Docomo Coin is a new promotion scheme that lets you earn ‘coins’ when you visit participating i-mode sites and campaigns on your cell phone. These coins are worth 1 yen each and can be saved up and then used to pay your phone bill.

The user registers with the service, creating a ’savings account’, and then when visiting participating sites, coins are automatically added to this account without any further action. The user can then have the equivalent amount of money deducted from their next phone bill.

The service is just a simple reward scheme, however, because it is being run by the network operator – Docomo – the points system can be applied by many different sites and so a whole host of companies can take advantage of the incentive for their marketing.

This is a standardised scheme, with a real, tangible reward and will provide benefit for the network – generating more traffic; benefit for the partner companies – incentive to visit their content and fill in questionnaires; and benefit for the user by giving them money off their cell phone bill.

At the same time, this is not going to wipe out the more traditional promotions, which tend to offer more interesting gifts, and it won’t put off more innovative campaigns which, by there nature, assuming they are successful, entice the user in more interesting and novel ways.

If you need to keep a track of your loved ones, your children, or even I suppose, your spouse, you can now do that with a well established service from EZweb.

The EZnavi service, as mentioned before with the in-car navigation system, comes in a new flavor, this one designed to send out a beacon with your location. Designed for use by worried parents, the system allows the child to broadcast their current position and then displays it on a map on the parent’s cell phone.

This is a perfect usage of a technology that is so popular with children and allows for unobtrusive monitoring of the child’s well being much more discreet than a phone call in front of friends.

ROKR update:

So it seems the first critisms of this new handset are now out into the wild, probably even before anyone has had a real chance to try the phone out in real life.

One of the biggest critisms of the ROKR cell phone concern the DRM ( digital rights management ) system it employs. The DRM is supposed to stop you from playing copywriten tracks that you haven’t paid for or don’t have permission to listen to for free.

So there is a bit of a fuss being kicked up about why the DRM on the ROKR will limit the amount of tracks you can download to the phone to 100, even if you don’t exceed the 512MB storage capacity of the handset.

This does seem very strange, and would be annoying to someone like me who has well over a 100 ‘favorite’ tracks at the moment, even if there is enough space for me to store more music, the DRM software will not allow me to.

One does have to ask ‘why?’.

Today’s breaking news does not come from Japan but instead from the United States, where Motorola have just announced the launch of their new phone which integrates the iTunes service from Apple.

This means that users on the Cingular network in the US will be able to download and listen to music directly on their cell phone.

The catch it seems is that you still need to link your phone up to your Mac or PC to transfer your tunes, you can’t download them directly over the air to the phone itself. But this is probably just a small drawback and has not got in the way, so far, of the extremely successful iPod series, which also requires you to hook up to your computer.

One thing that does amuse me though is the name : ROKR, which in my mind summons up an image of Avril Lavigne chatting to her boyfriend on her Razr phone.

Here is a direct link to the website

Continuing on the theme from the last article about location based services in Japan, I came across a really nice looking service from AU today which allows you to navigate, sat-nav style, on your phone, whilst driving your car.

The service runs on your cell phone and takes your position using the GPS chip in your handset and gives on screen directions and maps to help you navigate yourself around whilst driving.

Well, actually the service is not meant to be used by the driver but by a passenger; the Japanese quite rightly, as in Europe, do not allow you to drive whilst using your mobile.

The system is available as a one off, free, download and costs a monthly fee of 315 yen ( $2.80 )for heavy users and 157 yen ( $1.4 ) for light users ( excluding packet charges ).

It is really easy to use, you just enter in your desired destination and either follow the on-screen map or the directions presented to you, very similar to the in-car navigation systems. The phone does well with its small screen, but really it is not something you can use by yourself - you would definitely need someone riding in the passenger seat shouting instructions.

This image shown above is typical of the types of local search systems available at the moment, on both the 2G / 2.5G and 3G networks in Japan.

The level of detail has been enough to guide the user to the store or attraction of their desire so far, but now things are taking a massive leap now that the bandwidth of 3G is really being taken advantage of.

Check these images:

They show what is now available from your cell phone - real, street level satellite photographs of your surrounding area. Its amazing, this technology has just pounced onto the online world, with Google maps bringing the technology to the mainstream attention a whole host of smaller players are now investing in the feeds available and producing applications for the mobile world.

The services differ in the way they can pinpoint your location, from the simple cell triangulation that works with any phone, up to full GPS location depending on the capabilities of the handset. Surprisingly it was the 2.5G cell phones, the CDMA technology phones, which have the most handsets with GPS chipsets, the 3G phones are only now starting to arrive with the necessary chips.

So from now, with the high bandwidth from 3G paired with the accuracy of GPS positioning and the ready availability of satellite imagery, we are really going to see some action in the market. And with companies like Google and Yahoo rolling out their location based services the established players, like ‘goo navi’ , are going to have to fight hard to hold onto their market share.