I hesitate to be so blunt, but this really is the most dreadful rot. As
an English man who has lived in Japan for 12 years my experience of the
internet largely mirrors that of "the Japanese", as you put it. I think
I first got on the web, from the countryside outside a provincial
Japanese city, sometime in late 1995 - very much the early days of the
www - which I suppose is what you refer to when you talk about "the
internet". Browsing the www was by no means a novelty in 1996.
You may care to reflect on the fact that imode and similar services
currently happily coexist with some of the widest and cheapest
broadband in the world. While a Japanese user idly wonders whether to
bother with 100mb/s light fibre, my poor compatriots get quite excited
at the thought of 1mbit ADSL over copper.
Nick May
Fukuoka, Japan.
On Nov 1, 2003, at 11:25 PM, keitai-l@appelsiini.net wrote:
> Hi Jan, I recognize that Japanese use i-mode and otherwise browse the
> web with their phones. On the other hand I suppose that the amount of
> "information" that they get through their phones is far less than what
> a
> user of the internet in the US or Europe gets. Of course it is hard to
> quantify but I think it fairly clear. I would feel really limited if I
> had to use a mobile phone to get information that I can and do get on a
> PC. This was however the predicament of the Japanese when i-mode was
> introduced and it was all they really had access to and for that reason
> I feel that it took off. It took a well developed service (the
> internet)
> and offered it (albeit in a very watered down version) to an audience
> which was previously deprived of any part of it (not literally but
> effectively deprived). Like to someone who is hungry even a lousy meal
> will taste delicious. So from that point of view, i-mode is not
> particularly portable to somewhere where the food is already delicious.
> Of course there have been embellishments and with so much attention,
> energy, and work devoted to it in Japan it is bound to have some
> aspects
> which will be of interest outside of Japan. Such things as the Felica
> system merging with a handset for instance. However, I don't think the
> i-mode menu is something that should really take off in places where
> the
> internet is popular. On the other hand there is clearly convergence
> occurring in various ways. For example, smart phones or KDDI's flat
> rate
> high speed browsing. Once that happens and if the phones are capable of
> downloading a reasonably high percent of pages available on the net,
> then phone, PDA, and PCs will basically have merged. One problem with
> my
> discussion is that I am not really sure how i-mode is defined. I am
> taking it as the i-menu. By the way, I noticed that you are in Germany
> (I think). Is it true that in Europe people have been sending email on
> there phones for years? Anyway, thanks for reading my rambling. I am
> afraid that I am a latecomer and that these arguments have all been
> parsed out.
> Bill Claster, Tokyo.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net
> [mailto:keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net] On Behalf Of Jan Michael Hess
> Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 10:42 PM
> To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
> Subject: (keitai-l) AW: port of i-mode to other cultures
>
> hi "wbc@tkk.att.ne.jp" (unfortunately we don't know your name),
>
> even if you don't like browsing and emailing on your keitai,
> there are more than 40 million Japanese with i-mode enabled
> phones and about 90% are using them according to Yusuke Kanda,
> President of DoCoMo i-mode Europe, who just spoke at our
> Mobile Kaizen Seminar in Stuttgart.
>
> i-mode is a complete mobile Internet service offering with around
> 3.800 official content providers on their i-mode menu and
> over 67.000 unofficial content providers in the unofficial market
> that is indexed by independent search engines.
>
> DoCoMo has deals with 6 MNO partners in Europe that have about
> 50 million subscribers. Today, less than 1 million of them have
> i-mode powered mobile phones. But DoCoMo believes that new handsets
> in 2004 that finally reach the necessary quality as well as more
> Marketing power from i-mode licensees in their respective market will
> help make i-mode a success outside of Japan, too. DoCoMo has a lot
> of know-how and will clearly help its partners to succeed, although
> this process takes a lot more time than we all expected.
>
> When you look closer at the Japanese market, you can see that
> KDDI and J-Phone (now Vodafone) copied the i-mode business model
> (not all its technology decisions) almost 100%. Outside of Japan
> Vodafone has adopted the i-mode model, too, (though giving less
> money to its content partners). Most important, Vodafone now
> specifies handsets as handsets are the important user interface.
>
> Finally, Daniel Scuka and me believe that it is all about
> the management culture, not the end user culture. Anybody can
> learn from i-mode, adopt it, improve it etc. That's why we
> run a seminar called "Mobile Kaizen" showing how we can
> offer better products and services while increasing profits by
> implementing continuous improvements in the Mobile Economy Triangle
> of networks, devices, and services. So far all our participants
> have agreed that they have learned a lot from our 1-day wireless
> Japan peep show and that they will look into improving their role
> in the Triangle.
>
> Best, Jan.
>
> --------------------
> www.mobileeconomy.de
> www.mobiliser.org
>
>>> I would like to hear what other members feel about the so-called
>>> porting of i-mode. I suppose this may be an outdated discussion
>>> but would anyone be willing to comment on the ideas below.
>>> What is it that is the so-called success of i-mode that could be
>>> exported. I have read that it is a service not a technology. The
>>> browsing on i-mode is limited to the point of being useless.
>>> Email is not new. Signing up for services will not catch on very
>>> well because most services are free on the net and it is only in
>>> Japan where the net offerings are so limited and where computer
>>> usage has been very limited relatively speaking that i-mode could
>>> catch on and where people were willing to pay for services that
>>> are offered for free elsewhere (don't know how long they will be
>>> offered for free but the are at the moment).
>>> Games and Java apps are different from the above discussion. An
>>> application can sell on a phone as well as on a pc.
>>> Anyway, does anyone have any comments?
>>> Thanks.
>
>
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Received on Sat Nov 1 16:51:45 2003