To answer about the name of the company and give a couple of additional
details:
The company doing the licensing of technology is called Felica Networks.
Its shareholders are Sony (57%), DoCoMo (57%) and JR East (5%).
Edy is an application running on the Felica technology, just like Suica.
Edy is managed by the Bitwallet consortium (Sony 34.55%, NTT DoCoMo 15.88%,
and about 40 others among which banks, KDDI, Toyota, karaoke, video
games companies)
Suica is owned by JR East, and has been extended partly to other JR
regional companies.
Edy is mainly a mobile payment solution while Suica's main function is
contactless card for
transportation. However, both allow mobile payment and Suica is
increasingly competing with
Edy, thus having two applications of the same technology fighting to
convince store chains and
businesses to chose their system. In the convenience stores world, AM/PM
has been a long-time
user of Edy, and is now joined by Sunkus/Circle K, while Family Mart has
decided to get
a Suica reader-writer in 1000 stores for a start...
The Felica chip allows many other types of applications, and Edy is also
building a range
of services making use of the Edy I.D. number and payment method.
So depending on the customer's needs, one may talk directly to Felica
Networks
(for a complete custom system, for instance) while for simpler
applications, Bitwallet
is likely to be a cheaper and faster solution.
The technical part of application development is done by System
Integrators, not by
Bitwallet itself, whose role is mainly limited to strategy, marketing
and training.
As the technology was developed jointly with Philips, there are some
chances that Felica
may make it overseas as well in the future, though making it a success
locally currently
takes much effort and prevent overseas marketing.
-- Benjamin
Nik Frengle wrote:
>On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 03:21:41 -0800 (PST), Ken Chang <carigate@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>actually Vodafone.jp was in a better position to cooperate with JR
>>(because they used to be JR-Phone) but they gave up the opportunity.
>>
>>
>Actually, the tricky thing about Felica has always been working out
>licensing with Sony, not with any kind of negotiation with JR. I was
>not involved with our negotiations, but am friends with one of those
>who worked on the DoCoMo effort, and can tell you that the technology
>has been ready for awhile, it has been the business aspects that
>slowed things down. Because Sony and DoCoMo jointly formed the Felica
>mobile company that licenses Felica technology for use in mobile
>phones (don't remember what it is called), from a business standpoint
>it has probably been more difficult for us than DoCoMo, despite
>traditionally close ties with JR (which have dwindled, by the way, to
>little more than the fact that there are still people who work for us
>who used to work for JR, and the same with Nissan, our other founding
>company).
>
>
Received on Sun Feb 27 16:09:42 2005