At 09:47 03/05/09 +0900, you wrote:
>Jeff,
>
>I'm not sure if I would go this far. I'm with you on the Minitel/PC
>example, but SMS is still the driving force behind keitai usage in all
>markets around the world, including Japan. Our research of 14,000+ users
>in Japan showed that across all age, income, gender (and pretty much all
>other) demographic segments, SMS (short/medium length email messages) made
>up at least 75% of total MobileNet usage. And over 50% of all respondents
>use the MobileNet for less than 5 minutes a day. So the clear winner, even
>in this market remains email/chat.
Phil
According to docomo's statistics, only about 15% of traffic is due to
mail. Now this is down from 40% several years ago, which may be due to
different ways of counting (I won't go into this here). nevertheless, from
what I have gathered (and I would be interested in your input here) from
service and content providers and other firms, a large percentage of mail
is indirectly or directly generated by content providers and other firms
(even if we ignore spam). users find partners on dating sites, sign up for
or subscribe to mail magazines on mail magazine sites, and sign up for
opt-in mail services on more conventional sites. for example, Tsutaya
online reports that more than 60% of its mobile shopping revenues come from
people making purchases as a result of opt-in mail (not searching on the
site). Net price's shopping service (which provides discounts based on
number of units bought) is based entirely on young people exchanging mail
to find multiple buyers.
Finally, mail also still dominates the traffic in the PC Internet. But
much of this data volume is related to activities that the PC supports
either as a data processing (PDF and word files use a lot of data) or a web
site connection device. Further, the reason why many people believe the
Internet has important long-term implications for the global economy is not
because people can merely exchange mail, it is because of the other
applications. I believe the same argument can be made for the mobile
Internet. Where I agree with you is that mail/SMS will play an important
role in the expansion of the applications and should play an important role
in firm strategies.
cheers,
jeff funk
Received on Fri May 9 04:25:49 2003