure etc.) that it’s actually more of an “MVCO”, a Mobile Virtual Content Operator. I guess you could also call it an OEM model.
Disney will be able to leverage SoftBank Mobile’s massive distribution network of thousands of SoftBank stores across Japan: want a Disney mobile contract? Get it at the SoftBank store.
Billing plans are exactly the same as SoftBank Mobile’s, including the wildly popular “White Plan” which features free intra-network calls between 1 am and 9 pm at a mere JPY 980 per month - whether the person you’re calling is on Disney Mobile or SoftBank Mobile.
Then, there is the fact that Disney is already a major content provider in Japan - serving about 3.5 million loyal customers, some 75% of which are women in their 20ies and 30ies, delivering content via a total of 88 sites across the three carriers NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile, with subscription billed at a monthly rate of JPY 105-315 (about 90% of which goes to Disney).
Disney will be giving its subscribers free access to 23 of these sites, which offer all kinds of branded services, from ringtones to screensavers and from DecoMail (HTML email with graphic elements) to fortunetelling. And for extra coolness (I wouldn’t want to be caught dead using one, but that’s a story of personal preferences), they throw in a username@disney.ne.jp mobile email address.
In the hardware department, it’s wall-to-wall Disney, too of course: The first three handset models, made by Sharp and coming in “Shiny Silver”, “Glitter Gold” and “Sparkle Pink” (cuteness, anyone?), ship with a Disney button that leads directly to a Disney mobile portal developed in cooperation with Yahoo! Japan (which SoftBank owns, and which provides all of SoftBank’s proprietary mobile content and services).

Here, users will be able to access news, weather, horoscopes and all the other types of popular content - all wrapped in Disney look and feel, of course. Needless to say, the terminals themselves are chock-full with more Disney characters and animations than you can shake a stick: from the idle screen to the menus to the pre-installed applications.
Hardware spec-wise, the phones are pretty average if you’re living in Japan (and pretty mindblowing if you’re not): Music player application supporting Windows Media Audio and SD-Audio, Oneseg (digital mobile TV) receiver and FeliCa (NFC chip for contactless payment, ticketing and loyalty card schemes). A 2.6 QVGA liquid crystal display to display all that glorious content, and, of course, HSDPA high-speed 3G delivering it at up to 3.6 mbit/sec. Disney has announced they will launch new handsets three times a year.
As could be expected from Mr Masayoshi Son at SoftBank, this is a smart move indeed - the carrier has a third of the spectrum, but only 17.5% of the market, leaving much network capacity unused. Disney is certainly a partner with enough pull to keep pushing SoftBank Mobile subscriber growth - and with the billing plans covering both networks, Son doesn’t risk losing customers of his own.
So, which other brands in Japan could pull off this type of model? The answer is: not many, if any. Disney is uniquely positioned in that it has very loyal fans while at the same time being a brand that does not lose credibility and coolness the bigger it gets - something that can’t be said, for example, of fashion brands like A Bathing Ape that are built on a foundation of exclusivity. Secondly, Disney has a really strong portfolio of mobile content already - as opposed to brands like ESPN in the US, who only really tried to get into the mobile content space around the time of launching their MVNO. Disney has been a major player in mobile content since the early days of i-Mode, which is seeing is 10th anniversary next year.
Sanrio, creators of Hello Kitty is one potential candidate for a Disney-like model, but I wouldn’t bet the bank on it, considering that Sanrio is far less strong in mobile content than Disney. Sports teams? Not big enough a fan base as potential MVNO customers, not to mention their complicated content rights situation.
But, as Tomi Ahonen over at Communities Dominate Brands wrote a while ago, relying on branded content is not the only way an MVNO can work - advertising-funded MVNO, especially if targeted at a precise niche along the lines of Blyk is a different story entirely. And while it would be hard to get a foot in the door in Japan and would require some tweaking of the model they run in the UK market, this could be an extremely interesting proposition if executed well and with the right partners on board.
What the announcement didn’t include (to be honest though, we weren’t expecting it to) was any information regarding the rumoured Disney Mobile launch of the iPhone in Japan. But we still think Wireless Watch Japan has it right.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/disney_mobile_in_japan_why_it.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/disney_mobile_in_japan_why_it.html Infinita Scope Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:59:14 +0900 Here’s the deal:
After several crime incidents involving high school students using dating sites last year, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in December 2007 asked the mobile network operators to step up their efforts implementing and promoting content filtering services to limit access by minors to “potentially harmful types” of mobile websites.
All carriers since 2005 have been offering filtering applications that restrict access to sites that fall into the “potentially harmful” category: adult content and things links like gambling, of course - but more notably, anything that enables communications between users, such as the ultra-popular gaming and social networking site mobagetown and the mobile versions of mixi, bulletin boards like 2ch.net and dating sites. The list of sites to be filtered out is managed by Netstar Inc., a joint subsidiary of TrendMicro and Alps System Integration.
Under the proposed measures, all mobile phone subscribers under the age of 20 signing up for a new contract will be subject automatically to these access restrictions, unless their legal guardian accompanies them to the mobile carrier’s shop and opts out. For existing contracts that have a minor as the user, parents will be contacted by the carrier from next month, informing them that if they do not opt out, the filter will be automatically turned on sometime early this summer.
Carriers NTT DoCoMo and au KDDI’s age limit for this policy is 20 (the “full legal age” in Japan), SoftBank Mobile’s policy differs slightly, with the age limit having been set at 18. While NTT DoCoMo and au KDDI take a “blacklist” approach, filtering out sites that have been evaluated as being potentially harmful by Netstar, SoftBank handles things more strictly by implementing a “whitelist” approach, only letting through sites that have explicitly been approved by Netstar.
Now, why does all this matter? Over the past few years, the Japanese market there has been experiencing a very strong shift, especially among the early-adopting teenage crowd, away from paid subscription “official sites” listed on the carrier deck, which generally are tightly monitored by the carriers, to so-called “inofficial sites” not listed on the official portals and operating beyond their control, usually under an advertising-funded model. Both the proliferation of mobile data flat rates (making browsing off-portal content much more affordable) and the increasing adoption of mobile search (making it much more accessible) have contributed significantly to these developments. And while some official content providers have suffered in the process, off-deck content providers and the mobile advertising industry as well as the carriers themselves have been thriving as a result.
Thus, the new content filtering rules come as a shock to the industry - at least when taken at face value, see below - threatening to throw what some fear could be a major wrench into the gears of the evolution of mobile web usage in Japan.
DeNA Co., Ltd., the parent company of mobagetown, took a major beating, losing 150 billion JPY (source in Japanese), approx. USD 1.4 billion, in market capitalization in the week after the Ministry’s announcement in December. mixi Inc. has been hit less hard, since it is less dependent on the teenage crowd for revenues (it has a minimum age limit of 18 anyway).
Up steps the Infinita analyst and says: Things are far less bad than they seem, for DeNA and for the industry in general. Specifics first: In DeNA’s case, the demographic makeup of mobagetown’s users has shifted from almost 70% under the age of 20 one year ago to less than 25% today (source in Japanese), with the trend continuing towards a user base with a higher average age as the service becomes more mainstream. Having said this, other off-deck content providers relying more heavily on teenage users than DeNA may have some difficult times ahead of them.
Secondly and more importantly, the total market segment that could theoretically be affected by the filtering system - that is, if every single parent decided not to let their children opt out - is about 7.5 million users (minor with internet-enabled mobile phones). According to Telecommunications Carrier Association of Japan data (source in Japanese), by September 2007 - months before the Ministry’s and carriers’ announcements - 2.1 million of these already had a filter set on their handsets, leaving only a good 5 million potential additional minors to theoretically activate (or rather, not opt out of) the filter from now on. And many of these will implore their parents to opt out, confronting them with arguments which will make sense from a parental point of view: From “I can’t use free navigation services anymore and might get lost” to “I can’t access my own high school’s mobile site anymore”.
Third, the Mobile Content Forum (source in Japanese), an influential industry association, is lobbying with all its might already to loosen the rules governing which sites end up in Netstar’s filter list and which get through. Quoting today’s Nikkei English edition (subscription required),
“Industry group Mobile Contents Forum is protesting the blanket restrictions proposed for the social networking sites and is urging the creation of criteria to differentiate between sites with established monitoring structures in place and those that do not offer such features. The forum, which will announce the groundwork for its criteria as early as the end of this month, plans to lobby cell phone companies to implement it when they adopt the content filters.”
Considering all carriers and all major content providers are paying members of the Mobile Content Forum, that certainly shouldn’t prove too difficult a case to push through.
Lastly, Netstar’s method for deciding what needs to be filtered and what doesn’t is shaky and has been coming under fire from the Japanese blogosphere and industry media already. As one blogger states in a December 18, 2007 post (source in Japanese), there does not seem to be a coherent system at all, with sites like mobagetown and dating site Star Beach blocked, but other community-heavy sites like Girlswalker and Yahoo! Groups being accessible. Mobile Gmail and search engines, both of which could easily enable “potentially dangerous communications” between users, work fine as well.
The problem that Netstar is having such a hard time dealing with here is that, to call a spade a spade, the vast majority of mobile sites in Japan are potentially dangerous to minors - because they enable communities in one way or another (which is exactly why they are so much more useful than early generation mobile services and so much more successful). With many of today’s most popular mobile sites building heavily on social features - from off-deck sites like mobagetown to carrier-run services like au KDDI’s music playlist-based mobile social networking application “utatomo” to SoftBank’s 3D mobile virtual world S! Town, restricting access to minors for all sites with social/communication features or disabling these features would in consequence equal turning off a major portion of the mobile internet. You can’t take communications and social interaction out of a medium which is based on these without rendering it utterly useless. And that is certainly not going to happen.
Representatives from DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank (who asked to remain anonymous) interviewed by Infinita last week all confirmed that basically, nobody has the slightest clue how exactly things will turn out in the short term, but in the long run things should be pretty much back to normal anyway.
The drama unfolding on Japan’s mobile stage, at least for the time being, is thus a classic example of “Face-saving Hot Potato”: Ministry needs to make sure society remains under the impression it is doing its part in protecting their children and urgently issues measures. Mobile carriers rush to conform to prove how responsibly they are acting. Action is taken and widely publicized. Mobile industry, including the carriers, starts to lobby behind the scenes for more favorable conditions immediately. A few months pass. Things revert back to Status Quo with slight modifications. There is simply no way Japan’s tightly-knit old boys’ club of mobile (ruling over a USD 78 billion market) will have it that the industry’s development is stalled in any major way.
However, what is a very scary development indeed is worrying talk of the Japanese government’s plans to more strictly control the way people in Japan access the internet and what sort of content they consume - the mobile content filtering debate is only a part of this. This topic in itself merits a blog post at least as long as this - fortunately, Gyaku.jp has written it already so we don’t have to.
For more details on these developments, any of the companies mentioned here or, simply, anything else you might care to know about the Mobile Industry in Japan, please contact us anytime.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/a_royal_mess_content_filtering.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2008/01/a_royal_mess_content_filtering.html Infinita Scope Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:52:02 +0900 here a while back about J-Magic’s popular kaocheki service, which lets users send in a phone cam shot of their face, runs it through server-side visual recognition/image comparison software and then tells them which celebrities they resemble most. This has enabled J-Magic to collect tens of millions of Japanese mobile email adresses in just a few months, which they now happily use as a database for mobile email marketing. Furthermore, they’ve got the users’ faces tied to those email addresses as well, which opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for J-Magic enabling mobile social networking applications and all sorts of other stuff in the future (as well as familiarizing people with mobile visual search in general, an area that J-Magic is active in with several products).
Now a company called K&A Partners (which I had never heard of until now) put a different twist to this concept with their Nounai Cheki (“Inside-the-brain check”) service: “Send us a picture of yourself, and we’ll display an overlay of Japanese characters describing your personality, showing what’s going on inside your head.”


Nounai Cheki: What your face says about what’s going on inside your head
Now, while I very much doubt the empirical validity of the algorithms behind this, it’s definitely a good laugh. My result was about 80% love and 20% money, which, if you ask me, is an interesting manifestation of the Pareto Principle, more colloquially known as the 80/20 rule. When you send in your picture to get a clearer idea of what is really going on inside your mind, something I predicted would happen soon on J-Magic’s kaocheki takes place: a profile page for a mobile social networking service called “Mobisura” is created (Japanese English for “Mobile Slide”). Also, they have included a virtual points/currency system along the lines of what I called a “Point Affiliate System” in this post on ultra-popular mobile free games/social networking service mobagetown and some of its newer competitors: When signing up for Mobisura, members get 30 points, which enable them to send in three shots of themselves or friends - and in order to get more points (you guessed it) they need to recruit new members for the service, click on mobile ads, subscribe to or purchase mobile content downloads from partner sites.
As I have noted before, I am not very sure about the sustainability of services like these, but it’s surely a clever way to collect mobile email addresses for marketing purposes, especially in a market like Japan where people are as crazy about fortune-telling-type services as they are about mobile phones.
Via K-tai Watch]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/10/send_us_a_picture_and_well_tel.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/10/send_us_a_picture_and_well_tel.html Infinita Scope Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:04:36 +0900 mobagetown had 6.03 million users and generated almost 10.8 billion page impressions a month, contributing the main chunk of parent company DeNA’s USD 47 mln sales this quarter, and helping the company achieve 155% growth in operating profit (year-on-year basis). Those kinds of figures are bound to attract all kinds of competition, of course - new mobile social networking/avatar sites along the lines of mobagetown are popping up left, right and center these days:
An article published on Japanese industry news site IT Media [in Japanese] announced the upcoming September 15 beta launch of “Chipuya Town” [site in Japanese] by content provider Media Groove Inc. [site in Japanese]. Chipuya Town is a mobile Flash-based 2D version of real-world Tokyo youth hotspot Shibuya that users will be able to navigate around and interact in with avatars. Coming with standard SNS features like microblogs, communities, friends and chat, Chipuya Town also features a virtual currency/point system similar to MobaGold (the virtual currency the mobagetown system is based on - more on this here), which members will be able to acquire by clicking on mobile ads as well as for recruiting new members. These points can be redeemed for avatar clothing as well as interior goods for avatar rooms, and - according to the press release - for mobile content such as full track music downloads, too. This model is becoming increasingly common, and for want of a better label I’ll start calling it “Point Affiliate System”.

Chipuya Town: Room/main menu, item shopping and town views
While Chipuya Town doesn’t feature mobile games (as opposed to mobagetown), it does seem to have a more advanced virtual economy, and to be taking a cross-platform approach: In an Second Life-inspired take, users can use a free PC-based Flash application to actually create avatar items such as clothes and avatar home accessories themselves, that they can then use for own their own avatars or sell to others in virtual Shibuya - the mobile version, that is. Decomail (graphic elements for email, highly popular with the teen crowd) can be created on the PC and used on the mobile as well.
Media Groove is also planning on selling virtual store branches to real-world companies feeling a need for a presence within Chipuya. Recruiting customers will start tomorrow, August 1. Customers will be given several tools to pitch their goods to the avatar masses, including advertising outside and inside their virtual stores, in-store promotional events and - this sort of boggles my mind - a virtual advertising truck that will drive around and hand out virtual leaflets to avatars. Starting at JPY 1,000,000 per month (ca. USD 8,000), rent is quite steep in absolute terms, but may pay off if Chipuya Town sees growth rates similar to mobagetown.
In related news, a few days ago Excite Japan Co. Ltd. [site in Japanese] and Global Networking Solutions Ltd., a subsidiary of Japanese trading house giant Itochu Corporation, announced the launch of free mobile games/SNS/avatar service “Mobikade” (which was launched as “Ekimoba” [site in Japanese] in Japan this spring) in the UK, with plans to expand into other European markets, such as Germany and Italy. While I haven’t been able to check out what the European version looks like, I have to say I was impressed by two features of the Japanese version: the fact that the avatars are in 3D, and the possibility of users trading in points accumulated inside the system (by clicking on ads, purchasing mobile content etc.) for actual cold cash at the bank or the post office. From what I have read about the European version, I like the twist of being able to redeem points for free SMS messages.
I personally think it’s great that Excite Japan is pushing into foreign markets - while there is a lot of innovation in mobile in Japan, the list of companies that never look beyond this country’s borders and eschew the risk of taking their business international is endless.
With au KDDI’s operator-branded EZ GREE also in the game (I’ll write up some news on that one shortly, too) and Disney’s Wonder Days playing a minor role as well, the space of mobile virtual worlds involving SNS, personalizeable avatars and rooms, some kind of virtual currency system and - in some cases - free games is becoming increasingly crowded in the Japanese market, and the phenomenon is finally spreading beyond this little island.
Operators, content providers and marketers everywhere, don’t complain to us if you miss this train, we told you it was coming your way fast!]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/07/new_competitors_for_mobagetown.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/07/new_competitors_for_mobagetown.html Infinita Scope Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:20:38 +0900 Simply email a picture of your face, your friend’s or whoever else’s from your mobile to male@kaocheki.jp (for men), female@kaocheki.jp (for women) or mix@kaocheki.jp (if you don’t really know) - a few seconds later, you’ll receive an email with a link to a page that lists your similarity to three celebrities expressed in percentages (which you can, of course, immediately share with your friends). For example, I look 23% like Japanese actor called Eiji Wentz, who is a quarter German (which I found a bit creepy…how can this thing tell I’m German??). The whole thing is based on a face recognition engine developed by OKI Electric Co., which is usually employed for less prosaic purposes (read: security applications).
Of course, results will be different depending on the angle you shoot at and sometimes deliver different results. Among some people, this has led to a sort of contest along the lines of, “can I make this thing somehow tell me that I look like George Clooney?”
Now, why is J-Magic doing all this? For one, having 15 million users’ email addresses and the kind of traffic kaocheki.jp has is a very nice base to run an advertising business model on. Secondly and more importantly, J-Magic also runs eyenowa.jp, a mobile search engine running on image analysis technology (think: send in a picture of anything and we’ll link you to more information on that), which they cross-promote on kaocheki.jp: By leveraging the gimmicky Face Check service, J-Magic is able to drive users to a more advanced product. Clearly, there is a lot of potential in eyenowa for mobile marketing purposes, and J-Magic says they have already signed up two big clients for campaigns.
J-Magic is planning to expand kaocheki.jp by adding more celebrities (from additional categories such as comedy and sports) to the database, as well as launching SNS features, such as rankings and communities of all the people that look like a certain celebrity. So mixi and mobagetown, the other two big success stories in SNS in Japan, may have a new competitor coming their way (detailed Infinita reports on both mixi and mobagetown are available here).
Having said that, there’s a big differences between having registered users with profiles and massive repeat usage (mixi: more than 10 million users, mobagetown: more than 5 million users) and just people’s email adresses. Also, the three approaches are very different: mixi is more of a classic SNS/blog site, while mobagetown is focused on connecting people through free games, avatars and entertainment - and both can sustain repeat usage for a long time, while it’s unclear to doubtful whether kaocheki.jp will be able to do this.
Nonetheless, the service will be one to watch in the next few months.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/06/which_celebrity_do_you_look_li.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/06/which_celebrity_do_you_look_li.html Infinita Scope Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:49:44 +0900 Love it. I’m sure it won’t be long before these features will be integrated into mobile phones in Japan.
]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/03/excellent_product_of_the_week.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/03/excellent_product_of_the_week.html Infinita Scope Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:15:52 +0900 article published in the Nikkei yesterday, the number of Japanese mobile users with wallet phones (Osaifu Keitai) is expected to grow by 60% and reach 40 million within the next 12 months. The enabled base almost tripled between September 2005 and October 2006 (up from 13.2% to 37.4%, Keitai White Paper 2007 by impress R&D) and, according to the Nikkei, currently stands at about 25 million.

FeliCa chips, which are the underlying technology for contactless payment on mobiles, are increasingly becoming a standard feature on newly released handsets: Of the 10 handsets announced for spring by au KDDI, 8 are wallet phones, and DoCoMo announced a decent 6 out of 10 as well. This means it’s fast becoming difficult to buy a handset in Japan that doesn’t have FeliCa (unless you are on SoftBank Mobile, at least).
The technology and its applications have been widely promoted, and awareness among Japanese consumers for wallet phone functionality is staggeringly high, with 98.5% of all Japanese mobile phones users (and that equals just about anyone who is not living in a cave and/or not able to operate a mobile phone yet) in the know about Osaifu Keitai.
But the much more interesting question than sheer penetration is: how many people that could actually do use the feature, how much do they spend with it, and how will these numbers develop?
According to the impress R&D report from October 2006, usage among Japanese consumers with enabled handsets is about 30%. The average number of transactions per month made with wallet phones is just below 4, so we should currently be in the region of somewhere around 30 million monthly transactions. At a conservative estimate based on impress R&D figures, average value per transaction is about 750 JPY today, equaling JPY 21 billion (about USD 180 million) worth of purchases being made with wallet phones every month.
So…what will things look like 12 months from now? Under a very conservative scenario, let’s assume average value per transaction will not change, and the percentage of people with enabled handsets that actually use the feature will stay stable as well. We will also very cautiously assume average usage frequency among active users will only grow by 10% - but with people getting more used to their handsets being a magical device capable of transmitting digital cash, and even more places becoming enabled for IC payments (most noteable the whole subway and bus system of Tokyo, which will happen March 18) things could look very different a year down the road.
So we are very conservatively looking at about 12 million active users making almost JPY 39 billion worth of purchases with their wallet phones a month, which equals a yearly market value of JPY 466 bio. (USD 4 bio.), by next spring. Granted, that’s not even 1% of the total volume of the “quick daily purchases” market in Japan (USD 500 bio.), but it’s not exactly pocket change either, especially when compared to some other areas of the industry: The domestic market for mobile content was worth JPY 315 billion in 2005, and mobile commerce was JPY 407 billion.
It will be years before wallet phone use becomes mainstream even in Japan, but operators today are wisely investing heavily in an infrastructure that will pay off big time for them once voice and data ARPU don’t do the job anymore.]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/03/nikkei_40_million_wallet_phone.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/03/nikkei_40_million_wallet_phone.html Infinita Scope felica mobile mpayment Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:46:53 +0900 ]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/nintendo_and_motorhead_announc.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/nintendo_and_motorhead_announc.html Infinita Scope nintendo Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:52:52 +0900 ]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/feeling_a_bit_nutty_today_are.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/feeling_a_bit_nutty_today_are.html Infinita Scope Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:49:32 +0900 “By using the pakehoudai option [a JPY 3,900 service plan option for unlimited usage of i-mode data traffic] you saved 1.67 million JPY this month.”

Doing a quick calculation, we established that he had used a total 1.07 GB of i-mode data packets in January…which only cost him the equivalent of $32. Now, 1.07 GB of i-mode data packets equals VERY heavy usage, but it goes to show that flat rate data plans definitely make sense. It’s for a good reason that - even in Japan - the mobile internet in general, and mobile content downloads specifically, only really took off after au KDDI pioneered the concept of flat rate data plans, followed soon after by DoCoMo and the then-still-Vodafone SoftBank Mobile: freeing the user from any concerns whether he may have to file for personal bankruptcy because he looked up the train schedule on his handset one too many times is key to adoption. Non-Japanese operators (with a few notable exceptions, yes I know), please take note.
If Chikara-san were me, he would probably have thought, “Right! Now that I have saved so much money, I may as well go spend it.”]]> http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/infinita_member_saves_16000_on.html http://www.infinita.co.jp/en/scope/2007/02/infinita_member_saves_16000_on.html Infinita Scope imode mobile Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:08:21 +0900