(keitai-l) OT: m-commerce meets freeter work ethic

[...]

   http://www.paybox.co.uk/

Apparently Commerce has hit the UK (and some of Europe).  This 
service meets one of my major criteria for success:  people
can pay you by using SMS/WAP to send money to your phone number.
I immediately see the need for a check splitting applet, that allows
participants to pay for their part of the bill to the guy who get
the check.  You can even run a business using this service.  The
final criteria that I have for Commerce is:  Can someone pay you
by sending a message to your anonymous pre-pay phone number?  The 
paybox folks got a big splash all over CNN the other day:

  http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/12/10/mobile.payments/index.html

They must be trying to match paypal's tempo, given paypal's recently
announced IPO (I believe paypal is in the quite period, where they 
have to limit the mount of PR/capital lobbying they do prior to their
IPO):

   http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-7340170.html

Even so, paypal has managed to get themselves some good press:

   http://www.techreview.com/magazine/dec01/schwartzall.asp

...and they've also managed to get some bad press recently as well:

   http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/01/12/10/1713224.shtml

I believe mobile P2P payment systems will be the freeter's dream in 
Japan.  Though permanent employment may not be entirely a thing of
the past; the trend at the low end of the job market is clear:

   http://www.jca.ax.apc.org/web-news/corpwatch-jp/103.html
   http://www.jmnews.net/v1i8_final.htm

So, where are are the imode freeter job placement sites?  Or is 
the freeter's job search process going to be driven by the dead-tree
edition of the weekly part-time/OL placement magazines?  One thing
that strikes me odd about the Japanese market for IT is that the
whole certification thing hasn't taken off like it has elsewhere.
That could be due the lock that government testing standards have
in the market place, but I would think that even this would have
garnered it's own imode advertizing/scheduling aggregator.

More importantly and more to the point, I wonder when freeters can
expect to be paid via their mobile phone (just as JIT inventory was
a critical tool in Japan's manufacturing industry, daily, even  
hourly, JIT payroll could easily be the secret weapon of Japan's 
service sector)?  Some examples of what one might expect freeter 
imode job placement sites to be modeled after:

   http://www.Experts.com/
   http://www.FreeAgent.com/
   http://www.ework.com/
   http://www.sologig.com/
   http://www.elance.com
   http://www.guru.com/
   etc.

...and it's not limited to the techie, geek market either:

   http://www.content-exchange.com/
   http://mediabistro.com/

...and even managers need help:

   http://bullhorn.com
   http://intellectexchange.com/
   http://MarketItRight.com/

More interestingly, Peoplesoft's recent acquisition of

   http://www.skillsvillage.com/

points to the fact that companies are starting to embrace this point
and click worker culture (not necessarily to bring someone from the
outside in, but certainly to task and source people for projects 
within a company's existing talent pool).  Now that the job market 
has tightened up, perhaps the entire free agent thing has passed its'
prime... or maybe it will actually come into its' prime... maybe 
the idea setting the west and rising in the east?  I don't think the
job market (at either end) has decided yet.

Does anyone have any good references for working person to person
payment systems over mobile phones in Japan that don't involve being
a DoCoMo content partner, softbank or Bill Gates?  Heck, I'd just be
happy to see a working imode job placement site that has enough 
volume to actually write home about.

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