Renfield
>Email is just messaging, like SMS. Currently there are 2 BILLION SMS
messages
>sent every day globally.
Email is one of the killer app's for WAP. Middleware products are enjoying
high sales volumes at present.
>The US and Europe are THE largest markets for electronic games. There is no
>doubt in my mind that wireless gaming would be huge if available as it is
in
>Japan.
Yes.
>Users in Europe who do have access to things like customizeable ring-tones
>(Finland) have proven that teenagers are teenagers whereever they are; they
are
>willing to customize and pay for it.
Customizable ring tones are available over most of Europe. You can compose
or select ring tones on the web and download them via SMS to your phone.
>I honestly don't know why WAP operators haven't figured it out yet. Case in
>point: banking. DoCoMo has gone out of it's way to get EVERY bank on
i-mode,
>from the biggies like Citibank to the tiny, local agrarian cooperatives to
the
>post office savings system.
>In Europe, how many operators have more than 5 banks available on their
>gateway?...You MIGHT buy a WAP phone b/c you happen to bank at NatWest,
which happens to
>be on the gateway of the carrier you use. But it's unlikely you'd switch
>operators just to bank online or switch banks to NatWest just to bank
online.
>However in Japan just about anyone can get an i-mode phone and be pretty
sure
>that they can use it to bank online wirelessly.
There's a good answer to your question, and it revolves around one of the
big problems with WAP. Banks find the WAP security infrastructure, when in
the public domain, insufficiently secure. Therefore, they have to issue
pre-configured handsets to customers, which point towards a WAP gateway that
is located in the same secure domain as their content server.
>Agreed, cHTML vs WML is not too relevant.
>But the underlying issue is key: there are 700 official and thousands of
>unofficial sites because DoCoMo asked potential contents providers what
they
>needed to deploy lots of wireless contents. They responded by saying they
>wanted to reuse their existing html and web infra, and thus DoCoMo went
with
>cHTML and therefore there are LOTS of contents on i-mode.
To the consumer it is irrelevant which markup is used; I think we all agree
on this.
The number of European WAP sites has reached a phase of explosive growth,
which started in the last three months. I'll try and find some statistics
for you, but in the mean time I can assure that WAP sites will soon
outnumber i-mode sites globally.
The notion of reusing content, although mentioned frequently, is absurd.
Realistically, who reuses content? CHTML is so restrictive it would be
quicker to re-write pages from scratch than strip out all non-complying
tags, cut content, etc...
>You've got it backwards. The WAP Forum is attempting to dictate technology
>standards -- and from the reaction, they are failing, because they did not
>include contents providers and they totally ignored existing technologies
and
>protocols.
I agree that they should have included content providers in the forum. Of
course it could be argued that content providers could have joined the
forum. However, as most content providers are start-ups and the cost of
joining the forum is high, content providers were generally excluded.
To say that the forum 'totally ignored existing technologies and protocols'
is inaccurate. What you should have said was that they did not re-use
existing standards, but instead built new standards based on existing
standards.
>However, handset makers (major players in the WAP Forum) totally failed to
>enfore adherence to WAP standards, and thus the incompatibilities between
>gateways, handsets, WML/HDML, dev kits, etc...
I think we've been here before...I'll leave it.
>DoCoMo hasn't dictated anything; they asked what contents providers wanted
to
>use, they adopted existing, established technologies, and they enforced
>adherence to those standards. EVERY i-mode phone adheres to the basic
i-mode
>technical standards and protocols the same. Sure some phones support tables
>(out of spec) and some don't, but no significant number of sites attempts
to
>take advantage of these inconsistencies b/c it limits total audience reach
to
>those handsets only.
The same is true of WAP is phone.com browsers are removed from the equation.
>The business model would have been the same:
>lots of contents, easy to use, easy to pay for.
This should be the model adopted by any wireless service - shame it isn't!
Peter Roxburgh
Mobile Solutions Developer
peter.roxburgh@securetrading.com
http://www.securetrading.com
Tel: +44 (0) 1248 672007
Fax: +44 (0) 1248 672017
-----Original Message-----
From: keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net
[mailto:keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net]On Behalf Of Renfield Kuroda
Sent: 15 August 2000 10:50
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: New member/i-mode stumbles?
Received on Tue Aug 15 17:41:00 2000