Hi all, I write for a magazine based out of Hong Kong. Usually I just
take in the vast amount of information that is available on this list,
which has been great.
But one thing bothers me.
How come everybody is referring to i-mode as a walled garden when
nothing, technically, business model, or otherwise, indicate any walls,
unless of course, you count factors such as the fact it is based in
Japan, or that it uses PDC rather than GSM and CDMA.
These are not walls. As far as I can gathered from the information from
this list and my own research, there is inherently nothing that stops
developers in, say, America, from publishing a chtml site on a server
located in London for the i-mode service in Japan. There are obvious
issues such as, latency when the traffic has to travel all the way
around the world, language since most i-mode users are still Japanese,
and business case - what reason do you have to target users half-way
around the world? But are these really walls?
Likewise, if someone decided to put a chtml microbrowser in a GSM phone
(I think the Sony c25 is one) or CDMA handset, there is little stopping
that user from access an i-mode site, unless of course, their service
providers has adopted a walled garden approach and blocks outside access.
Can some please confirm or refute the above argument.
Tony
Renfield Kuroda wrote:
>
> The bigger issue is: the Internet is fine and open and all that, but if you
> are interested in having a successful business, making people pay for the
> free, open Internet is a model that has never worked.
>
> I like the fact that the wireless web is a walled garden -- it's why i-mode
> is successful and WAP services, so far, are not.
>
> Blatant self-plug:
>
> "Are Walled Gardens Such a Bad Thing?"
> http://www.japaninc.net/feedback/letter/letter01.html#gardens
[excessive quoting removed]
Received on Wed Oct 18 11:07:45 2000