On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Helen Keegan - BeepMarketing wrote:
> I don't doubt that our usage will shift more and more to mobile in the UK
> and Europe, but not until the networks have sorted out their pricing models
> to make it cheap(er). It's just too expensive right now for the average
> teenager to run their messaging via their phone when the bank of Mum and Dad
> are paying for broadband at home, effectively costing Joe Teenager nothing.
I think that the issue here is that there seems to be a strong
perception that SMS is some sort of big mobile success for which Japan
has no equivalant. I've personally been asked by several people not
familiar with Japan if tabemo.com (a mobile-focused restaurant coupon
site that I work for) could do SMS and why we don't, and just the other
day at a seminar related to mobile security someone obviously not very
familiar with the Japanese mobile scene was asking why SMS "never took
off" here.
SMS use is rarer than hen's teeth in Japan for several good reasons:
a) E-mail is easier and more fun to use. You can have longer
messages, you can have emoji (icons), you can attach ring tones and
pictures, and so on.
b) You can reach vastly more people with e-mail. I don't have
figures, but I'd be willing to bet that you can reach ten times as
many people via e-mail as you can via SMS.
c) E-mail is far, far cheaper. If I recall correctly, a 160
character SMS is something like .10 euro, right? A 160 byte e-mail
would be two packets on Docomo, or 2/3 yen, about .005 Euro, 1/20th
the price.
However, that Japanese users send three times as many e-mail messages
per day on their phones as Europeans send SMS is not even the whole
picture. SMS is used for a lot of "browsing" and for-pay services,
a role that is filled by web access here in Japan. So while that
1-or-so SMS per user per day includes all access to automated services,
the 4-or-so e-mail messages per day includes almost none of that.
(The only automated service commonly accessed via e-mail is site
registration--sending a blank e-mail to get back a URL that will
automatically fill in your e-mail address when you register for a site.)
To get the real picture of mobile usage, you want to throw in all of the
web browsing used for services for which people use SMS in Europe.
In short, mobile e-mail and web browsing in Japan getting far more
than three times the usage SMS is getting in Europe, if you consider
SMS to be a success, Japan you must consider to be a fantastic, huge,
resounding success. SMS is small potatos in comparison.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Tue Nov 29 04:01:19 2005