Re: <nettime> wap the hell

[geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

[In response to the posting of David Cox and the Cellphones thread, one
could state the obvious that WAP is not Internet. I suppose everyone is
aware of that. Clay Shirky has written a column about this a while ago,
which can be found on his website www.shirky.com (see below). Besides the
issue of proprietary standards there is the claim of a public sphere or
domain which can be made (again) in order to get a certain part of the
mobile phone frequency spectrum (like TV and radio). I have not yet heard
or seen anything written anything about "citizens" channels or content
within this context. Could anyone update us on this? I am not sure if the
entertainment aspect of the current WAP content is such a drama, or not
(see LA Times report). If it's just a digital medium, amongst many, then
there is little to complain. If WAP services turn into a poor(wo)man's
Internet than it's something else: handy phones for the masses and real,
free, unfiltered content for those with a PC, laptop or settopbox access?
Or another image: the WAP newsstand versus the Internet as a digital
library with by and large "dead" information? I am not sure if comparing
mobile phones with radio is so usefull. I think the relation to the PC is
a more interesting one, also seen in the light of the competition between
the USA, Europe and Japan. /g]

         http://www.latimes.com/business/20001112/t000108394.html

 November 12, 2000

   Telecom: In Japan, teens' infatuation with cell phones has turned NTT
   DoCoMo into a corporate star--and the country's most valuable company.

   By MARK MAGNIER, Times Staff Writer

 TOKYO--This country hasn't had much to cheer about lately, but there is a
 new source of inspiration: Its teenagers--weighted down with money and
 free of old ideas--have helped to build a new Japanese corporate
 mega-star.

     Their fixation with cellular phones outstrips even handset-crazed
 Europeans, thanks to the most successful, elegant and idiot-proof system
 anywhere on the globe for getting onto the Internet from a cell phone.

     Reaping the benefits is a company called NTT DoCoMo, which almost
 overnight has become Japan's most valuable company. Now it is taking aim
 at the rest of the world, where obstacles abound but it has a running
 start.

     After a decade in which Japan fell behind on the Internet and endured
 its worst economic performance since World War II, DoCoMo has emerged as
 a new kind of Japanese company--one that encourages individualism,
 eschews protectionism and breaks many of the old rules of Japan Inc.

     Spawned by the stodgy former government telephone monopoly, NTT
 Corp., in 1992, DoCoMo was created almost as an afterthought to see what
 cellular communications was all about. Early employees recall pitched
 battles with NTT traditionalists skeptical of the ethereal nature of
 wireless.

     A phone-monopoly spinoff with an unproven technology seemed an
 unlikely candidate to point Japan in a new direction. But its success has
 been phenomenal. Every day it signs up 50,000 new customers. In the stock
 market, it's now worth $280 billion--50% more than its NTT parent.

      DoCoMo (Japanese shorthand for "DO COmmunication over the MObile
 network") has captured 58% of Japan's booming cellular market, rewarded
 stockholders handsomely and pioneered Internet on the move with its
 so-called i-mode service.

      It's become a media darling and its visionaries, celebrities.

      And as is often the case with success stories, it was part accident.

      DoCoMo's early i-mode business plans targeted corporate warriors,
 with many Web sites offering airplane reservations, directories, stock
 trading, scheduling and news.

      Almost as an afterthought, it threw in a few games. And that helped
 launch DoCoMo's rocket ride from corporate afterthought to global
 wireless leader.

      The company admits it didn't fully appreciate what an incredible
 resource it was sitting on.

      "Very few countries have this many teenagers with this much money,"
 says Mari Matsunaga, a key member of the i-mode development team.
 "They're the eye of a hurricane."

      Less than two years later, 60% of the sites are entertainment-
 related and Japan's young people have stormed the Internet airwaves,
 downloading cutesy screen characters, e-mailing their friends, checking
 restaurant listings, exchanging photos and tracking sports teams.

      The latest DoCoMo advance: images of Japan's 25 most-wanted
 criminals appear on your handset so you can look for them while hanging
 out in bars or other shady places.

      On average, Japanese consumers buy new, increasingly lightweight,
 stylish, feature-packed handsets every 18 months, many of which they then
 adorn with stickers, special straps, gizmos, characters, dolls and
 luminescent antennae. There are even chip-embedded, glue-on fingernails
 that light up when your phone rings.

      "I e-mail my boyfriend five times a day," says Asako Shikichi, an
 18-year-old high school senior, showing off a gray flip-up model
 decorated with a string of beads and a tiny surfboard. "I like DoCoMo.
 This is my third one."

      DoCoMo's winning formula has turned Tokyo into a cellular mecca,
 drawing media companies from around the world to gawk, prod and poke.

      The company somewhat modestly attributes its success in part to
 luck. But it also credits its open-system approach--following some past
 disasters driven by insularity--and its emphasis on making things as
 simple as possible for the customer. Point-and-click menus replace
 cumbersome Web addresses. Hit a tiny camera icon and "Want to go to the
 movies?" is automatically added to your e-mail.

      "We never mention the word Internet, browser, mobile multimedia--
 those are all techie words," says Takeshi Natsuno, a DoCoMo executive
 director. "We just say 'Look, you can transfer money, check a dictionary,
 do this, enjoy that.' "

       Users pay as little as 99 cents a month to visit 650 official Web
 sites--DoCoMo gets a 9% cut--but also have access to 23,000 free sites.
 All charges are then tallied on a single monthly phone bill, another
 innovation.

      DoCoMo also has broken new ground with its corporate culture. People
 join mid-career and leave for other ventures, virtually unheard of at
 most Japanese companies. And forceful personalities are welcome.

      Keiichi Enoki, the project's managing director, was pulled from
 relative obscurity at a company office in Tochigi prefecture for his
 strong and unconventional views. A longtime NTT engineer, he had always
 taken a keen interest in marketing, his wife's shopping preferences and
 his kids' video game crazes. These proved invaluable in shaping i-mode.

      Enoki in turn sought out "strange or unique people," recruiting
 Matsunaga from her job as a magazine editor. Although self-avowedly
 tech-challenged, Matsunaga quickly revealed her keen understanding of
 popular culture. She in turn lured Natsuno away from his own start-up.

      The seven-member executive team, which she calls "the seven samurai"
 for their widely disparate skills, was given planning independence and a
 "remote island" office away from the rest of the company. Initially it
 was so cavernous that members rode bikes inside.

      The outspoken Matsunaga quickly went to work visiting authors,
 directors, media types and marketing experts. Along the way, she also
 persuaded Enoki to spend nearly $100,000 on a special room for
 brainstorming dubbed Club Mari with leather couches, a karaoke set,
 living room furniture and a huge beer and wine fridge.

      Told by engineers the screen on the i-mode handset had to be small,
 she browbeat them into enlarging it to fit a monthly calendar. As
 executives fretted over revenue targets, she fought doggedly to keep
 rates cheap. And as the launch approached, she had it out with DoCoMo's
 public relations department, which kept removing language with any
 marketing flair. "I felt like I was visiting a government office," she
 recalls.

      Matsunaga's friends predicted she wouldn't last six months. But
 Enoki's support helped her, Natsuno and other team members win many key
 battles. And her tech ignorance, she says, ultimately allowed her to stay
 focused on what ordinary consumers wanted in an Internet mobile phone.

      DoCoMo also is playing a far more savvy game than Japanese
 multinationals or parent NTT ever did in the past. In a break with
 decades of de facto "buy Japanese" policies across the corporate
 landscape that helped spread the Japan Inc. moniker, DoCoMo has in
 general embraced open standards, foreign cooperation and overseas
 equipment makers, forging links with Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Ericcson
 and Microsoft.

      "This time they've been a whole lot more open about letting in
 foreign players," says Eric A. Noordin, vice president at Bain & Co.
 Japan. "They're making an honest attempt to make this the best of the
 best."

      With its domestic position increasingly secure, DoCoMo is setting
 its sights on the brass telephone ring: global primacy. This next step
 promises enormous rewards. But it also involves tremendous risks, as the
 company ventures from Japan's comfortable shores into the cutthroat
 global market.

      Faced with this uncertainty, DoCoMo is moving cautiously--although
 its greatest risk ultimately may be its reluctance to take more risk in
 such a fast-paced, winner-take-most industry.

      The rather enviable problem for DoCoMo is that it's rapidly becoming
 a victim of its own success. Most Japanese will own cell phones within a
 few years, clogging DoCoMo's spectrum, saturating the market and capping
 company growth.

      So it is building a global presence, hoping to do better abroad than
 other Japanese service companies.

      It boasts a strong technological arsenal. In the anticipated
 industry move from second-generation to so-called 3G (for third-
 generation) cellular service--which promises video streaming, music
 downloads and a 40-fold boost in capacity--DoCoMo's expected launch in
 May will be up to two years ahead of the rest of the world.

      With i-mode, it's had an easy, reliable 2G Internet connection in
 place since February 1999 even as its European cousins struggle with
 delayed roll-outs, cumbersome systems, limited content and technical
 glitches.

      "In Europe, the market is mostly driven by voice service," says Kate
 Lye, analyst with Warburg Dillon Read. "Not many are doing mobile
 Internet."

      The U.S., meanwhile, isn't even in the running, frustrated by
 standards battles among equipment makers and other internal problems.

      With this impressive head start, DoCoMo's challenge is to ensure
 that other parts of the world follow its technical lead. A slam-dunk? Not
 necessarily.

      Although more than 500 telephone companies in more than 100
 countries are in general agreement with DoCoMo on a new 3G Europe-based
 standard, DoCoMo risks getting too far ahead only to see the pack move in
 another direction.

      In response, DoCoMo in recent months has gone on a shopping spree,
 spending more than $6 billion on 15% to 20% stakes in mobile-phone
 operators in Hong Kong, Britain and the Netherlands. It's also looking in
 the U.S. and Asia.

      "We've tried to plant some seeds in virgin areas," says Kiyoyuki
 Tsujimura, DoCoMo's global strategist.

      Critics say this strategy is too timid, that it ties up billions of
 dollars without giving the company control. And that's not the only
 question about DoCoMo.

      It also is burdened by the NTT connection. For example, that
 prohibits it from floating shares on the New York Stock Exchange or using
 its stock to buy into other companies, forcing it instead to pay cash.

      The NTT name also carries political baggage, as seen recently when
 sister company NTT Communications attracted an FBI probe while trying to
 buy a U.S. firm. Furthermore, many countries limit how large a stake
 foreign-controlled companies can buy.

      More fundamentally, for all of DoCoMo's innovations, some still
 believe there's less here than meets the eye. Decisions are still made by
 committee, it's more bureaucratic than many high-tech counterparts
 overseas, and its unwillingness to offer stock options raises doubts over
 whether it can keep talented people.

      "Growth is the perfect prescription for every pain, so right now
 everything looks good," says Susumu Tsubaki, project manager with Boston
 Consulting Group. "But after the market hits saturation, these could
 become a bigger problem."

      DoCoMo President and Chief Executive Keiji Tachikawa doesn't see a
 problem. He believes management by consensus is still a good way to do
 things and says being part of the NTT group still has its advantages. It
 remains important, however, to stay disciplined and avoid becoming
 arrogant, he adds.

      For the time being, however, none of that matters to the likes of
 Masami Tanaka, a 23-year-old college student who uses his i-mode phone to
 check sports scores at least five times a day. And with graduation on the
 horizon, he's starting to check some of the job-recruitment sites.

      "I can't imagine life without it now," he says. "It's almost like
 your lungs or your heart."

-------

WAP may pose the first real threat to the freewheeling internet
By Clay Shirky

WAP is in the air, both literally and figuratively. A mobile phone
consortium called Unwired Planet has been working on WAP (Wireless Access
Protocol) since May of 1995 in an effort to establish the foundation for the
mobile phone's version of the Web. After several false starts, that work
seems to be bearing fruit this year: Nokia was caught by surprise at the
demand for its first WAP-enabled phone, Ericsson is right behind with its
model, and analysts are predicting that by 2002, more people will access the
internet through mobile phones than through PCs. However, we've got to be
careful when we tout WAP as the next major networking development after the
Web itself, because it differs in two crucial ways: the Web grew organically
(and non-commercially) in its first few years, and anyone could create or
view Web content without a license. WAP, by contrast, is being pushed
commercially from the jump, and it is fenced in by a remarkable array of
patents which will affect both producers and consumers of WAP content. These
differences put WAP's development on a collision course with the Web as it
exists today.

Even after years of commercial development, the Web we have is still
remarkably cross-platform, open to amateur content, unmanaged, and
unmanageable, and it's tempting to think that that's just what global
networks look like in the age of the internet. However, the Web is not just
the story of the internet, it's also a story of the computing ecology of the
1990's. The Web has grown up in an environment where hardware is radically
divorced from software: Anyone can install anything on their own PC with no
interference (or even knowledge) from the manufacturer. The ISP business
operates with a total separation of content and delivery: Internet access is
charged by the month, not by the download. And most important of all, the
critical pair of protocols -- http and HTML -- were allowed to spread
unhampered by intellectual property laws. The separation of these layers
meant that ISPs didn't have to co-ordinate with browser engineers, who
didn't have to co-ordinate with site designers, who didn't have to
co-ordinate with hardware manufacturers, and this freedom to innovate one
layer at a time has been part and parcel of the Web's remarkable growth.

None of those things are true with WAP. The integration of WAP software with
the telephone hardware is far tighter than it was on the PC. The mobile
phone business is predicated on charging either per minute or per byte,
making it much easier to charge directly for content. Most importantly,
WAP's patents have been designed from the beginning to prevent anyone from
creating a way to get content onto mobile phones without cutting the phone
companies themselves in on the action, as evidenced by Unwired Planets first
patent in 1995, the astonishingly broad "Method and architecture for an
interactive two-way data communication network." WAP, in other words, offers
a chance to rebuild the Web, without all that annoying freedom, and without
all that annoying competition.

Many industries have looked at the Web and thought that it was almost
perfect, with two exceptions -- they didn't own it, and it was too difficult
to stifle competition. Microsoft's first versions of MSN, Apple's e-world,
the pre-dot-com AOL, were all attempts to build a service which that grow
like the Web but let them charge consumers like pay-per-view TV. All such
attempts have failed so far, because wherever restrictions of either content
creators or users were put in place, growth faltered in favor of the freer
medium. With WAP, however, we are seeing our first attempt at a walled
garden where there is no competition within a "freer" medium -- the Unwired
Planet patents cover every mobile device ever made, which may give them the
leverage to enforce its ideal of total commercial control of mobile internet
access. If predictions of the protocol's growth, ubiquity, and hegemony are
correct, then WAP may pose the first real threat to the freewheeling
internet.

Clay Shirky is a contributing editor at FEED and Professor of Media Studies
at Hunter College.



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