Ludovic Copéré

i-mode: wireless services à la Japanese

I first heard about i-mode sometimes around in February 2000, a since-then forgotten time when we Europeans were struggling with more-or-less crappy and unreliable mobile data access with the then glorified WAP service. Back then, the very ability of downloading-as-you-go and running fully-featured games and and having access to diversified content and information source from a click on your clamshell phone was at the very least extremely intringuing. And seeing over 5 million users in Japan at that time (growing to 42 million in Q1/2005 according to NTT DoCoMo) made it obvious that the Far East knew something in how to make mobile services technically viable and economically profitable. All of that starting with a startlingly simple yet profoundly new thinking from the mobile network operator: "to become profitable ourselves, we have to motivate and enrich the content providers", as explained by Takeshi Natsuno, the chief designer of the i-mode service at NTT DoCoMo.

Fast-forward to 2004, after having experienced i-mode myself in Japan (and in France, through Bouygue Telecom's licensing of the technology) and while studying about wireless and mobile network architectures in Sweden, I wrote a synthesis report on the technological and business characteristics of the i-mode ecosystem, which I'm happy to make available under a Creative Commons license.

If you are interested on the subject, I recommend that you read by NTT DoCoMo's own view of the service. Written by Natsuno san, The i-mode Wireless Ecosystem and i-mode Strategy are two  excellent sources of information on how this radically new approach to mobile services emerged and managed to cross the chasm, both in Japan and now on a global level. And for a constantly updated insight on current developments, have a close look at the i-mode Business Strategy blog, a very informative source to track the evolution of i-mode on an international level.

Ericsson and the future of the mobile

Low blogging those past two days, mainly because of the crammed schedule during Armada, the job fair at KTH. Among the many interesting things out there, the grand come-back of Ericsson was probably the most noticeable. More than just a big booth (with nice flashy give-away telephone collars), the company also hosted several events to better understand what's inside the mobile telecommunication giant.

One of those events was a panel discussion on R&D and future technology trends, and it reminded us all, if needed at all, that the telecommunication industry is probably one of the most complex: as underlined by Ulf Wahlberg, Vice President Research, making your shiny new 3G mobile phone able to seamlessly call a 60 year-old phone sitting in a dusty corner in the outskirts of Mexico is no easy task indeed. A perfect (yet of such an ironic coincidence) example of the complexity to handle is the major network failure Bouygues Telecom suffered yesterday, effectively preventing most of its 6 millions customers to make or receive calls during the whole day.

Yet the future looks bright and open: 3.5G is already showing up its potential in the labs, with the new HSDPA (High Speed Digital Packet Access). In Kista (the "Wireless Valley", where Ericsson's HQ are located), Ericsson is experimenting this future generation of mobile access through prototype base stations in vans that drive around in the neighborhood, effectively allowing up to 5Mbit/s. Concerning services, the convergence towards an all-IP, Internet based platform opens up the way for integrated multimedia services (think Triple Play - broadband, Voice over IP and Video on Demand, directly on your mobile phone). In that sense, the development of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) should hopefully make it easier for terminal manufacturers, operators and service providers to roll-out their contents and services in an always shortening Time-To-Market.

The key challenge might well be beyond the technological development: in order to avoid the self-created and sustained hype around 3G the whole industry suffered from, it is important to always put those innovations back in a user-driven and customer-centered perspective: such said customer might not always be rational, but at the end of the day, he's the one who sets the pace for the sector.

3G and Wireless convergence in Japan

Forget about dual or triple-band phones: DoCoMo is (once again) leading the way in Japan with its new mobile phone, the N900iL, which sports both 3G access (FOMA - Freedom of Mobile Access) and Wireless LAN connectivity (the same 802.11b standard used in offices as well as private and public hotspots).

Named PASSAGE DUPLE, this dual access opens up the way for a better integration of mobile phones in the professional sector: whenever Wi-Fi is available, VoIP calls can be made, as well as "presence" services (like Instant Messaging, chat, file transfer). When out of the office, the device can switch back to the (almost omnipresent in Japan) 3G coverage and be used as a traditional phone.

I can't help but relate this to last Friday's seminar at Wireless@KTH, when Magnus Melander of Brainheat Capital  talked to us about the opportunity Wi-Fi has of being a neutral ground between the telecom world and the datacom world - a broadly applicable technology on which new, less-vertically integrated business models can be established on both sides. In that sense, DoCoMo's strategy makes a lot of sense: in 1999, it brought i-mode, the first usable Internet services to a Japanese population that was at the time quite behind in its adoption of web surfing and computer-based internet. 42 million customers after that, it focuses this time on the corporate sector and aims at leveraging on the growing wireless adoption there.

A move to follow closely for sure; now, what I really want to see is Skype for DoCoMo phones!

3G, for real this time?

This Wednesday marks a significant milestone for Third Generation (3G) mobile infrastructure and services: Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator after China Mobile, is vastly expanding its 3G offerings: after Sweden and Japan, it will expand its Vodafone Live! 3G package in most part of Western Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK).

As reported by Bloomberg, Vodafone "plans to lure more than 10 million customers to the company's high-speed mobile- phone services by March 2006", a number that stresses again, if needed, the dire needs of operators to recoup the large investments they made for acquiring 3G spectrum licenses in the late 90's (Vodafone alone forked out nearly $28 billion world-wide). More than the new shiny phones and video calls (which 3 has already understood as being insufficient for attracting customers to switch to 3G), it will be user-centered services and innovative applications that make the operators' gambits less risky.

In that sense, Vodafone seems to take an interesting first-step by providing a "mobile iTunes" equivalent in Sweden. With 3000 songs already available, and the promise of 100000 by the end 2005, it's not the choice of or the technology (CD-quality) that is problematic, but rather the underlying business model: the songs cannot be transferred to a fixed computer nor a digital music player, and traffic costs are added when using the service from abroad. Still some way to go for the operators for providing true mobile media...

Collective Action and Creative Destruction

Listening to Howard Rheingold this morning, I was especially sensitive to his insight on how emergent mobile and digital technologies such as location-based services, distributed computing, social networks as well as ubiquitous communication actually integrate themselves into the underlying fabric of our post-industrial societies: whether it is the teenage Finns using SMS as a vector of friendship bounds (example taken from Smart Mobs), the daily casual (and unnoticed) C2C deals on the virtual marketplace of eBay, or even this very act of blogging, they all contribute to building new habits and practices that clearly and voluntarily differ from the incumbent ones, whether it is about going away from operator-centric and vertically-integrated communications, B2B or B2C transactions or mass-media.

Like the personal computer in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's, this new wave of pervasive services is today still in its infancy. As the consequences of the excessive hype around the Web are still fresh in minds, prophetic predictions and unbounded optimism is not the way to go. Yet, there are several encouraging signs showing that this may well be a promising field:
- Wide availability: Ericsson and the GSM Association now envisions the next billion users, which will means that "The lion's share of the GSM family market growth is now in the lower-penetration markets, primarily China, but also some other Asian Countries, as well as India, Russia, Africa and South America".
- Integration to the "physical" world: the idea of Cities without Borders means that such technologies bring information, media, culture and property beyond the geographically-bound metropolitan clusters. The phone in your pocket is not only a means to reach you easily, it is now an immediate tool that anyone can use, forget, and rediscover again and again, hence becoming far less demanding than dedicating one's full attention span in front of a computer.
- Active end-users: the backside of freeing users is that they can, and will, take a pro-active role in the use of mobile services. Many "revolutionary" services have failed because they were based on technology-push (i.e. geeky dreams) rather than on user-driven, demand-pull analysis. As hilighted  by Rheingold, "additional questions such as 'Do people really need this?' and 'What are they doing in their lives where this is a large value?' need to be asked" when working on such innovations.

Referring to Schumpeter, these coming innovations have the potential of "creative destruction", that is to say they hold both the seeds of encouraging a new type of growth and usages, while at the same time threatening today's accepted business practices and structures (for instance rethinking intellectual property, media distribution as well as privacy issues). An exciting time to live, work and play in, indeed!

Parking, 3G style

As reported by Akihabara News, Japan is once again on top of the technological curve and ICT diffusion in everyday's life. Honestly, what could be more commonplace and anecdotic than the immutable ritual of parking you car? That is, opening the window, taking a piece of printed cardboard you're likely to lose in your pockets; and then, after queuing for paying (if the machine is not down), rushing again to your car before the "exit" timer has expired....

Well this painstaking reality could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to FeliCa, a technology originally developed by Sony. Basically, it is a contactless chip, that holds more information than on the credit cards' chips, with the added advantage of being contactless, as the names implies: just swipe it in front of a wireless reader and that's it (similar to RFID tags).

Now, the neat thing that those chips are integrated into NTT DoCoMo's latest third generation (FOMA) phones - such as the brand new F900iC. It didn't take long for Park24, a large parking company in Japan, to take benefit of that and launch a FeliCa-powered parking area next to the NTT DoCoMo Yoyogi Tower (how appropriate!) in Shibuya, starting October 1st.

In a nutshell, when entering the parking lot, you swipe your 3G phone at the entrance beacon (cf. picture at the top), that way you can pay for the exact time you have been parked. But wait, that's not all! You also get a printed 2D barcode on you receipt.. Those little pixelated squares are (of course) understood by your camera-phone, and upon taking a picture of it, you are redirected to a surveillance camera pointing at the direction of your parked car.
Well, considering the average crime rate in Japan, I don't know if it's really worth the technological paraphernalia, but it's at least a very convincing showcasing of Japan's mastery in mobile, user-pushed and market-driven services.

I now remember how I did find Mint's parking payment in Sweden through SMS already way ahead of its time (compared to lagging France, that is). Different cultures, different adoption curves...