Birth of the keitai Internet The success of i-mode is a notable example among recent Japanese business successes. It not only made Internet access an established element of keitai ownership, but also succeeded in charging for Internet content. The keitai Internet network is built on a telecommunications industry model. The Internet is merely connected through gateways. In other words, from the Internet point of view, the mobile communication network of each mobile service company is just one narrow gateway to another network. For Internet people the open architecture of the Internet is its central appeal. However, for at least some keitai users, the more limited and easy-to-use network has proven to be a selling point. What is the secret to this success? One is that Docomo already had a national network for packet communications. A new division board was organized, which included people brought in from the outside to develop new competitive services -- such as e-mail -- that fell outside of the bounds of the telephony market. Their primary mission was to find ways to effectively utilize the packet network. Another innovation of i-mode was its micropayment system. I-mode is probably the most successful example of a business built on subscription-based content. This success is based on the micropayment scheme that is derived from a telecommunications model. Docomo built on this existing structure and took the position of agent for the content providers. Users pay for content together with their i-mode fees, the service provider passes these payments on to the content provider and the content provider in turn pays a commission to the service provider. The ?300 (about $2.55) cap on monthly subscription fees was also a clever tactic. The amount is small enough that users show little hesitation in signing up for the content with a few taps on their keitai keyboard. This micropayment system for content subscriptions provided a radical new model for Internet business that had previously seen advertising as the primary source of revenue for content services.
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"I-mode ... not only made Internet access an established element of keitai ownership, but also succeeded in charging for Internet content." |
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It is also important to note that the primary use of the keitai Internet is for transmitting e-mail. Web access comprises a growing but still relatively small share of keitai Internet traffic.Prior to the advent of i-mode, the transmission of messages between keitai handsets was restricted to short text messages between handsets from the same service provider. The advent of the keitai Internet enabled users to send and receive e-mail with other keitai and PC users regardless of service provider and regardless of terminal device. The success of i-mode was thus also built on the existing practices of mobile messaging that were well established in the youth market at the time of its launch. Location-based services Unlike the fixed telephone, the keitai is not limited to one specific location; it is a medium keyed to its location in specific and wide-ranging locations. Because of this, location-sensitive services hold much promise. Various services have been designed to pinpoint the location of keitai. Until recently, positioning was based on the location of cell stations, but now there are keitai terminals with Global Positioning Services (GPS) and greatly improved accuracy. There are a variety of positioning services that can be categorized by function: basic locational services, communication services, navigation services and location-sensitive information services.
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"The most popular services of this type include ones that display stores and restaurants in a particular area." |
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In the most basic positional location services, the relation between the locating person and device and the target keitai becomes crucial. Some services notify the user of their own location and other services notify others of a keitai user's location. Some examples of the latter type of service are used by companies seeking to locate mobile workers such as sales reps or service technicians or the elderly carrying a such a handset in the event that they get lost or disabled. Because of the problem of privacy, these services are used in only limited instances.The privacy issue has been a persistent topic of debate. Positioning services were first implemented with the PHS. Since the PHS is operated through many small cell stations, if they can locate the one being used for a given transmission, it is possible to get relatively accurate positioning of the handset. The public reacted negatively to services that capitalized on this technical capability. The media wrote extensively about the privacy problems such services would herald. More recently, car navigation systems played a significant role in opening up a market for positing services and the privacy concerns have become somewhat muted while still remaining unresolved. The more surveillance-oriented systems are still unpopular. In general, the tendency has been for people to see privacy issues as an individual responsibility rather than something that requires public standards. In reality, the "communication" type of service can entail a form of surveillance. Some dating sites use services that locate nearby facilities and facilitate communication based on proximity of users. These services get around privacy concerns by informing users of their relative position vis-?-vis other users rather than disclosing absolute position. Navigation systems build on basic positional services by providing transit information such as roads and traffic lights, information about speed and direction, and activity indexes that predict the time to a destination. These kinds of high-performance car navigation systems are also used by corporate operations that deal with mobile workers. The final type of service, location-sensitive information services, help users access local information based on positional data. The most popular services of this type include ones that display stores and restaurants in a particular area. Others services provide information on local history and culture and environmental information about weather, landscape, and animals and plants. Keitai cameras
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"When further progress is made in this field, the camera could function more as a high-performance sensor and this would significantly alter the impact of the keitai camera." |
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Recently, keitai with camera functions began rapidly gaining popularity. Users primarily use keitai cameras to send images in the context of private communication. However, some networked services are appearing. These include snapshot services, transparent services and image recognition-processing services.Snapshot services are primarily those that attach photographs to existing services. Typical examples are dating and adult content services. They are also often used for Weblogs and diary sites. Transparent services include file-format conversion sites that mediate different service providers, sites that create 3D photographs and photo album construction sites. Image recognition and processing services have attracted much attention. At the moment, they are only used for physiognomy fortune telling, compatibility fortune telling and cosmetics consultation. When further progress is made in this field, the camera could function more as a high-performance sensor and this would significantly alter the impact of the keitai camera. We are still in the early days of the keitai camera services. Nonetheless, judging by adoption rates, it appears that cameras will become a standard keitai function. We are on our way to becoming a country where half the population carries a camera at all times. The social significance of this could be quite large. All our memories are at risk of becoming materialized in recorded form. We are going to have to insist on more and more responsibility on the part of those taking the photograph, and ongoing questioning of the ways in which the reality of our lives is and is not being captured by these cameras. This is an edited excerpt of an essay that will be published in a book on mobile phones in Japanese life, edited by Mizuko Ito (University of Southern California), Misa Matsuda (Chuo University), and Daisuke Okabe (Yokohama National University). This look at the recent changes in the mobile communications business in Japan draws from business literature as well from Ken Kohiyama's experiences engineering the Personal Handyphone (PHS) at NTT during this period. Kohiyama is known as the "father of the PHS" and worked at NTT for 30 years. He is now a professor at Keio University and head of Docomo House research center there.
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