Mobscope

The Record Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) has released its quarterly figures for music sales in Japan, including statistics on mobile music sales by members.

The figures show that the mobile music market is continuing to grow, with sales of 12.4 billion yen (136% sales from the same quarter last year) on 86 million individual downloads.

Breaking the figures down further, it becomes clear that most of the growth has been in fulltrack downloads, with sales of 4.7 billion yen (201% of sales in the same quarter last year).

The growth in fulltrack downloads isn’t surprising as operators (in particular au) have been actively pushing their new fulltrack download services and there have been a slew of new music phones leaving the handset factories.

The Pacific Epoch has started an editorial section where they will be talking about the next killer app. Although the current report will not focus on mobile gaming, I thought I’d point out the section for future reference because mobile gaming will likely be a topic.
“Content is king. In China’s wireless value added service industry, content is commoditized. Whether in mobile games, color ring back tones, or SMS and MMS subscriptions, no commercially profitable mobile content in China is unique. Mobile content providers have tried to alleviate the problem by brand licensing, but Mickey Mouse will only take mobile Mahjong so far, especially when facing dozens of sexy bikini Mahjong games.”
Each update in Pacific Epoch’s Wireless Report will concentrate on one specific potential “killer app”, using that sub-industry as a case study to better show the effects of the recent developments in the wider industry. A purchase of the report will include all quarterly updates.The report can be found here.

AMEinfo.com has a great article about eGames, a two-day gaming conference that will focus on mobile and serious gaming.
The article focuses on the reasons for having a conference and discusses the mobile gaming industry as a whole.
‘We’re looking at mobile gaming as revenues from this sector are expected to grow from US$3bn in 2006 to US$10bn by 2009, this increase is being driven by continued growth in subscriber numbers, an increase in roll-out of 3G services, falling game prices and a new generation of made for mobile games,’ said Mohammed Al Maskari, Director General, KOM and organizer of eGames.

‘Mobile games have come of age. They’re no longer the poor relations of console and PC games. They are a different family of entertainment products with their own set of characteristics,’ continued Al Maskari.

‘If we look further down the line, I see continued growth of mobile subscribers in Oman and across the Gulf, and given the global mobile gaming growth projections the revenue streams for the region’s telco providers and mobile game developers will soar,’ he added.

In addition to the conference, KOM is also organizing a one-day gaming workshop in partnership with MECIT. The workshop is aimed at college students and will be run by staff from the Faculty of Art and Design at De Montfort University in the UK. According to Al Maskari the workshop is intended to promote the games industry as a career option to students.

“When we go to colleges, we find it’s not something students have thought about doing,” said Ibtisam Al Faruji, KOM’s Head of Marketing. “We want to encourage students with an interest in drawing, animation and story writing that the gaming industry is something they could get into. In fact, we’re very keen to attract gaming start-ups to set-up in the Knowledge Mine business incubator program,” she said.

On the question of financing a gaming start-up, Al Maskari said, “For people with truly inventive, credible investments, approaching angel investors, venture capitalists and similar routes of funding isn’t as hard as the impression people have of it. If you are credible and have done the required thinking, pretty much anyone will talk to you.”

Back in June we all we informed of the merger between Nokia and Siemens “to combine Nokia’s Networks business group and Siemens’ carrier-related operations for fixed and mobile networks to form a new company called Nokia Siemens Networks.”  Yesterday, the European Commission Unconditionally gave it’s clearance to bless this merger.CEO designate of Nokia Siemens Networks, Simon Beresford-Wylie, welcomed the decision, saying it was an important step towards full regulatory approval and good news for customers. “We believe this decision by the European Commission is a key milestone in obtaining all the relevant approvals for the transaction. While there are notifications still pending in some countries, based on this decision we are optimistic that the merger can be closed within the timetable anticipated by both parties.”

This merger has cooperate synergies written all over it that we all hope can be passed down to Joe Gadget Buyer. Let’s all hope it’s not sucked up in Cooperate severance packages or the like.

Today DoCoMo announced that its DCMX credit card service has gained its millionth subscriber.

DCMX is available both in mobile RFID and more traditional plastic card varieties (although the plastic card contains an RFID chip), but the press release didn’t specify how the million subscribers break up.

DoCoMo launched DCMX at the end of April this year, so the company has managed to sign up the million subscribers in just 6 and a half months. The romance between Japanese operators and financial institution looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.

There is a great article from ZDNet Asia regarding the mobile games industry. The article deals with mobile games finding niche markets as well as it talks about Flash Lite game development.The US$3.5 billion mobile games sector is “moving to different spheres”, Stefan Rust, chairman of Mobile Entertainment Forum Asia and head of Web services at Sun Microsystems, told ZDNet Asia in an interview, during the Mobile Entertainment Market (MeM) Asia 2006 held early this month.

According to Rust, this market is expanding into niche games segments that include “casual”, “hardcore”, 3D, role-playing and network-connected games.

These are just some of the niche markets that mobile games have been carving out for themselves. Once they find these niche markets, it is only a matter of time until Flash Lite takes these games, and makes them a million times better.

According to Brongiel, Flash Lite has been adopted by the top six handset makers worldwide including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and BenQ, which have committed to putting Flash into half a billion phones over the next few years.

Read all this and more here.

Yesterday, Japanese mobile site Mobagetown signed up is 2 millionth member. The name Mobagetown is a fusion of “Mobile Game Town” and the site is a mobile-only community game site, similar to Korea’s PC based Hangame site which is the largest online game community in the world, with 25 million subscribers in Korea and 17 million in Japan. Like Hangame, the site is a blend of casual games and social networking –multiplayer and singleplayer games coupled with chat, blogs and avatars.

Mobagetown launched in February this year and so has managed to grow to 2 million members in just 9 months. To put that in perspective, it took Mixi (the most popular PC based SNS in Japan) 1 year, 9 months and 3 weeks to reach 2 million members!

Mobagetown plans to increase its functionality and introduce music, video and search features to the site in the coming months. Membership to Mobagetown is free.

Last night, Nokia premiered musician Rob Dickinson’s new video, “Oceans;” which is the first music video created solely on a Nokia Nseries multimedia computer — the first music video ever done solely on a device of its class.Directed by Mike Hodgkinson, “Oceans” is the second single off Rob Dickinson’s debut solo album, entitled Fresh Wine for the Horses.  The “Oceans” music video was shot by Hodgkinson on the Nokia N93, a 3.2 megapixel cameraphone with DVD quality video and Carl Zeiss optics.

“The great thing about the Nokia N93 cameraphone is that we were able to go anywhere with it.  We didn’t have to lug a camera crew around thanks to the luxury of such a compact and versatile device,” said Mike Hodgkinson, director of ‘Oceans’.  “We were able to get some very creative shots with it, even underwater and we also created an aerial shot with a bunch of helium balloons — we really pushed the Nokia N93 to its limits, and it responded fantastically.”

“It’s a testament to the skill and inventiveness of Mike Hodgkinson, and the sheer quality of the Nokia N93 that the video has come out so brilliantly. I think the fact that most people are amazed when they are told that it was all shot on a cellphone says it all,” commented Rob Dickinson.  “That something so small and portable can produce such stunning results gives hope to independent artists everywhere, and credit to Nokia for encouraging this project from the start.”

“Nokia is about connecting people with their passions and it’s truly impressive to see how artists like Mike and Rob can bring their creative visions to life, particularly knowing it was done with an N93,” said Andrew Elliott, Director of Multimedia Experiences, Nokia America.  “We encourage people, from professional to hobbyist, to explore the full capacity of the Nokia Nseries devices to express themselves.”

To view the new ‘Oceans’ music video as well as the creative ‘Making of Oceans’ video by Mike Hodgkinson, please visit Nseries Studio.

by Om Malik [GigaOM.com]

Brand name cellphone makers are finally beginning to realize that if they need to survive falling cell phone prices and declining margins, they need to start focusing on software and services. Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, all made moves last week, taking further steps in this direction.

Motorola bought Good Technology, a Silicon Valley based company that is a RIM competitor, and had raised $200 million or so in venture capital. Nokia is rumored to have bought Ryze, a social networking start-up, and Sony Ericsson snapped up UIQ, the Symbian derivative OS maker.

These moves come in the wake of news that Vodafone was going to standardize on three platforms – Linux, Symbian and Microsoft. Any handset maker who wants to sell through their channel in the future will have to serve up the most interesting package of applications on their handset. Which means software, a business where handset makers are not particularly good at. Hence the buying frenzy.

We had written about this shift from hardware to user interface and software nearly a year ago, after talks with handset makers. But we all know that the mobile business is not quick to change gears. Nokia in particular has been aware of this shift, and has been making moves to better position itself. It has bought Loudeye, Intellisync, and Gate5 – all to cram their phones with additional features.

Vodafone and other carriers are increasingly selling white label phones, with their own branding. Motorola, Nokia and others will have to fight for consumers attention if they want to sell their handsets, especially the more expensive ones. I bet they will start acquiring some of the cooler app makers next. Shozu comes to mind!

With Nokia holding a strong foot in S60, SonyEricsson decided it’s time for them to secure a bit of the Symbian market themselves. Being the biggest distributors of UIQ based handsets, they now announced to acquire the UIQ branch from Symbian (UIQ Technology AB). SonyEricsson will make the UIQ department a separate subsidary in the company. This probably to avoid support from companies like Motorola who also have a range of UIQ devices on the market. The current management team will also remain in place to secure proper functioning under the SonyEricsson flag.