Motoko’s weblog

Yes, it’s true. I’m not joking here. According to the survey I just saw, more than 40% of people participated in the survey (16000 people) bring a cell phone to a bath when they soak in the tub. (In Japan, people soak in tub pretty much every day.)

Many of them said that they e-mail/text in a tub, and also listen to the music with cell phone. Though not many said that they browse web sites at this time, I’m sure it will catch up especially since many of them are already checking e-mails. All they need is to receive some e-mails from friends about some interesting sites. They may soon searching a product they just saw on TV commercials before they came to take a bath. It’s a known fact that people are most likely to be on Internet after 10pm at home in Japan, but this mobile Internet trend is already changing that data.

Anyway, being water resistant got to be one of the must-have features of cell phone in Japan.

DeNA owns Japan’s most popular mobile portal site, “Mobaga Town”, and their stock is falling rapidly for the past several weeks.

Late last year, Japanese government put out a statement requesting all the mobile service providers to use a filtering system to stop children under 18 to access certain sites*. And, in early December, Japanese Telecommunications Carriers Association and Continue Reading »

One of Japan’s largest mobile portal sites, “mobile@nifty”, opened its shopping search services. The users can search products from 10,000 shops participating the service.

More and more people are accessing Internet from their cell phones. In June 2006, research by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication showed that there were more mobile Internet users (approx. 69.23mil) than PC Internet users Continue Reading »