DoCoMo in yesterday's Detroit News:
Wireless Web nears reality for Japanese
DoCoMo leads way to surf Internet, may soon be gateway to thousands of Web sites
By Peronet Despeignes / The Detroit News
TROY -- Over the past year, AirTouch, Sprint and other U.S. cell phone companies have bragged about new "Wireless Web" services offering stock quotes, e-mail and news. But they remain heavily filtered, bare-bones versions of the real thing, bearing little resemblance to the Web familiar to most Americans.
Japan is rapidly moving toward the real thing.
"Our phones may one day be sufficient as a gateway to the Internet," said Keiji Tachikawa, president of NTT DoCoMo, before his speech Monday to the Economic Club of Detroit at the Troy Marriott.
DoCoMo, a play on the words "communications mobility" and the Japanese word for "anywhere," is the world's fastest-growing and, by all accounts, most advanced cellular phone company.
Through "i-mode," DoCoMo offers "always on" Internet access to more than 7,000 Web sites (compared to less than 1,000 on U.S. cell phones), online banking, ticket-buying, traffic maps, photo swaps, train schedules and more. The latest phones have full-color displays and accept voice commands.
Web sites must adapt to i-mode, but that's relatively easy because the system understands HTML, the language of the World Wide Web. WAP, the American wireless Internet interface, requires Web sites to basically rewrite themselves.
"One result is that cell-phone applications there far outnumber applications here," said Chris Avery, a telecommunications analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities.
DoCoMo, a spinoff from Japanese phone giant NTT, has a market capitalization of more than $350 billion, making it one of the world's most valued companies, along with Microsoft and General Electric.
I-mode expects to double to 10 million users by year-end.
At present, the service handles simple graphics, but will adopt "third-generation" standards next year with faster data transmission rates and, within three years, mobile multimedia -- music, videoconferencing, TV, gaming and movies.
U.S. phone companies, an estimated three years behind the Japanese, are still negotiating third-generation standards.
Meanwhile, in Japan...
"We've started work on a fourth-generation system," Tachikawa said in his speech, "and I've ordered my engineers to start research on fifth-generation technology." |
