By YURI KAGEYAMA – 8 hours ago
TOKYO (AP) — Japan will start an aggressive push to market abroad its mobile technology, especially the nation's popular "wallet phone," a government official said Tuesday.
Although Japan boasts some of the most sophisticated cell phones in the world, delivering high-speed Internet connections, digital TV broadcasts and video downloads, the nation has failed to make its handsets, wireless technology and mobile services hits outside of Japan.
The latest initiative spearheaded by the government with an industry group of Japanese carriers and manufacturers is an effort to help Japan catch up in wooing global users, said Masayuki Ito, official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
Among the wireless innovations Japan hopes to peddle is the wallet phone. The technology relies on a tiny computer chip called FeliCa, embedded in each cell phone, which communicates with a reader-device at stores, train stations and vending machines for cashless payments.
FeliCa was developed by Japanese electronics and entertainment company Sony Corp. Such technology is more common in smart cards, popular in Singapore and parts of Europe. But Japan hopes to market the technology abroad for cell phones.
In Japan, wallet phones have been available since 2004, introduced by top mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo. Most recent handset models here have the wallet function.
Older Japanese technology had compatibility problems with other global standards, but new third-generation technology allows new products to be used outside the country, and can be more easily adapted to overseas products.
Japan leads the rest of the world in 3G cell phone proliferation, with nearly 104 million 3G handsets in use, or about 90 percent of cell phones being used in Japan.
Japan also hopes to promote overseas other kinds of wireless technology, including 3G mobile phones with GSM, or Global System for Mobile communications, which allows the same phone to be used in most countries.
Ito acknowledged that wireless technology must adapt to differing social needs around the world. Wallet phones have been hits in Japan because of the omnipresent convenience stores and vending machines, as well as the relative lack of credit card use here. But conditions in other nations may differ.
"Some critics say Japanese mobile technology tends to be quirky like the Galapagos Islands," he said, referring to the isolated Pacific islands reputed to have averted evolutionary changes in a reference of the incompatibility of older Japanese cell phones and their quirky services.
"But Asian nations such as Taiwan and South Korea have for years expressed great interest in Japanese cell phones," he added.
Other technology Japan hopes to promote abroad are more futuristic such as fourth-generation wireless, Ito said.
Details and budget plans for the government effort are being outlined in the next few months, but a proposal was approved at a ministry meeting last month.
The ministry is planning international missions and seminars to spread the word about Japan's technology, he said.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/japan_wants_to_sell_you_a_wallet_phone
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- Japan, Inc. (a government-led group of Japanese wireless carriers and handset makers) announced plans to hawk its "wallet phone" technology worldwide. The guts of this technology is the FeliCa chip, which enables contactless payment. I'm for it, but I'd rather not have to buy a Japanese phone.
I love the idea of a "wallet phone." In an age of cell phones, where everyone is walking around with a battery-operated, wirelessly connected computer, why are we still carrying around these lame slices of plastic whose sold function is to hold a thin magnetic strip full of data?
I've written about, and advocated, the wallet-phone concept before. But Japan's initiative is all about giving everyone a reason to buy cell phones made by Japanese companies. Most of us, however, would rather use phones from companies based in Canada, Cupertino, Korea, the U.S. or Finland.
But Japan's push reminds me that in the United States, companies are (as always) way behind the rest of the world in various things you can do with a cell phone.
I wrote about wallet phones back in April of 2007, and back then I reported that Citigroup, Obopay, PayPal, VeriSign, Cellular South, Kyocera, Discover, Ecrio, Nokia, MasterCard, Motorola, CellTrust, Vivotech and others were testing, and poised to unveil game-changing products and services that would enable us all to ditch our credit cards and simply wave our cell phones over readers to pay for things.
Where did all those initiatives go? Where's my cell phone wallet?
Japan has been very successful at cell phone payments, and they serve as a great model for how to accomplish it. But as a consumer, I'd hate to be faced with the choice between buying the phone of my choice on the one hand, and a Japanese phone that does contactless payments on the other. Why can't U.S. carriers and financial institutions get their acts together and make cell phone wallets a reality?
The biggest problem, as always, is multiple competing standards and an industry that is more interested in carving out their own proprietary solutions than working together to realize a new technology that will -- if done right -- benefit everybody.
Japan wants to sell you a wallet phone. That means yet another incompatible set of standards and technologies are going to be tossed into the mix.
Hopefully Japan's initiative will focus minds on the need for making long-overdue wallet phones a reality at last.
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