Information & Communications Technology

Japan is moving closer to requiring companies to stop using personal information for such purposes as advertising if requested by consumers, a government plan showed Thursday.

Mobile phone carrier SoftBank Corp. and Google LLC parent Alphabet Inc. said Thursday they will jointly set up airborne mobile phone base stations, using balloons and aircraft in the stratosphere, to cover wider areas for next-generation 5G wireless services.

About half of Japan's 1,400 banks are planning to join a nationwide smartphone payment service that is now slated to start in October.

SoftBank Group Corp. leader Masayoshi Son has much bigger ambitions for transportation than simply seeing his investment in Uber Technologies Inc. turn into more than $13 billion when the company goes public next month.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Thursday urged the government to consider a new law obliging technology giants such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC to disclose contract terms with vendors using their sites.

NTT Docomo Inc. says it will cut mobile phone charges by up to 40 percent in June amid the government’s call on carriers to lower service fees.

The government plans to submit to the current Diet session a bill to revise the National Strategic Special Zones Law with the aim of implementing its Super City Initiative, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned. The initiative introduces new special zones for utilizing artificial intelligence and big data.

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has approved the allocation of frequency bands for fifth-generation (5G) telecommunication services to four mobile network operators, a major step toward the spring 2020 launch of full-scale services that can send huge amounts of data 100 times faster than the current 4G technology.

We have entered an era in which individuals’ and corporations’ data are considered the oil of the 21st century, as they can substantially impact industrial competitiveness. Yahoo Japan Corporation, a major internet services company in the country, has embarked on fully utilizing its big data to enhance convenience in people’s daily lives. For this installment of Leaders, a column featuring corporate management and senior executives, President and Representative Director Kentaro Kawabe explains his growth strategies to The Yomiuri Shimbun.

After a number of natural disasters hit the area last summer, a government bureau in western Japan began trials Monday for a multilingual smartphone-based service to provide overseas tourists with disaster information.