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Playing to winBy Tony Chan, QUALCOMMStrong uptake of games and GPS position location services shows that Japan’s KDDI is mastering the art of mobile content delivery. Many in the mobile world attribute the phenomenal success of the wireless Internet in Japan to the country’s affinity for gadgets and the games citizens play. From the very beginning of wireless data services in Japan, games have been featured prominently in the service offerings of all three mobile operators. Even with limited network bandwidth and monotone handsets, Japan’s operators have always found a way to draw players to their networks. Today, all three Japanese mobile operators are offering games that feature high quality graphics, realistic sound, and multimedia action on handsets with high-resolution color displays and cutting edge synthetic audio chips. According to market researchers, Frost and Sullivan, the mobile gaming market in Japan will reach $9.4 billion a year by 2008, from about $437 million in 2001. The next stage Games, above all other applications, have proven themselves to be the most popular content on KDDI’s EZweb offering. “Most of the 90 applications provided at the moment are game applications,” says Makoto Takahashi, KDDI’s vice president and general manager of the content division and content business planning department. The top five mobile applications on EZweb are Tetris Blue from G-mode, Space Invader by Taito, Xevious developed by Namco, Super Standard Golf from NEC and Cho Search from Melody Park. Of the five, the top four are games, while Cho Search is a search engine for the operator’s popular CD-quality music download service. Exploiting a combination of high speed data transmissions supported by the operator’s 3G CDMA2000 network and the technical breakthroughs provided by BREW and gpsOne, KDDI has built a successful wireless data service that combines usability with a rich feature set that includes the world’s first ever navigation service for handsets. Adding location-based information has been a key component of the carrier’s strategy. Leveraging the built-in gpsOne position location capability of CDMA chips, KDDI was the first operator to offer location-based picture messaging. With this application, users can take a photograph, for example of a shop or restaurant, attach a map indicating exactly where it is, and then forward it to a friend or partner. With position location, game developers are now able to take advantage of real world information, such as the location of the game player, to add a whole new dimension to their creations. Imagine a game with monsters that are specific to the user’s location. Or puzzles that can be solved only by referring to nearby landmarks! Taking the lead Essentially, BREW’s architecture of allowing applications to be run at the native code level of the hardware allows game developers to fully exploit the capabilities of the handset’s microprocessor. The additional performance improvements of BREW are also a key enabler for advanced services such as handset navigation, which require fast rendering of maps. In addition to booting up and running applications faster, BREW also takes advantage of CDMA’s innate evolution to high-speed services. While its rivals are struggling to come up with attractive and affordable handsets for their WCDMA-based 3G service platforms, KDDI has been able to migrate more than 70% of their 2G CDMA subscribers to 3G by offering feature-rich handsets that are essentially the same in size and cost. In a little more than a year, KDDI’s has signed up more than 10 million 3G users, or more than ten times the number of 3G users on the networks of its rivals, NTT DoCoMo and J-Phone. “We have the environment that allows the user to use 3G services naturally. We believe that we have the advantage to provide the advanced services as part of a natural evolution of the technology,” says Takahashi. Going places This enables mobile operators such as KDDI to offer applications developed overseas. According to Takahashi, up to 20% of the BREW applications offered by KDDI originate from overseas developers and are localized for their market. The worldwide adoption of BREW also allows the developers in Japan, who are looking to expand their business, to offer their applications to not only KDDI, but to other 23 BREW carriers overseas. “In addition to the distribution of high-quality applications from overseas, we also want to distribute the applications developed in Japan to other countries,” Takahashi said. “In particular, we believe that mutual exchange [of BREW applications] will accelerate in East Asia since the culture is very much alike.”
![]() Downloading in rhythm EZ Chaku Uta leverages the operator’s video download platform to deliver CD-quality music in the form of MP3s to handsets. The music can then be set as a ringtone, the sound of an alarm clock or simply played back for enjoyment. KDDI has also added digital rights management (DRM) capabilities to Chaku Uta, which protects the intellectual property rights of the artists. KDDI currently has some 13.7 million subscribers to its EZweb wireless data service. Users of KDDI’s CDMA2000, gpsOne & BREW-enabled 3G service are spending an average of 2,170 yen (US$20.60) a month on data services, or 25% of total ARPU. Fact or Fiction Is BREW really an open environment? BREW specifications are public. Those specifications include officially approved standards as well as privately designed architectures whose specifications are made public by the designers. That’s a pretty good definition of “open”. So, too, is the ability for anyone to design add-on products, which is true for BREW, too. In addition:
Publishers and developers from around the world can develop for and realize success with BREW. Operators in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and the U.S. have deployed commercial BREW products and services and developers everywhere are taking advantage of the openness of BREW to provide content to them all. BREW helps facilitate the import and export of applications across regions around the world via the BREW Global Publisher (BGP) program. Even publishers and developers in Europe, India and Canada have joined the global community, after recognizing that BREW is the way to go to make the most amount of money. Is BREW only for QUALCOMM CDMA chipsets and technology? Is BREW open to Java developers?
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