The wall is simple:
it's the wall between official sites on the gateway and onofficial sites out
there in the wild.
While hits are pretty much 50/50 for official/unofficial sites, the key statistic
is that 80% of the REVENUE comes from official sites.
Everything outside the walls (on the Internet) is free, some stuff inside the
walls are not.
r e n
Tony Chan wrote:
> Hi all, I write for a magazine based out of Hong Kong. Usually I just
> take in the vast amount of information that is available on this list,
> which has been great.
>
> But one thing bothers me.
>
> How come everybody is referring to i-mode as a walled garden when
> nothing, technically, business model, or otherwise, indicate any walls,
> unless of course, you count factors such as the fact it is based in
> Japan, or that it uses PDC rather than GSM and CDMA.
>
> These are not walls. As far as I can gathered from the information from
> this list and my own research, there is inherently nothing that stops
> developers in, say, America, from publishing a chtml site on a server
> located in London for the i-mode service in Japan. There are obvious
> issues such as, latency when the traffic has to travel all the way
> around the world, language since most i-mode users are still Japanese,
> and business case - what reason do you have to target users half-way
> around the world? But are these really walls?
>
> Likewise, if someone decided to put a chtml microbrowser in a GSM phone
> (I think the Sony c25 is one) or CDMA handset, there is little stopping
> that user from access an i-mode site, unless of course, their service
> providers has adopted a walled garden approach and blocks outside access.
>
> Can some please confirm or refute the above argument.
>
> Tony
>
> Renfield Kuroda wrote:
> >
> > The bigger issue is: the Internet is fine and open and all that, but if you
> > are interested in having a successful business, making people pay for the
> > free, open Internet is a model that has never worked.
> >
> > I like the fact that the wireless web is a walled garden -- it's why i-mode
> > is successful and WAP services, so far, are not.
> >
> > Blatant self-plug:
> >
> > "Are Walled Gardens Such a Bad Thing?"
> > http://www.japaninc.net/feedback/letter/letter01.html#gardens
>
> [excessive quoting removed]
--
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morgan stanley dean witter japan
e-business technologies | engineering and strategy
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Received on Wed Oct 18 11:27:15 2000