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>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.
The fact that it is based on PDC is, I suspect, what the original quoter
was getting at.
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>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?
No. You are quite right. But walls keep bad things out as well - so the
fact that the sites they access will all work fairly consistently, and are
based on a functional and sensible standard gives a positive sense to the
notion of a "wall" - which is what i suspect subsequent references to
"wall" on this list were getting at.... From a practical point of view,
any standard is a "wall". And a spine.
Nick
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Received on Wed Oct 18 11:23:37 2000