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Top Stories
1. DoCoMo advances mpayments in Thailand
2. Telstra's CEO gets a lesson in cultural sensitivity
3. DoCoMo launches RFID shop bookmarker
1. DoCoMo advances mpayments in Thailand
DoCoMo continued its expansion and interest in Thailand, with a new deal with Advanced Info Service.
It had previously been rumoured to be talking with other carriers, namely TOT, about taking an equity option, but it has a long standing relationship with AIS, Thailand's largest mobile phone operator.
The joint venture firm, Advanced mPay, will be capitalized at 300 million baht, and will increase its registered capital to THB300 million from THB210 million via an issue of new shares. All 9 million new shares, carrying THB10 par value, will be sold to DoCoMo.
Advanced mPay will operate an electronic card payment system via mobile phone in Thailand, Advanced Info said.
The service enables consumers to use their mobile phones, for instance, to settle shopping transactions, pay utility bills and buy drinks at vending machines
This deal indicates a strong set of relationships that inevitably raise the question of when DoCoMo will be able to convince AIS to sign up as the local i-mode alliance partner.
From the degree of inter-relationships and commercial dealings it would not appear to be too distant, perhaps before the end of 2005?
2. Telstra's CEO gets a lesson in cultural sensitivity
In Australia DoCoMo alliance partner Telstra's new CEO, Sol Trujillo, delivered what some media called his "first, explosive public speech in the 33 days since arriving for work at Telstra" and caught the immediate attention of the Prime Minister of Australia.
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Sol who comes with a reputation of being the ultimate performer in selling himself upwards caught his foot in a beartrap that he set himself when he declared that Telstra could not commercially sustain the Government's political agenda.
Being the former telco monopoly and still 51% owned by the Australian Government Telstra doesn't operate with free market constraints.
Sol learnt this quickly, as reports hit the headlines of Federal Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan being "particularly peeved" and Prime Minister John Howard following up with a direct comment that "we all have to take a reality check on" the balance between regulation i.e. political agenda, and the competitive market.
Sol's preferred scheme is to drag money out of the future sale of the Government's stake and to set up a $2 billion pork barrel fund to be administered independently of Tolstoy.
Senator Coonan said that Sol has to adjust to Australia's approach to its telecommunications environment.
"I think it shows that the new CEO has come out of a different regulatory environment into a very different culture and I'm very keen that he should be aware of the way in which we approach telecommunications in Australia," Senator Coonan said.
Ironically Sol was often lauded and awarded in the US for being a successful Hispanic from a "different culture" apparently to the rest of the US. All that really happened here is that he flew a kite and the Government said "hands off". There's nothing too specifically "cultural" about politicians and their votes - their horizon is only one year longer than Sol's within the Australian political system.
However, having a nice solid new "take or pay" contract Trujillo can afford to dig up the buried elephants, and when they are landed on the surface they can have a pretty awful smell.
So perhaps we're in for more exciting times than we thought over the next 2 years as 3G rolls out and we see how i-mode is positioned in the new Telstra strategy.
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3. DoCoMo launches RFID shop bookmarker
DoCoMo and TEX and the Harajuku district store's assocation Urahara.org announced a new RFID shop coupon and id system using Felica build into the i-mode handsets.
The system, Townpocket, developed by TEX, enables a shopper to brush the handset past an RFID chip and pick up details of the store for a bookmark and also coupons and specials.
The Townpocket application has to be downloaded, and the participation fee for shops is around US$500, and there were 153 stores at launch, with plans to go to 300 stores within 9 months, and also to expand to other shopping districts.
While this is only marginally more convenient than the many barcode and other codings that can be used at present for linking phones and stores, one of DoCoMo's motives are to breed familiarity with Felica and the mobile wallet system, expecially among the youth who frequent Harajuku.
You can see photos at the Google-translated article from CNET Japan.
4. DoCoMo's bursting bank account
Reuters reports that DoCoMo has "set aside" more than $3 billion for investments, "including mergers and acquisitions, its chief financial officer said on Thursday".
The funds are available on top of the 890.7 billion yen in cash and cash equivalents (about $9 billion) that it had as of the end of June, Yoshiaki Ugaki, DoCoMo's chief financial officer said in an interview with Reuters.
Ugaki said usage of the funds was not limited to just mergers and acquisitions.
"Nothing has been decided, but there are a lot of possibilities such as one related to i-mode or international communications," Ugaki said. "An investment in another operator could also be possible."
That kind of money burns a whole in the pocket, and in the face of the increasingly difficult competition at home it will be worth watching DoCoMo to see if it can avoid throwing the money down the drain as it did in its previous direct investments. Besides its almost unparalleled opportunity for advanced R&D it is a much larger challenge to map out and manage growth markets. Investing is the easy bit - getting a return has proven a little more elusive.
In related news DoCoMo gained a net 229,800 subscribers in July, led by growth in demand for its FOMA 3G services, and it had 49.659 million customers at the end of July and its share price lifted for the week. However KDDI's "au" mobile phone service scored the largest net subscription expansion among cellphone service providers in Japan during July for the first time in two months, posting a net increase of 230,500 subscriptions - new subscriptions minus cancellations
5. Macromedia's mobile strategy
Here's an interesting article regarding Flash Lite, Flash Cast and Macromedia plans, in an interview with with Gary Kovacs, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for mobile at Macromedia, on Mobile User Experience. For example:
Following DoCoMo’s example, operators around the world are looking to Flash for several reasons. Firstly, it drives third party content development. It also provides an effective tool for customising the handset interface to provide a consistent experience across a range of devices from different manufacturers. Last but not least, operators can deliver their own information services in Flash.
When Samsung saw the success of Flash in Japan, it approached Macromedia to integrate the technology into some of its handsets. In doing so, Samsung realised that Flash could be an effective tool for handset interfaces too. It created the ‘CEO’ phone, which used rich graphical animations as part of a menu system designed entirely in Flash, and distributed one to the CEO of every major company in South Korea, its home market. Now Samsung is using Flash MMI, Macromedia’s mobile interface technology, for a wide range of its handset products.
You might also want to read Best Practices for Porting Flash Animation to Mobile Phones with Flash Lite via Tom Hume:
"The biggest enemy when creating Flash Lite content is not performance, but running out of memory. I touched on this already in various places throughout this article, and it really is most likely the issue on which you'll spend most of your debugging time."
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