Re: WAP and mobile phone Internet access / Sep 17th

Koichi-san,

your's is a very interesting and typical story - which I
think stands for many other successful examples. We work
with some others here in Tokyo. It's an interesting,
exciting and fast-moving time...

Certainly, the business models - as you say and at least
for now - are very different on the internet and on the 
imode system.

I guess that both will evolve over time - as they have
on the internet as well: in the beginning it was mainly
academic for 30 years, then people tried advertising
based models, then people focused on B2C ecommerce,
then people focused on B2B, then on Click-and-Mortar,
and there are approaches to the internet mass market
like MSN versus AOL versus YAHOO versus Netscape 
versus dot-net etc.

It will be interesting to see how all this develops in the
future.

By the way - I work in Tokyo, so maybe we'll see each other
sometime.

Gerhard

Gerhard Fasol
Eurotechnology Japan K.K.
http://www.eurotechnology.com/
fasol@eurotechnology.com



Koichi Hasebe wrote:
> 
> Hi Gerhard:
> 
> I agree with your opinion. I think there are many reason
> why i-mode took a big success.
> 
> --
> We are providing a i-mode service named "i-ekitan" which
> supplies information for train passengers, time table,
> routing guide, map, etc. This service is originally stated
> on Internet in Mar,1997.
> 
> We stated it in Feb. 1999 as free, and started paid service
> in Mar., 2000. We have more than 180,000 paid subscribers for
> our i-mode service, now.
> 
> --
> Frankly speaking, we couldn't believe that i-mode could get
> so many subscribers when we heard their plan. But it is actual
> that more than 10% of Japanese has internet reachable mobile
> phone (DoCoMo, KDDI, J-Phone, etc). None can control such
> many users.
> 
> --
> One of thing I remember is the word of Mr. Natsuno who is a leader
> of i-mode contents in DoCoMo. He said
> 
>   When trying to start i-mode like new business, people
>   always meet a chicken and egg problem. Contents providers
>   say they will start service if operator get many subscribers,
>   against operators say they expand service area if there are
>   many good contents.
>   But this time, DoCoMo prepares i-mode system first with DoCoMo's
>   risk, before contents providers develop their service.
> 
> We considered the ratio of mobile phone replacement and estimated
> ratio of internet phone in whole number of sold mobile phones.
> Then we decided to start i-ekitan on i-mode. Now we are trying to
> expand it to other operators.
> 
> --
> To the contents provider, only mobile phone environment has
> simple billing system. I don't think current system is the
> best one, but we have no good billing systems on Internet and
> we can get revenue with this simple system.
> 
> The other side, i-mode phone doesn't have screen file transfer
> function which is easy on internet browser. This means that
> users can not copy contents and that this reduce the risk of
> contents providers.
> 
> Like that, DoCoMo can show us that kind of new contents
> environment.
> 
> It's not the discussion only, but real specification.
> 
> It helps us to build our business model.
> 
> --
> To expand contents service, there should be each merit to
> each performer, not only to operator but to device manufacturer
> and contents provider. DoCoMo maybe a first operator who
> can show it to the market.
> 
> ---- K. Hasebe, Toshiba Corporation  http://ekitan.com (Japanese Only)
> ===================================================================
> At 11:45 00/09/17 +0900, Gerhard Fasol wrote:
> >Yes Eric,
> >
> >I think that there is a lot of truth in what you say.
> >
> >DoCoMo (with imode) for example goes out of it's way
> >to attract users/subscribers and to attract content
> >these users want to see, and to have handsets available
> >which users want to have (they are a lot smaller than
> >those available elsewhere and many have pretty large
> >full color screens, and JAVA VMs soon) and imode has
> >animated color images, which I think WAP does not have
> >right now outside Japan (but soon will I think). WAP
> >has all that in Japan!
> >
> >Best regards from Tokyo-
> >
> >Gerhard Fasol
> >Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
> >http://www.eurotechnology.com/
> >fasol@eurotechnology.com
> >

Received on Sunday, 17 September 2000 02:06:41 UTC