Nokia has announced that they plan to launch an MVNO with Docomo using their Vertu brand in Japan.

A quick look at this brings up many more questions than answers. Vodafone failed spectacularly in Japan just a few years ago, and without careful understanding of the Japan market, Vertu/Nokia will fail as well. Masayoshi Son was the major benefactor of the failed Vodafone Japan effort.

I think Vertu in Japan needs to understand why these efforts failed in Japan:

- Toyota's Lexus brand
- Sony's Qualia brand

Lexus did well in the US because the US Toyota dealership experience was so horrendous for customers that they were happy to pay more for a much better dealer experience AND the products had a premium that was not as high as the German competition but was as good as they expected of a Japanese manufacturer. Affordable luxury. In Japan, the dealer experience is much more uniform so that is not a competitive edge, and for Japanese car buyers, Lexus is a domestic brand, it does not have the cachet of a foreign brand like BMW or Audi. We all know that the Lexus RX and the Toyota Harrier are the same vehicle, the GS is a gussied up Toyota Crown, the IS is a gussied up Toyota Altezza, etc.

Sony's Qualia effort was doomed from the start, even if the idea may have been a good one. The products were roundly derided as being poorer feature-sets for the outrageous prices that were being demanded.

Unless Vertu has a whole new line of phones designed just for the Japanese market, they'll fail via product, as Vodafone did. And even if Vertu has a whole new line of phones for Japan, it's incredibly poor timing to launch a premium-anything in Japan. Maybe if the target market is the top 10,000 richest people in Japan, but how valuable is that market really?

More competition in Japan's mobile market is very welcome, but I don't see clearly Nokia's strategy wrt a Vertu-based MVNO in Japan. If anyone can convince me otherwise, I'm all ears.

UPDATE: on my way home yesterday I was wondering how Disney Japan is doing with their MVNO with Softbank but since the target demographic is so different from what Vertu wants to do, I don't think there are many lessons to be learned.

Only a few weeks ago, I showcased a number of alternative home page interfaces Google is using in East Asia. Today I saw a new UI for Simplified Chinese at one of the Google.cn urls that previously had a different design.

The previous design is here.

You can see the whole set of Google's East Asian home pages at my Flickr account.

But almost five years into its expansion into Europe - where it has a headquarters in Dublin, large facilities in Zurich and London and smaller centers in Denmark, Russia and Poland, among other countries - Google is beginning to bump up against a web of privacy laws that threaten its growth and the positive image it has cultivated as a company dedicated to doing good - its unofficial motto.

In Switzerland, data protection officials are quietly pressing Google to scrap plans to introduce Street View, a mapping service that provides a vivid, 360-degree, ground-level photographic panorama from any address. Swiss privacy law prohibits the unauthorized use of personal images or property.

In Germany, where Street View is also not available, the simple process of taking photographs for the service violates privacy laws.

Once greeted warmly, Google wears out welcome

You don't say?

Well it isn't only in Germany and Switzerland where Street View is unwelcome. Chris Salzberg and Global Voices have months of coverage of Japanese dissent concerning Street View in Japan.

Japan and Google Street View 2008

CS Monitor on $1 trillion in Japanese financial reserves and why they may not be used to bailout the system this time. I think that Japan ought to be less conservative than the current stance but being the 2nd largest open wallet when it's not clear how stable Japan is itself is not the right stance either.

Tokyo - Can Japan, the world's second largest economy, save the global financial system?

Don't count on it.

As world leaders prepare to meet in Washington Saturday to seek a way out of the financial crisis, some are casting covetous eyes in the direction of Japan's $1 trillion worth of foreign reserves as a source of salvation for troubled nations and banks.

In Tokyo, too, a group of parliamentarians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are pressing the government to spend some of its reserves - the second largest in the world - to win international prestige and diplomatic influence.

They are likely to be disappointed. The Japanese authorities say that while they are willing to lend some money to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), they would be happier offering advice born of their own financial crisis a decade ago than a lot of cold cash to today's victims.

And though Japan's financial system is weathering the crisis better than many other rich countries, a property slump and falling exports are likely to throw the economy - already heavily burdened by debt - into a recession, denting Tokyo's ability to lead the world out of the current turmoil.

Japan's $1 trillion to the rescue?

Everyone is referencing this excellent article on the situation in Detroit. The key difference is Chapter 7 vs. Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

One reason for the casual support for letting GM fail is the assumption that bankruptcy would be no big deal: As USA Today editorialized recently, "Bankruptcy need not mean that the company disappears." But, while it's worked out that way for the airlines, among others, it's unlikely a GM business failure would play out in the same fashion. In order to seek so-called Chapter 11 status, a distressed company must find some way to operate while the bankruptcy court keeps creditors at bay. But GM can't build cars without parts, and it can't get parts without credit. Chapter 11 companies typically get that sort of credit from something called Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) loans. But the same Wall Street meltdown that has dragged down the economy and GM sales has also dried up the DIP money GM would need to operate.

That's why many analysts and scholars believe GM would likely end up in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would entail total liquidation. The company would close its doors, immediately throwing more than 100,000 people out of work. And, according to experts, the damage would spread quickly. Automobile parts suppliers in the United States rely disproportionately on GM's business to stay afloat. If GM shut down, many if not all of the suppliers would soon follow. Without parts, Chrysler, Ford, and eventually foreign-owned factories in the United States would have to cease operations. From Toledo to Tuscaloosa, the nation's assembly lines could go silent, sending a chill through their local economies as the idled workers stopped spending money.

The New Republic - Panic in Detroit

Always nice to wake up to new news of a recession on Monday morning.

Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Japan's economy, the world's second largest, unexpectedly shrank in the third quarter, entering the first recession since 2001 as companies cut spending.

Gross domestic product fell an annualized 0.4 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30, the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. Economists predicted the economy would grow 0.1 percent after contracting a revised 3.7 percent in the previous period.

The slowdown may deepen as the global financial crisis hurts exports, prompting companies from Toyota Motor Corp. to Canon Inc. to slash profit forecasts and cut investments. Japan has the lowest interest rates among the 20 biggest economies and public debt that exceeds 180 percent of GDP, limiting the government's ability to stimulate growth.

Japan's Economy Shrinks 0.4%, Confirming Recession

Fleep.com now has 19 of his most recent deep house mixes on iTunes.  With album art too!

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=294197024

I just had dinner with Kevin when he was in Tokyo a few weeks ago. I'm very glad to see Kevin in this new position.

Two academics -- Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach -- will lead the Obama FCC transition team with the responsibility of advising the incoming administration on policy, budget and personnel matters, the Obama-Biden office announced today.

Crawford is a professor of law at the University of Michigan, teaching communications law and Internet law. She was a partner with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) until the end of 2002, when she left to become a legal academic. Crawford recently ended her term as a member of the board of directors of ICANN.

Werbach is an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference. His research explores the legal and business dynamics of information and communications technologies. During the Clinton administration, he served as counsel for new technology policy at the FCC.

Obama Names FCC Transition Team

While I hope that the global financial system's almost-total-collapse in October has taught us lessons, I think human nature is such that we will make similar mistakes in the future once this time period is in our hazy memory. I had no idea that 'Liar's Poker' was 20 years old.

I thought I was writing a period piece [Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker"] about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

The End of Wall Street's Boom

2009 Nikon Predictions

Worth perusing if you are drooling over expensive DSLRS...and something of a misnomer as Thom opines on Canon and Sony and others too.