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Infinita member saves $16,000 on DoCoMo bill in one month
Looking at Chikara-san’s DoCoMo bill this morning made all our jaws drop in perfect synch. It said: “By using the pakehoudai option [a JPY 3,900 service plan option for unlimited usage of i-mode data...
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Feeling a bit nutty today, are we?
I wonder how well-received this new flavour (note British spelling) from Camel would be in the UK…”nutty mental, mate!”:
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Nikkei: 40 million wallet phones in Japan by spring 2008 (and what it means)
According to an 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...
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Excellent product of the week: the spoon wrench
I came across an extremely useful product yesterday which comes in very handy when having coffee or dessert while fixing the car, mounting a RAID system or assembling IKEA furniture (which, naturally,...
View ArticleWhich celebrity do you look like?: 15 million Japanese go crazy about mobile...
Even in Japan, mobile services that they become an instant hit with almost no promotion are rare. But some are so simple and so clever that they do. Just one month ago, content provider J-Magic,...
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New competitors for mobagetown boast advanced features
Mobile free games/avatars/SNS smash hit site mobagetown is still going strong: In June 2007 mobagetown had 6.03 million users and generated almost 10.8 billion page impressions a month, contributing...
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Send us a picture and we’ll tell you what’s in your head...
I wrote 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...
View ArticleA royal mess: Content filtering on Japan’s mobile internet
Rarely a day goes by at Infinita in the past few weeks without all sorts of investors, analysts and industry experts calling in asking for help figuring out just what on Earth is going on with the...
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Disney Mobile in Japan: Why it is not just the second time around
Disney Japan announced details of the upcoming March 1 launch of their so-called MVNO Disney Mobile on SoftBank Mobile’s network. According to the official company line, they are “extremely confident”...
View ArticleDoCoMo: Current filtering system does not meet user needs
In a 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 &...
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Find a clean toilet now! (and other ways out of your predicament)
Every now and then you come across a mobile application that actually solves a pressing human need. SUGUSOCO (“right there” in Japanese) solves several at once. Let me give you a worst case scenario:...
View Article3G iPhone to launch on Softbank Mobile in Japan
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...
View ArticleWeather-dependent mobile navigation feature saves countless designer shoes...
If you look at the navigation systems in Japan, whether in cars or on mobile phones, it’s immediately obvious the rest of the world still has a long way to go to get to the level of sophistication...
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