DoCoMo Bets US Users Will See Beyond Tiny Screen
--From AOL. How about them Rams!-- Cooters--
Hong Kong, Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Conventional wisdom has it Americans used to tall fridges, big cars, and open plains will balk at surfing the Internet on mobile phones with tiny screens and chicklet-sized keyboards.
Takeshi Natsuno doesn't buy it. The 35-year-old developer behind the i-mode service that NTT DoCoMo Inc. plans to transplant from Japan to America argues the success of the mobile Internet doesn't rest on a love of gadgets but on Web sites people everywhere need.
Consider these uses. Four friends are struggling to divide the cost of a meal, one reaches for her phone, punches in the orders and the check is split instantly. Or how about this: a passenger in a car hears a song she likes on the radio, checks into the station's Web site and reads all about its singer.
``We let users create killer content by providing the platform,'' says Natsuno. The imagination of the 15.5 million people using i-mode in Japan, and the Web site designers tapping them for ideas, ``was the key for our success.''
Plenty is resting on i-mode catching on stateside. Japan's biggest mobile phone company spent $9.8 billion for a 16 percent stake in AT&T Wireless Group as part of an agreement which involved starting the service in the U.S. market.
It may be a hard sell. A recent study from the Yankee Group found 54 percent of Americans who own mobile phones say they don't want or need mobile Internet service. Among those who now do their banking online and already have a mobile phone, just 14 percent expressed interest in accessing their account through wireless Internet links, the Boston-based market research firm found.
U.S. Entry
Natsuno isn't discouraged. He predicts users in the U.S. will be attracted to services such as pop music ringing tones, cartoon downloads and games, the same services to which Japanese teenagers have gravitated.
Analysts say U.S. teenagers are unlikely to be as enthusiastic as the Japanese for animated Hello Kitty screensavers and may balk at Web surfing on credit card-sized screens. So AT&T Wireless and DoCoMo will form a new unit to develop services specially designed for U.S. customers.
``DoCoMo may not bring the exact model in Japan to the U.S., but the company has the potential to develop the service in the U.S. market,'' said Yasumasa Goda, a senior analyst at Merrill Lynch Japan Inc. ``DoCoMo's expertise as a content aggregator is universal.''
When DoCoMo started i-mode in February last year, the company had 67 Web site providers. Now it boasts more than a thousand. In the beginning, it was Natsuno's job to convince contributors --banks, airlines, bookstores, gamemakers, newspapers and television stations -- to provide services through i-mode.
Sites are divided into two categories: official sites where companies such as toymaker Bandai Co., Sega Corp. and Konami Co. offer downloadable interactive entertainment and those created independently by i-mode users. Subscribers can also access corporate intranets.
Half of DoCoMo's 33 million cellular phone customers in Japan are i-mode users after only 21 months. Revenue from data transmissions surged 20-fold the past year. I-mode users are on average spending twice as much as last year as the diet became richer.
Almost 60 percent of i-mode traffic goes to DoCoMo's official sites for entertainment purposes.
Because DoCoMo's i-mode sites are designed using a language called HTML, or hyper text markup language, existing Web content is easily modified to fit DoCoMo handsets. Other carriers use a protocol called WAP, or wireless application protocol, a unique standard for the wireless Internet.
Upgrades
To enrich the service, DoCoMo introduced handsets with color screens. Next month will see the introduction of handsets running Java, a programming language that will enable users to play games like Konami's popular Dance Dance Revolution music simulation game.
AT&T Wireless also expects to introduce advanced wireless phone services based on a high-speed standard called wideband code-division multiple access, a technology DoCoMo wants to promote around the world. That may allow the downloading of video clips, interactive gaming and other services that are already popular with U.S. web surfers.
Like i-mode, DoCoMo expects everyday users to be the main customers of the new services, not the business customers envisioned by some rivals.
But first comes the roll out of services like those already seen in Japan.
``There are just very, very little wireless data applications going on in the U.S. right now,'' Leo Nikkari, vice president for Universal Wireless Communications Consortium, a Bellevue, Washington-based industry association, said last week. ``It's a huge untapped market.''
Dec/10/2000 20:57 ET
For more stories from Bloomberg News, |
