The Mobile Internet : How Japan dialed up and the West disconnected

256 pages

Jeffrey Lee Funk,

The Mobile Internet : How Japan dialed up and the West disconnected

$32.00

ISBN: 9627762695
Format: hardcover
Subject:
Pub Date: 10/01/2001
Publisher: ISI Publications

Shipping Weight: 500grams

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Praise for ?The Mobile Internet?

"The Mobile Internet is a great book - a rare combination of careful scholarship written in an engaging style. It is not just a history of how one company built a new market. Rather, it constitutes a detailed template for how to create new disruptive technology markets of many sorts."

Professor Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business School -- author of the bestseller, The Innovator's Dilemma.

"This book is the first comprehensive English-language discussion of the success of NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode and as such, should be read by business persons and policymakers alike. The lessons Funk draws from this research will help Western audiences understand the power of the i-Mode model and its vulnerabilities. He warns against thinking that the mobile Internet is the same thing as the fixed-line Internet, something the proponents of WAP are finding out. For European and American business persons, these lessons should help them create viable business strategies for exploiting the opportunities in the wireless Internet space. If you are interested in what is happening in the most dynamic mobile Internet market in the world, read this book."

Martin Kenney

Professor, Department of Human and Community Development & Senior Project Director,

Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.

University of California

"An important R&D lesson is that one cannot create the future without knowing the present and its history. This book proves to be a very insightful guide to the way ahead in the mobile world - a serious and well-documented contribution."

Dr. G.B. Huitema, Senior Scientific Consultant, KPN Research

Description:

The mobile Internet has been phenomenally successful in Japan, with 70% of the world's mobile Internet subscribers and 90% of the mobile Internet income in Japan, and a dismal failure in the US and Europe, who each account for less than 5% of the world's subscribers. Jeff Funk compares the US and Japanese approaches to the mobile Internet and shows how the different approaches have led to such wildly different market responses.

It becomes apparent when reading The Mobile Internet, that the reason for the success of the mobile Internet in Japan is that the initial focus of the service providers was on the initially appropriate content, phones, business models, portal/search engines, services, and users (the critical factors), thus creating positive feedback between each of them. This positive feedback has caused each of the critical factors to quickly evolve, and in ways that suggest the mobile Internet is both different and an important complement to the fixed-line Internet.

At first, the users of the mobile Internet in Japan were young, and the services, phones, content, portals, and content provider business models were simple. Jeff Funk describes how each of these items has evolved from simple to complex, and users have quickly diversified. US and European firms must rethink their approaches to the mobile Internet, focusing first on the initially appropriate critical factors. Unless they do, they will probably not see strong growth in their mobile Internet markets and their third generation services are most likely to fail.

Table of Contents

1. How Success Begins with Simplicity

1.1 Network Effects and Reinventing the Wheel

1.2 New Business Models

1.3 New Services

1.4 New Content

1.5 Young People are Initially the Main Users

1.6 New Portals and Search Engines

1.7 New Phones and Compatible Devices

1.8 Returning to Network Effects

1.9 Why Japan Got it Right and the Rest Haven't

2. The Japanese Mobile Internet Market Explodes

2.1 The Origins of the Mobile Internet

2.2 i-mode's First Year: Slow Growth, But a Few Very Happy Customers

2.3 The Second Stage of i-mode: New Handsets and Content

2.4 The Third Stage of i-mode: Growth in Traffic to Unofficial Sites

2.5 Killer Application: Entertainment

2.6 Killer Application: News

2.7 Killer Application: E-mail

2.8 Key Initial Users: They're Young

2.9 The Result of Positive Feedback: Increased Revenues

3. Mobile versus Fixed-Line Content

3.1 The Traditional Trade-off between Reach and Richness

3.2 The New Trade-off between Reach and Richness

3.3 Reach and Richness Explain Traffic Patterns and Ages in the Japanese Mobile

Internet

3.4 Youth and Entertainment in the Fixed-Line versus Mobile Internet

3.5 US and European Companies are Overemphasizing Richness

4. Mobile versus Fixed-Line Business Models

4.1 Service Provider and Manufacturer Business Models

4.2 Content Provider Business Models: Paid content

4.3 Mobile Shopping

4.4 Transaction-Based Business Models

4.5 Information-Loading Models

4.6 Discount Coupons, Dynamic Pricing, and Auctions

4.7 Advertising

Appendix: Alternative Micro-Payment Schemes

5. Mobile Versus Fixed-Line Information Strategies for Content Providers

5.1 Reach is Critical in the Mobile Internet

5.2 On-Line Stock Trading

5.3 Concert Tickets

5.4 Navigation Services

5.5 News

5.6 Entertainment.

6. Mobile versus Fixed-Line Portal Sites and Search Engines

6.1 Fixed-Line versus Mobile Portals and Search Engines

6.2 Japanese Mobile Portals and Search Engines

6.3 Expanded Reach through Mobile Portal and Search Engine Services

6.4 Expanded Reach through More Sites

6.5 Expanding Richness

7. Multi-Channel Convergence

7.1 Fixed-mobile convergence

7.2 Phones and other mobile devices

7.3 Mobile Internet and TVs

7.4. Mobile Internet and the printed media

7.5 Clicks and mortar case - convenience stores

7.6 Clicks and mortar case - music and video stores

8. Mobile versus Fixed-Line Contents: the Future

8.1 Greater Richness through Advances in Semiconductor Technology

8.2 Greater Richness through Higher Speed Services and Phones

8.3 Greater Reach of Car Navigation Systems

8.4 Greater Reach of PDAs

8.5 Wearable Computing

8.6 Navigation and Location-based Services

8.7 Mobile Intranets

8.8 Business-to-Business Webs

9. The Challenge for the Rest of the World

9.1 Mistake #1: Initial Use of Complex Technologies and Business Models

9.2 Mistake #2: A Focus on Existing Users

9.3 Mistake #3: Modularly Improve the Existing System

9.4 A Proposal for Creating Positive Feedback in the Rest of the World

10. The Challenge for Japan

10.1 Phone Manufacturers

10.2 Content Providers

10.3 Service Providers

10.4 Regulators

10.5 Portal Sites and Search Engines

10.6 Creating the Mobile Economy

About the Author:

Jeff Funk is Associate Professor of Business at Kobe University's Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration. He has been studying the global mobile phone industry and the mobile Internet for more than five years. His previous books include Competition Between and Within Standards: The Case of Mobile Phones.

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