Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo Inc and U.S. social networking service provider Twitter Inc will jointly develop a location-based alerting service for smartphone users based on tweets, the Nikkei business daily said.

The two firms have signed a licensing agreement in which Twitter will provide its databases to DoCoMo. The deal will be announced on Friday and the services are expected to be launched this winter, the Nikkei reported.

However, Twitter will remove data that could identify users, before using the stored tweets for this service, the business daily said.

The necessary software will be initially available only for DoCoMo smartphones, the Nikkei added.

There were around 17.57 million Twitter users in Japan as of March, according to NetRatings Japan Inc, second only to the U.S., the paper said.

(Reporting by Aniket Basu in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)

Japan Smartphone Twitter