Hi Mike, hi all,
the following article answers some of your questions:
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode a Useful Tool for Capturing Customers
Fulltext:
http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/wcs/leaf?CID=onair/asabt/fw/99124
quote:
[...]
Billing Agency Service Restricted to Approved Sites
The Web sites that can be viewed in i-mode are either official
sites, approved by NTT DoCoMo and registered on the iMenu
portal site managed by NTT DoCoMo, or sites without that
official sanction. Bandai, Recruit, Kinokuniya and the others
are all approved sites.
With around 400 approved sites and 5,000 unofficial sites
available to subscribers, unofficial sites vastly exceed
approved sites in number.
Approved sites easily score more hits because they can be
accessed from iMenu without entering the URL. NTT DoCoMo's
billing agency service and unique i-mode handset IDs are
open only to approved sites.
On the other hand, unofficial sites are attractive to providers
because the only requirement to start offering services is to
set up an iMode-supported Web site.
To register as an approved site, the provider must accept
certain limitations and forgo features such as communities,
search services and links to other sites. Thus, the provider
may not be able to develop the type of business model that
would be the normal practice on the Web. An unofficial site,
on the other hand, imposes no restrictions on the business
model and therefore allows a great variety of services to
be provided.
[...]
Mata ne,
Andrea
--
Andrea Hoffmann -- Wireless Product Development
andrea_at_girigiri.co.jp --- http://www.girigiri.co.jp/
Phone: +81-3-5731-6270 -- Fax: +81-3-5731-6272
Received on Tue Apr 11 00:46:59 2000