John,
Both have have been solved in Japan, see answers below:
John Whelan wrote:
> Can I ask if anyone has any thoughts or solutions about getting around the
> following problems:
>
> A. Consumers in Europe sometimes need to upgrade the OS on a handset (for
> various reasons - usually unstable OS delivered by handset manufacturer!).
> In doing so normally they lose any content items (ringtones, logos, java
> apps) that they have purchased previously and stored on the phone.
>
> Has anyone come across a technical solution for this in Japan/Korea? It is
> possible to store the apps on a server and re-download however for handsets
> out there already this will not work. May be possible to do something with
> cable as the operation usually takes place in a shop.
Yes. The solution are removable memory cards. Most Japanese high-end
phones now have removable memory cards, e.g. 128 Megabytes. In my
view, this is the only practical solution. Try moving many megabytes
of pictures from one phone to the other via infrared. I did once,
takes forever...
> B. Prepaid subscription services. Since Prepaid not very applicable in Japan
> this may be more difficult. Problem is what type of model to deploy in order
> charge a prepaid consumer who wishes to subscribe to a data service. Not
> really practical to simply debit the account at a certain time of the month
> as credit may not be there, and user needs to be prompted to top up.
> Something like the O2 "bolt on" concept may be more appropriate.
This has also been solved in Japan at least in principle.
The answer is credit card payments, or 2D-code payments,
or payment via club memberships. There is a whole range
of mcommerce models in Japan, although non-Japanese
people focus a lot on the imode YEN100-300 model,
in reality there are many many more. There is prepaid
in Japan, however most are "credit challenged" people,
the term I learnt from a J-Phone VP. "credit challenged" people
are unlikely to be excellent customers for huge amounts of
value added services, so they might not use the payment
systems even if they exist.
Email me off-list if I can help more.
Gerhard
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Gerhard Fasol, PhD Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
fasol_at_eurotechnology.com http://www.eurotechnology.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Find us in "IBM developerWorks" and in "Chemical & Engineering News":
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/wireless/library/wi-elite8.html
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8049/8049bus1.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tue Nov 18 16:02:36 2003