NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s leading mobile operator, has announced that it will invest in 500 Startups as it prepares to launch a 10 billion JPY ($109 million USD) venture fund in late February. The accelerator program will focus on the development of new businesses for smartphones and tablets. → Read More
If you thought that LG’s global roll out of the Optimus G meant that its successor, the Optimus G Pro, would stay in hiding a while longer, you were wrong. According to NTT Docomo, one of Japan’s largest mobile carriers, the Optimus G Pro will be available in Japan as part of its spring lineup.
As of now, the biggest Optimus G Pro leak we’ve seen has come out of Japan, which makes a bit more… → Read More
It’s been a long time coming — plans for a mobile content partnership between NTT Docomo and China’s search giant Baidu were announced a year ago — but today it’s finally happened: the Japanese telco has announced the completion of their $22.5 million (¥1.78 billion) investment in a joint venture in China, Baidu Yi Xin. Docomo becomes a 20 percent shareholder in the new mobile content… → Read More
What happens when you put some of the biggest names in the Japanese wireless industry in the same room to work up a plan to develop some home-grown mobile chipsets? The answer is, apparently, not much.
Just over three months after NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications announced the creation of a mobile joint venture to do just that, DoCoMo has recently… → Read More
NEC did it again: about 11 months after unveiling the world’s slimmest smartphone at that time, the company is ready to release another super-thin Android phone with a set of impressive specs (via Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo). Dubbed MEDIAS ES N-05D [JP], the handset will hit Japanese stores in February or March this year.
NEC rolled out quite a few Medias-branded Android phones… → Read More
Android adoption is growing rapidly in Japan, with local handset manufacturers doing everything they can in order to meet the demands of customers in all segments of the population. One particularly attractive target group seems to be women, given how many Japanese companies say they design Android phones specifically for female users.
Here are three recent examples. → Read More
Do women need special cell phones? Certain companies, such as Deutsche Telekom or Samsung, seem to think so. Now Fujitsu Japan is ready to roll out [JP] not one but two handsets specifically designed “for girls”, a feature phone and an Android model.
The Android phone, the so-called F-03D Girls’, has been developed in cooperation with popular teenage fashion magazine Popteen. → Read More
Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo has announced [JP] it will start offering the Medias PP N-01D on December 9, the latest Android phone in NEC’s Medias smartphone series. And if NEC ever gets its act together regarding its internationalization plans, this pretty cool device might hit the US and other markets soon, too.
NEC is especially proud of the 1,700mmAH battery that’s built into the… → Read More
It’s not the first cell phone that has been designed specifically for women, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting, as far as features and specs are concerned. Fujitsu’s so-called ARROWS Kiss F-03D for the Japanese market runs on Android 2.3, is targeted at women aged between 20 and 30, and comes with “elegant and glimmering jewelry design”.
The area around the “gem-cut” buttons on the… → Read More
Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has developed a real-time Japanese <-> English translation service for mobile phones, the first of its kind. The way it works is that you speak something into the device and wait to hear a voice interpretation of what you just said in another language.
As you can see in the videos embedded below, the service, which uses the cloud for the heavy… → Read More
Truth be told, I wasn’t very impressed with what electronics makers showed at the CEATEC 2011 tech exhibition – especially because a lot of the new products were “leaked” to the Japanese press before the event started.
However, here are a total of five of the coolest innovations Japanese companies showed at CEATEC 2011 in video form, delivered from our friends at Diginfo TV (YouTube channel). → Read More
Singapore-headquartered mobile media and advertising startup Affle has raised over $10 million from D2 COMMUNICATIONS (D2C), Japan’s largest mobile advertising company and a subsidiary of the country’s largest mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo, in joint venture with DENTSU.
D2C joins Microsoft, Itochu, Bennett Coleman & Company and Centurion Private Equity as investors in Affle. → Read More
Qualcomm is one of biggest players (if not the biggest) in the mobile chipset space, and their dominance of the market is forcing other manufacturers to seek alternative strategies. While Qualcomm’s huge presence has helped shape the market, a group of Asian companies are looking to form an alliance that will reduce their reliance on Qualcomm’s products and instead develop and rely on their… → Read More
A big (marketing and distribution) deal for Cellogic, makers of the fine FlyScreen mobile application: they’re teaming up with NTT DoCoMo, a big Japanese carrier.
Under the terms of the partnership agreement, NTT DoCoMo and a local Japanese location-based services company called Brilliant will be pushing FlyScreen onto the Japanese market, bringing it to millions of Android handset users. → Read More
The idea of translating spoken language from cell phone to cell phone isn’t exactly new, but the mobile simultaneous translation system NTT Docomo is currently working on looks really impressive. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier says it uses the “best technologies” for voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis out there for its solution. → Read More
Up until now, when Twitter has struck deals overseas with carriers, it has mainly been for SMS deals so that users can send/receive tweets for free and/or cheap. Today, Twitter has announced a new type of deal with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest carrier: a content deal.
As they’ve announced in Japanese on their blog (with English translation below), “Tweets and other Twitter content will be included… → Read More
We covered NTT Docomo‘s smartphone line-up for this summer here, but Japan’s leading mobile carrier also revealed 11 new feature phones today. And here are all of them listed up. → Read More
Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has announced its summer line-up of cell phones today, and we have squeezed all their nine new smartphones (plus Fujitsu’s Windows 7/Symbian hybrid) into this article for your reading pleasure (click here for a list of all new feature phones). → Read More
Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today announced it will develop with Twitter a set of new mobile services for its domestic customer base of 58 million. Under the deal, Docomo plans to integrate a “touch and follow” app into NFC-equipped feature phones, allowing two users to start following each other just by placing their handsets together. → Read More
It can’t get bigger than this in Asia’s mobile industry, and in fact, it’s a business alliance with the potential to shake things up on a global level. Today, the world’s biggest mobile carrier China Mobile, Japan’s No. 1 player NTT Docomo and Korea’s leading telco KT have announced the establishment of a “broad-based business tie-up”. → Read More
Remember back in 2008 when there was a lot of talk about how the iPhone would flop in Japan? 91 percent of Japanese would not be buying the device, said one survey. By 2009, that talk inevitably turned to how it had already flopped. With some even writing about how the Japanese people “hate” the device. Then something funny happened. That kind of talk abruptly stopped. And for good reason. As it… → Read More
And we have yet another cell phone maker joining the Android bandwagon. Various Japanese media, for example Sankei Digital [JP], are reporting that Fujitsu is currently working on an Android-based smartphone. → Read More
Wikipedia has a pretty useful list of countries by number of mobile phones in use, which shows that Japan (with around 100 million users) is the No. 7 in the world. The market is largely controlled by mobile carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank Mobile but seemed big enough to offer enough room for a number of smaller competitors, too.
Yesterday, however, a company called Willcom (one of said… → Read More
Social music player TuneWiki is on a funding roll. The startup just raised $7 million in Series B funding from Motorola Ventures, Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and Benchmark Israel. Today, TuneWiki is announcing that DOCOMO Capital, the venture arm of Japanese mobile giant NTT DOCOMO, has made an undisclosed investment in the company.
TuneWiki says it will use the… → Read More
The rest of the world is catching on rapidly but overall, Japan is still the world’s most advanced mobile society. That being said, you’d assume that the first 4G (LTE) device to get an official certification from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications must be coming from one of the many mobile companies over here, but it was South Korea’s LG who got the bragging rights [KR] for… → Read More
Japanese company Cerego, the brains behind the social learning platform iKnow!, has raised $3.4 million in a round of funding from NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier. To date, Cerego has raised a total of $23.4 million in funding since its launch in 2000.
Cerego originally launched iKnow as an online service for Japanese people to learn English and then expanded the platform to… → Read More
Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax… → Read More
Saying goodbye to that “special someone” is never an easy thing to do, especially after many years have passed. But, when the time comes, it’s best just to try and move on. Take today’s NTT DoCoMo announcement that it will be shutting down its 2G cellular network by March 31, 2012, for example. By the end of 2008, only 12% of its users were still rocking second-gen mobile… → Read More
Nokia will create its own cellphone service in Japan, piggybacking on NTT Docomo’s infrastructure there. That’s right, it’ll be a VMNO. (Those have done so well…) It’s scheduled to launch in the springtime. Nokia is expected to use the service to market its high-end phones, presumably including its N96. → Read More
Japan’s biggest cell phone carrier NTT Docomo had one of the coolest booths at this year’s CEATEC (which ended last Saturday), showcasing a lot of spectacular new stuff. These are their cell phone concepts, some of which even might make it to the mass market one day. Watch a video of their microprojector cell-phone hybrid here and a see this post for more information on their cell… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
