(keitai-l) Re: 20th anniversary of Minitel

Mark, and everyone else in this thread:
Though it may be a bad analogy, in some ways i-mode spawned a
Minitel-like regression of its own, in Japan--L-mode. 
For those of you who do not reside in Japan, (or even who live here, but
don't keep up on consumer fax and answering machine markets) L-mode is a
service over normal phone lines that allows users of compatible fax
machines and telephones (mostly fax machines, though) access to a
variety of online services which are very much like i-mode, and rather
like Minitel. The markup language is cHTML, and the carriers are NTT
East and NTT West. 
Because wired internet access took off so much more slowly than wireless
internet access, you have a situation where NTT DoCoMo is the largest
ISP in Japan, and perhaps in the world, with around 33 million users.
The wireline carriers decided to try the non-PC route for themselves,
and came up with L-mode to attempt to replicate in the wired world what
DoCoMo had done in the wireless world. 
It has not been the phenomenal success that i-mode was for a quite
simple reason: People change their home phones much less often than
their mobile phones, and the profit margins are too small to allow wired
carriers to subsidize the purchase of L-mode phones. 
However, eventually a good part of the population of Japan may very well
purchase L-mode compatible home phones. And when they do, you may well
see the first successful online wired appliance after Minitel. 
Just a thought. Anyone else have any of those concerning the parallels
between Minitel and L-mode?
-Nik Frengle

-----Original Message-----
From: keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net
[mailto:keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net] On Behalf Of Mark Frieser
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 10:23 PM
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: 20th anniversary of Minitel


Everyone,

Please check out the anniversary article for Minitel from the BBC.

Very interesting link between Minitel and imode.  But if you now the
Minitel
and you know imode, it is pretty obvious.

And, though its not nearly generating as much money as imode, its still
a
big industry - 500MM USD.

Check out the full story here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3012769.stm

Mark



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