video recognition

Innovative Mobile Services: What’s hot in Japan?

By Emilie Dewulf on 27 April 2010 in Friday Session | Comments Off

Jap’Presse / InnovAsia Research is a consulting company specialized in High Tech business in Asia, especially in Japan and South Korea. Philippe Le Fessant, managing partner, was the special guest of a Cleverwood Friday Session and introduces innovative mobile services in Japan.

Japan counts around 112 millions of mobile subscribers, of which 97% have 3G dataplan. The key factor for the uses of mobile Internet in Japan is the importance of the unlimited data plans in the market: around 50 millions Japanese subscribers pay for such a plan, and use mobile Internet in their everyday life.

Many differences with the European market explain also the surprising uses of mobile Internet in Japan: history, relationship between carriers and handset makers, importance of unlimited data plan, Japanese way of life.

One of the interesting points of the Japanese market, for European professionals, is the way

marketers use the mobile as a media.

For example, in 2007, the brand Cup Noodle, launched a very important campaign, called “Freedom Project”, proposing mobisodes made by the famous maga-ka Katsuhiro Otomo (movie maker of “Akira”). Major brands, like Coca-Cola and Mc Donald’s, massively invested in mobile marketing in Japan, up to the point they made the mobile phone their 1^st media to reach the young customers. Mc Donald’s is already massively using mobile couponing, in all its archipelago’s shops, and develop customized loyalty program, thanks to the mobile.

About the future trends for mobile business, we can already see some in Japan :

Mobile social networking services (SNS have more traffic on mobile than on PC),
video recognition on mobile (to create a link between TV and mobile),
or Virtual assistant.

In late 2008, NTT DoCoMo has launched its virtual assistant service, called i-Concier. This little character appears on the screen and gives shopping advices to the user, information, couponing, etc. Something impressive is how NTT DoCoMo connected this service to more than 250 brands, retailers, and contents providers. This service is very successful, with almost 4 million subscribers 1 year after the launch. Philippe Le Fessant believes virtual assistant is a major step in the User Interface history, and Europe should try to move quickly to this new kind of mobile user interface.