>
> 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.
Not really if we consider consumers...
Looks like that e-mail on broadband is not the driving application any
more.
I've recently discussing with Telecom Italia about 2002 ADSL usage. From
their statistics P2P is becoming hugely popular and it is emerging as
the
first application. In 2001 the average traffic generated by an ADSL
user
was 3gb and in 2002 the average traffic has been 11gb. 40% of the
traffic
for the average user was in uploads.
If we consider these data P2P is the real and only "killer application"
for consumer broadband and it is the main driver today. Looks
like that no content providers have been able to offer any
other interesting application for broadband.
It emerged in a spontaneous way from a free network that is very
different from the Japanese mobile networks (Internet)...
The Japanese mobile environment is much more controlled
as handset are developed by the operators and all the features
for media content delivery and fruition are well defined and
content is well protected.
This emerged clearly from Symbian Exposium 2003. The
only phone designed for the Japanese market was the
Fujitsu FOMA handset the only Symbian device where
you ca not develop any application in C++ but just in
Java. It is clear to me that Ntt DoCoMo sees an open
OS as a very serious danger for the actual business model
It is also clear to me the soon to be EU mobile market could
be very different from the JP.
Well if you consider the new Symbian based handset or even better
something like Nokia N-Gage this is a totally different story. On
Symbian phone you can develop almost anything that you like by
accessing the full OS with C++. This leaves the door open form
new innovative applications developed from bottom up and
not designed from the beginning for the best revenue for the
operators and content providers.
Nokia has done a bold decision by not supporting DRM on
N-Gage and by supporting MP3 and AAC. It it clear that
they see a quiet different market in EU than Japan.
By the end it is interesting analyzing the user behavior of the
Europeans and Japanese but this could be not enough.
As Interactive TV based on a controlled network and well
defined business model has totally failed with huge
investments and today DVX is the standard de-facto
for movie distribution over the internet. (Think also
MP3).
We could face new disruptive technologies and models
enabled by the much more open mobile european
mobile networks. Or maybe not, maybe...
Giovanni Bertani
Received on Fri May 9 19:23:43 2003