(keitai-l) Re: SMS and URLs

From: Jeffrey L. Funk <funk_at_iir.hit-u.ac.jp>
Date: 05/09/03
Message-Id: <5.0.2.5.2.20030509100317.0276e3f0@localhost>
At 09:47 03/05/09 +0900, you wrote:

>Jeff,
>
>I'm not sure if I would go this far.  I'm with you on the Minitel/PC
>example, but SMS is still the driving force behind keitai usage in all
>markets around the world, including Japan.  Our research of 14,000+ users
>in Japan showed that across all age, income, gender (and pretty much all
>other) demographic segments, SMS (short/medium length email messages) made
>up at least 75% of total MobileNet usage.  And over 50% of all respondents
>use the MobileNet for less than 5 minutes a day.  So the clear winner, even
>in this market remains email/chat.

Phil

   According to docomo's statistics, only about 15% of traffic is due to 
mail. Now this is down from 40% several years ago, which may be due to 
different ways of counting (I won't go into this here). nevertheless, from  
what I have gathered (and I would be interested in your input here) from 
service and content providers and other firms, a large percentage of mail 
is indirectly or directly generated by content providers and other firms 
(even if we ignore spam). users find partners on dating sites, sign up for 
or subscribe to mail magazines on mail magazine sites, and sign up for 
opt-in mail services on more conventional sites. for example, Tsutaya 
online reports that more than 60% of its mobile shopping revenues come from 
people making purchases as a result of opt-in mail (not searching on the 
site). Net price's shopping service (which provides discounts based on 
number of units bought) is based entirely on young people exchanging mail 
to find multiple buyers.
   Finally, mail also still dominates the traffic in the PC Internet. But 
much of this data volume is related to activities that the PC supports 
either as a data processing (PDF and word files use a lot of data) or a web 
site connection device. Further, the reason why many people believe the 
Internet has important long-term implications for the global economy is not 
because people can merely exchange mail, it is because of the other 
applications. I believe the same argument can be made for the mobile 
Internet. Where I agree with you is that mail/SMS will play an important 
role in the expansion of the applications and should play an important role 
in firm strategies.
cheers,
jeff funk 
Received on Fri May 9 04:25:49 2003