Mobile ticketing users store a ticket on their mobile device for later redemption. These tickets serve as a substitute for a traditional paper based ticket or even an e-ticket that needs to be printed out. When redeeming the mobile ticket, users simply need to show their handset to the ticket checker at the entry point to the venue.

At present, only about 1 in 20 consumers worldwide make use of mobile ticketing facilities, which means that the total number of users accessing these service is about 230 million.

Analysts at Juniper have projected that by 2015 this ratio wil go up to 1 in 8 and the actual number of mobile ticketing users will be about 750 million. It is also expected that the next two years will be crucial for the growth of this market.

Mobile ticketing services are already fairly popular in Japan, Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. In these places, mobile ticketing is widely used to purchase tickets for transport, sporting events and entertainment.

Tickets, once booked, are delivered to the user in a variety of ways such as through SMS, mobile Web, bar codes, near field communication (NFC) and smartphone apps. It is essential for advertisers and vendors who wish to make use of this opportunity to plan their strategy well.

Total Mobile Phone Users (%) Who Use Mobile Ticketing Split by 8 Key Regions 2015

Far East mobile users are expected to continue leading the way in terms of adoption of this technology, even in 2015. Western European users are expected to be the second largest user group adopting mobile ticketing technology.

Howard Wilcox, author of the report says, “Mobile technology is moving the ticket machine into our pockets. Our research demonstrated that mobile ticketing will change the way that many people buy and obtain their regular, every day tickets that are mostly printed at the moment.”

Apparently, the deciding factor in this deal was the fact that Google’s services in the Japanese language were better than those of Microsoft.

The partnership is likely to come into effect next year.

While Yahoo! has a strategic partnership for search with Microsoft in the U.S. and other places, they are under no obligation to do so in Japan. This is because Yahoo! Controls only a 30% stake in Yahoo! Japan, while Softbank controls 40%. Since Softbank is the dominant partner, they are at liberty to select the partner.

At present Yahoo! Japan controls about 57% of the search market in Japan, while Google controls about 385. When these two ‘super powers’ join hands, they would effectively control about 95% of the market, potentially killing all competition.

Microsoft had to fight a similar situation between Google and Yahoo!, in the U.S. in 2008.

They had won that round thanks to the Anti-trust laws. They intend to do the same thing in Japan.

A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google’s deal with Yahoo! in 2008 that the U.S. Dept. of Justice found to be illegal,”

However, it is believed that it may not be very easy for Microsoft to win this battle in Japan, and the deal is eventually likely to go through.

It had been reported about a year ago that billboards that could tell whether the face in front of it was male or female were being developed. This project is now being tested at subway stations in Tokyo.

NEC is developing a facial recognition system that will be inserted into these billboards. A pilot project has been undertaken by 11 railway companies and it will run for a year. They will set up 27 such billboards in total.

The Digital Signage Promotion Project, which is running this project, says that the billboards contain a camera that can determine the approximate age and sex of a person standing in front of it for a minimum of 1 second. The longer the person stands in front of it, the more accurate the data available is. The information is then relayed to an internal computer, which will pick appropriate ads to display to that person.

This system is called the Next Generation Digital Signage Solution. The project aims to collect data about the type of people most likely to stand in front of billboards and then show ads in accordance with the data available.

For instance, young women may be shown ads about cosmetics or designer apparel; whereas elderly women may be shown ads for household and kitchen equipment and men may be shown ads about sporting goods. This project is meant to help marketers and advertisers reach their target audience.

IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign developed an interactive billboard that provided a simple and engaging virtual demonstration of how a smarter retail system can work. The video below shows this “smart” billboard in action:

Color Sensitive Interactive Billboard from IBM Smart Planet

One big problem that the project currently being tested in Japan is definitely bound to face in the West concerns user privacy. Officials of the Digital Signage Promotion Project have said that the images of users will not be stored in the computers.

This innovation could very well be an example of real life being inspired by reel life. The film Minority Report had shown billboards that could similarly recognise people by name and then shout suggestions about which products they should buy!

Yahoo! is the current search leader in Japan. Google Japan started featuring “Hot Keywords” on their homepage last month. This was done with the intention of guiding users to other related sites such as Google Maps, Google News, Gmail and YouTube, which they hoped would improve the user experience and get more users to access the site.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog reported last week that Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a company that specialises in online marketing to sponsor blog posts through a pay-per-post service to inform users about these new features and associated Google products.

Paying bloggers for links is against the policies of Google. Since Google Japan had to pay the online marketing company for the blog posts, they have broken one of their own company’s rules.

Google Japan has not only discontinued the services of Cyberbuzz, but has also issued an apology on the Google Japan blog, The translated post says:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologise to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

The “Hot New Keywords” feature has also been removed since then and Matt Cutts confirmed that Google dropped the page rank of Google Japan from 9 to 5 and it will likely stay that way for a while!

Twicco.jp

Previously, Twitter had used Japan as a test market when they first attempted to display ads among user Tweets. What is surprising is that even though Twitter is an American company with a predominantly English-speaking audience, it chooses Japan for its trial runs.

Svetlana at Profy speculates that this preference for experimenting in Japan may have something to do with the fact that in Japan, Twitter is run as part of a joint venture between Twitter and Digital Garage. It is possible that their partners may wish to try out new things, which Twitter does not wish to use elsewhere. The launch was discovered by Loic Le Meur.

Twicco allows a user to create and follow various groups. Following groups is just like tracking companies or events on Twitter.

While Twicco is a separate site and service by itself at present, it is entirely possible that Twitter may integrate it into the mainstream offering at some stage. Feedback received from Japanese users will likely be used to decide the future of this service, i.e. based on the response received in Japan, Twitter may decide whether or not to introduce this facility worldwide.

Ads from Doubleclick are already integrated into Twicco on the right-hand side of the page, rather than between user tweets. User names still link back to the original user profiles on Twitter.

In fact, according to a post on TechCrunch, a local social network, Mixi.jp, has beaten both of them, and is currently the 6th most popular site in Japan, while MySpace is way behind at number 95 and Facebook does not even figure in the top 100 list.

It is not as if the Japanese are not inclined towards social networks, but it is essential for these sites to adapt to the social and cultural customs of the region.

If these networks think that whatever is appreciated in Western society will be accepted all over the world they are wrong!

In Japan, for instance, far more importance is given to the community as a whole, than to an individual, and security concerns are very important. Facebook for instance, advocates the use of real names and photographs in their profile, which is not a very welcome idea in Japan.

Also Facebook’s translations leave a lot to be desired and most of the third-party apps on Facebook are useless to the Japanese who are not fluent in English. Another major issue could be the absence of blogs on Facebook, which are a big draw in Japan.

Mixi, on the other hand, has been able to meet the demands of the Japanese culture and hence it is doing very well.

MySpace and Facebook opened up to the Japanese market 3-4 years after their respective launches in the U.S. In the meanwhile, Mixi has had plenty of time to established itself and has now turned into a $1 billion company, unhindered by competition from these international giants.

The absence of mobile optimised versions of Facebook and MySpace on Japanese handsets could also have been yet  another cause for their failure, as Japanese consumers use the mobile Web far more than consumers in the US, UK or Europe.

It so happens that Japan has one of the largest online advertising markets in the world, which is incentive enough for these social networks to go out of their way to establish themselves there.

Japan is of course the world’s most advanced country for mobile marketing, as about 80% of its 100 million mobile users, use mobile data services, and Japan accounts for 40% of the world’s mobile data revenue.

According to a report from Seed Planning, the market which was worth about 81 billion yen, last year, is expected to cross the 100 billion yen ($1 billion) mark, by the end of the year, i.e. a 22% growth in a span of just one year: and if this expansion continues in the same manner, it may even cross 250 billion yen by 2011.

This sudden growth spurt in the mobile advertising market, is inclusive of banner ads, affiliate advertising, paid search and mailing ads.

Affiliate advertising in particular, has crossed the 17.9 billion yen mark, which is a rise of 184% over the previous figures. This will be welcome news to the directory industry, which is of the opinion that affiliate advertising on mobiles is a good way to increase their mobile online business.

Though similar ads are available for desktops and mobiles, they may not be equally successful on both the versions. What works for one need not work for the other. For instance it has been shown that email ads have been more successful on mobiles than on PC’s.

Thus it is necessary for an advertiser to be very watchful, in order to decide which form of advertising will give him the best results on each platform.

The idea has been propagated with a view to protect children from the harmful content available on mobile sites, such as cyber crimes, pornography and bullying, to which children would be especially vulnerable.

Council members made an earnest request to parents, schools and all others concerned, to help restict mobile phone usage by young students of elementary and junior high school levels to calls only, as far as possible.

Prime Minister Fukuda agreed with the council’s conclusion that the use of mobiles can lead to various problems. He was reported to also wonder if children really need to possess mobile phones at all. It is estimated that about one-third of children between the ages of 7 and 12 years and 96% of high school students use mobile phones.

Only about 1% of these children have blocks on potentially harmful material, thus exposing them to fraudsters, pedophiles and harmful content. Even protected sites such as the school bulletin boards can be hacked into.

The Government will be considering these proposals carefully, before setting up guidelines in the next few weeks.