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TechMom from Silicon Valley
According to Nikkei Newspaper, NTT DoCoMo's 2470 base stations are still not functional as of 3/15, 10am, down from 2810 site as of 3/14, 5pm. They say if the rolling blackout continues, fuel may run out at some of the sites and they will stop running.
Ibaragi prefecture is suffering the most, with 80% traffic restriction, followed by Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima, with 70% restriction.
Michi
Due to the damages to power plants, including the current-hot-topic Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant -, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) planned rolling blackout in Tohoku/Kanto area. As of 3:00pm, 3/14, mobile carriers are stating the expected effect of the blackout as follow: Source: WirelessWire News, 3/14
Softbank Mobile
au (KDDI)
NTT DoCoMo
Wilcom
UQ Communications
Michi
All the mobile carriers started "Emergency Mobile Bulletin Board" right after the quake on 3/11. Source: WirelessWire News, 3/11
NTT DoCoMo: iMenu top menu, only available to upload from Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata, Fukushima, Ibaragi, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Niigata, Yamanashi, Nagano prefectures. For smartphones, Emergency Bulletin app is available from DoCoMo Market.
au (KDDI): EZ Web top menu, or auone top menu
Softbank Mobile: Yahoo! Keitai or My Softbank, and iPhone Emergency App
E-mobile: Bookmark -> EMnet service
Wilcom: http://dengon.clubh.ne.jp
For access from PC, see the following:
NTT East (Fixed Local) is providing Emergency Bulletin Board Dial 117 and Broadband Bulletin Web117.
Michi
This is the situation on the next day after the quake struck. 3/12 (Sat) around noon, according to my friend Asako Itagaki at WirelessWire News
Source: WirelessWire News, 3/12 noon
NTT DoCoMo
au (KDDI)
Softbank
E-mobile
Wilcom
UQ
Michi
This is an early situation review when the quake struck. Time is all expressed in Japan Standard Time. 3/11(Fri) 2:46pm The first quake occured off the coast of Miyagi prefecture, Northern Japan (Tohoku area). The second big one occured about 30 minutes later off the coast of Ibaragi prefecture (Kanto area).
Unknown number of cell sites were destroyed and mobile traffic was quite congested right after the quake. At Narita Airport near Tokyo, I tried to call my parents in Kanagawa prefecture with my Japanese cell phone and did not go through. I could send out mobile e-mails, but did not get any reply for a few hours.
After 2 hours or so, I started to see many people on cell phone outside of Narita, where everyone in the airport building evacuated. So I tried to call again and got through. After another 1/2 hour, my sister called me to my cell.
According to them, mobile e-mails were taking about 2 hours to be delivered. Family members were exchanging mobile e-mails asking "are you OK?" to each other, and the other side got them after everyone came home.
Still I could not receive any mobile e-mails at all.
I was lucky to be in the Airport, where WiFi was restored in a few hours. I noticed that my Verizon Android phone (I did not use 3G roaming) have WiFi connection at around 7pm. E-mails were still slow but Twitter was working fine, so I started tweeting that I was OK. Twitter, Facebook, SMS via GoogleVoice started to puring in. Airport WiFi was totally fine, it kept working all night.
Michi
via www.nytimes.com
Just read NYT article about Huawei, which was linked from WierelessWire News in Japan.
I have been WELL aware of Huawei's push into the U.S. market, through their huge presence in trade shows and Silicon Valley events for the past year or so. It is another "deja vu" from 90's when Korean vendors tried to enter into the U.S. infrastructure market.
I was at a start-up carrier at that time and LG was making really aggressive offer with a very generous vendor financing. So I am suspecting that Huawei is making a similar offer, basically to "lend money", to get a symbolic first major contract in the U.S.
Korea is basically an U.S. ally and is not considered any political threat to the U.S., and still, LG could not make much inroads into the U.S. telecom infra market back in the 90's, despite their big effort.
I wonder if Chinese, who holds a very different view of the world from the U.S. people, could break through this barrier, after 15 years since Koreans' failure. Of course, the time is different. 15 years ago, there were more vendor choices for carriers, including North-American native such as Lucent and Nortel, but they are gone. The only other choices are European vendors, such as Ericsson, NokiaSiemens and Alcatel-Lucent, who picked up the remains of the NA vendors.
Looking at it from Sprint's point of view, I can understand that they are THAT desperate right now, needing financing for the next generation investment. But again, "deja vu" feeling comes up for me. When they selected WiMax for their 2.6GHz spectrum holdings, I suspect it was not exactly a technical merit decision, but guess there was some monetary distortion going on with the vendors. I mean, they are private company and it is OK to make decisions based on "various considerations", but "distorted" decision could cause a "distorted" result - that is the risk they are running.
At least back in the 90's, I was surprised at the level of "political/national security" influence into the telecom infra world in the U.S., and I really wonder if it was so much changed since then. If so, Sprint may go into another chaos. Hmmm....
Michi
Tokyo, June 17, 2010 — Fujitsu Limited and Toshiba Corporation announced that today they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to merge their mobile phone businesses. According to the MOU, Toshiba will transfer its mobile phone business to a new company to be established October 1, 2010, and Fujitsu will acquire a majority of the shares in the company.
via www.fujitsu.com
They denied the rumor in the past, but as everyone expected, it turned out to be true. Fujitsu and Toshiba are merging their mobile handset business.
Fujitsu was the core member of "NTT family" in the past and is a long-term DoCoMo shop. Toshiba started off from a CDMA/KDDI camp as a new entrant at digitization period. In the past, there have been a loose "carrier shop" relationships in Japan, because DoCoMo had an invisible but "strong" influence to their handset vendors. Now that the Japanese mobile market is at the infliction point, finally such "power structure" seems to be collapsing.
Still, there is a very slim chance that they (Japanese handset vendors, in general) will regain the position in the global market, unfortunately.
I just wish they did this 10 years ago, but let's not speak useless "would have, could have" anymore.
Michi
via online.wsj.com
Generally speaking, I think HP-Palm combination makes a lot of sense - Palm as a part of HP cloud strategy, Palm's rich patent/IP asset and developer community support, and their common DNA as Silicon Valley natives.
I think that the key question is where HP/Palm position its WebOS in the increasing crowded smartphone battlefield.
iPhone has established itself with fashion statement, as well as its ecosystem with iTunes, and it is basically a comsumer electronic device, with "viewing" as the main purpose.
RIM Blackberry is still popular among business people, not only because it has a strong grip in corporate mail server market with Blackberry Enterprise Server, but also its superiority as the "input device". Geeks look down on Blackberry apps, but for layman business users, small number of apps are well integrated into BB's basic functions (mail, address books, calender etc.), much easier to use than iPhone. RIM is way ahead of the game in the subscription model for SME market of anybody else.
Google's Android is going after the mobile advertisement model, so it is rapidly expanding its platform to many handsets. Some may or may not be as cool as iPhone, but it does not matter - as long as the platform is broad, Google can make money.
Microsoft has failed to eat up RIM's market, where they logically has a strength. But their new Phone7 platform does not sound like a match for RIM-type customers. Phone7 emphasize "social network" and "integration with Xbox" - sounds like a teen market. Their new Kin1/2 model is exactly that. Sounds like a strategy confusion for me.
And Palm. Their Pre model was positioned between iPhone and Blackberry, but the focus was not too clear. HP says Palm is a key element for their mobile cloud strategy. Logically, HP's market is the enterprise market, and I don't think they are going for consumer electronics strategy like Apple. So are they going to directly compete with RIM? Or are they going after any "Blue Ocean"?
I am curious.
Michi
So Microsoft is coming up with a sort of a new version of "Sidekick", this time with Verizon. Sharp is producing the stuff.
The device is supposed to target young crowd with SNS and texting zealot.
It caught my eyes for two reasons.
(1) "Sidekick VZ version" is a fine and dandy concept, but then why are they all BLACK? From my everyday life observation of my teenage son, the main drive of this crowd must be "teenage girls". Don't they have different colors? If I were them, I would make PEARL WHITE as the basic color, just like iPhone. As a girl (albeit older age group), I am tired of US phone industry's design sense that totally ignores female users.
(2) Japanese vendors are totally behind in global smartphone race. Japanese domestic market has been dominated by feature phones (non-smartphone) and vendors cannot afford to develop smartphones, particularly for outside of Japan, where they have very little presence. Sharp has been the only major vendor that has declared to do smartphone for international market, and there you have it. They have become "HTC for Microsoft", through their long standing relationship with Danger. It is only logical that they took this route, although I still believe that Windows Phone 7 will not become a factor in the smartphone market, and that Sharp seems to be betting to a losing horse. I am curious how it develops in the near future.
Michi
Report: Palm searching for a smartphone suitor - FierceWireless
The report, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter, said Palm is working with Goldman Sachs and another investment bank, Qatalyst Partners, to find a buyer. According the report, both HTC and Lenovo have expressed interest in the company, and might make a bid.
Read more: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/report-palm-searching-smartphone-suitor/2010-04-12?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz0kuFb4S5J
This has been talked about a lot already, nothing new, but interesting that HTC and Lenovo are mentioned this time. True, it makes sense.
Acquisition of Palm will not only bring about the bunch of engineers and patents, but also the genuine "local developers" along with it, albeit it has shrunk quite a bit lately.
If anyone understands that power and economics of the developer community, particularly HTC would be the one. It is totally natural expansion for them.
So.. would they buy Access as "buy one, get one free" deal??
Michi
