Pamir Gelenbe, Co-Founder and Director of Corporate Development at Flytxt, recently went on a fact finding tour of Japan, to discover exactly what made the world's most advanced mobile data market tick. With 67 million browser-enabled phones and 34 million active i-mode users, the world's most advanced mobile data market is Japan. So what have been the key drivers behind the Japanese telecom market? What's big over there that isn't over here? Is the mobile internet's success in Japan due to superior technology or unique to the behaviour of Japan? And are we likely to see any of Japan's more popular applications and services taking off over here?

Let's first look at some of the key drivers. Probably the single most important driving force behind its success is the creation and monopoly of one particular mobile internet service. 1999 saw the launch of what became the world's first, and to date, most successful mobile internet service: i-mode, created by NTT Docomo. i-mode has since been recognised as the blueprint for successful mass-market consumer mobile data services.

What made i-mode so special and so different from its European counterparts? Unlike WAP, which flopped after its launch back in 1999, i-mode is a complete product. The i-mode service is just four clicks away for new users wishing to sign up. The cost of the service is simply added to the monthly phone bill. Unsubscribing is just as easy: you delete the service from the special menu and that's it. WAP by contrast was a clunky technology, with no thought behind how consumers might use it.

i-mode's technical ingenuity and its got-to-have sidebar "Mad about i-mode" are other reasons behind its success. The design offers a huge variety of internet sites, the phone displays them well and the whole package is cheap. It uses a computer language that's a step-child of the code used to design web pages on the Internet. This means that programmers accustomed to creating web sites for the internet can easily adapt them for access by i-mode or even write new programs for it. The result is masses of content, including over 40,000 web sites written just for the system, from horoscopes to train timetables to job-search engines.

The Japanese mobile market has another defining feature that sets it apart from its European peers. Operators in Japan launch handsets according to their own specifications. Even though many of the same handset brands operating in Europe also operate in Asia, in Europe manufacturers have a consumer brand separate to the operator's brand. This results in a multitude of different handset screen sizes, number of pixels per screen, keypad layout etc. By contrast, in Japan handset manufacturers work alongside operators and design models in line with specifications that operators need for their services.

The majority of phones in Japan therefore have a uniform mobile internet browsing experience, with high-resolution colour screens, standardized keyboards, cameras and function keys the same across the board. NTT Docomo's majority market share wields a power which brings with it coherence and consistency to the handset market, in contrast to the highly competitive and fragmented European market. Japan's situation is enormously advantageous in comparison to Europe, where designers are slowed down by having to render their content onto no less than 50 different handsets types.

The pricing structure for i-mode makes the service very attractive to users. Users do not pay for the time they are connected to a web site or service, but charged only according to the volume of data transmitted. That means that you can stay connected to a single web site for hours without paying anything, so long as no data is transmitted.

Fairer revenue share agreements between operators and content providers have also led to a wealth of content on Japan's mobile internet. Operators take only 10% of gross revenues. This, combined with the fact that the majority of all Japanese handsets are colour browser-enabled and can run Java applications, has spawned an entire mobile ecosystem consisting of network operators, content owners, content aggregators, mobile advertising companies and application developers.

So what are the most popular services on the Japanese mobile internet? E-mail, the Japanese equivalent of text messaging, represents 50% of all data traffic. Mobile Internet browsing accounts for the other 50% of data traffic; this consists of subscribers browsing various mobile sites and downloading Java applications, or using streaming audio and video. The main sites visited and uses of the mobile internet are sites with weather forecasts, news, sports results, those with ring tone downloads, games downloads, online banking (92 banks connected to the i-mode network), online stock trading, purchasing air tickets, downloading cartoons and images, looking for restaurants and for new friends.

The biggest official (i.e. operator endorsed) content sites provide music/ringtones, branded content (e.g. Disney wallpapers) as well as Java games. The biggest unofficial content site in Japan is a personal home-page creation site called Magic Island. Over 3 million people have used Magic Island to create a personal home page. Other popular unofficial categories are dating and adult content sites.

So, is the mobile internet's success in Japan due to superior technology or unique to the behaviour of Japan? We've seen how important factors such as uniformity of handset and completeness of product and service are. The widespread knowledge of the programming language behind the service has also been critical.

The Japanese culture has also been cited as being the perfect breeding ground for the mobile internet. The epitomy of Japan's mobile phone culture is probably the streets of Shibuya, Tokyo's youth shopping area, where every other person has a mobile phone in their hands, most street ads advertise mobile phone operators, mobile phone retailers can be found everywhere. Mobile messaging is well suited to the way the Japanese communicate, because Japanese people don't like to say things directly. You can say something more clearly via mobile messaging than on the telephone. The mobile internet also fits the Japanese lifestyle and culture much better than the desktop version - especially in big cities like Tokyo. Mobility is a defining characteristic of Japanese culture. Everyone is always on the move, with Japanese people typically spending as much as 12 hours every day away from home. The Japanese spend hours each day commuting to and from work and its possible to get a mobile signal on the underground. Trains are crowded, apartments small, even laptops are too big to use on the trains. Personal computers are also not adopted by ordinary households to anywhere near the extent they have been in the United States or Europe. In Japan, home PC users are still predominantly hobbyists. These differences in culture, lifestyle and internet usage are perhaps sufficiently different to suggest that the mobile internet is uniquely suited to the Japanese.

Are we likely to see any of Japan's more popular applications and services taking off over here? Analysys.com 2003 data indicates 253 million active (used at least once) Mobile Internet users worldwide. Japan represents 22.5% of Mobile Internet market, so the statistics certainly suggest that its taking off elsewhere.

Looking at France's Bouygues Telecom's i-mode service, the future of Europe's mobile internet looks positive. On November 15th, there were 360,000 i-mode users in France, a figure expected to rise 500,000 by the end of 2003. At the end of 2003, 11 million e-mails had been exchanged; 500 million pages had been viewed. Bouygues Telecom recently announced that content providers received 10 million euros in revenues for the services they have provided since the i-mode service launched.

Closer to home, the uptake of MMS and WAP also looks positive. By the end of last year, Orange reported that it has 570,000 MMS messages sent across its network every month and Vodafone Live! subscription figures reached 3 million. The four main UK mobile operators' gateways alone served 947,000,000 wap pages in November. These statistics clearly indicate that the wireless internet is growing in popularity and is here to stay. So, although Europe may be several years behind Japan, we have a great deal to learn and get excited about from our Japanese peers' experience in mobile in the meantime.

If you would like to hear more about the Japanese market, please feel free to email your questions to: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it