Note to moderators, I have (hontou!) tried to quote as little as
possible, but this is still long.
> In many ways mobile phones are not anymore about communication only,
> making steps not only in your "communication share" (with people you
> know)
> but also in your "entertainment share" (games or else), your "social
> network share"
> (with people you don't know), and more recently in your "money source
> share"
> (be it wallet phone, mobile banking or else)
> Also, one very undervalued aspect is that mobile phones are the only
> item
> for the last fifty years to make their entry in everybody's pocket.
I agree and I think this is precisely why it is SO important to make a
fuss about it. Who controls the "thing in my pocket"? (insert
obligatory joke here..). Lots of the current crop of 3G phones in Japan
bring out the latent Richard Stallman in me. Who controls that device?
Me ? - which means I have options and choices that may not be to the
best advantage of the carrier - or the the carrier, who will act in
their own interest which may not coincide with mine?
I don't want absolute control in the Stallman sense, or "Freedom" in
either the speech or beer sense, but I don't want easily available
options excluding from me (voip) ... I suppose really I don't want the
carriers controlling the "device in my pocket". There doing so has put
Japan ahead in the keitai field, but in the long term it is going to be
bad for consumers.
> To come back to music on mobile/iPod/whatever, the idea is actually
> not to
> think about "how can I load my music" but "what musical experience do I
> want".
> Music is not a file
Mmm - sometimes music is a file. I have to make choices about what I
carry based on file size and download speed to the device I carry.
Music is a file when I have to pay the bandwidth charge...
(And frankly, I don't want some marketing droid in KDDI worrying about
my "experience" of music - I can manage that all by my little self.)
> and business models should be thought about with the
> "experience" in mind. Do you need a song to be forever in your device ?
> Do you need to have it played in your home stereo ?
Choices, choices. The business model should fit my choices, even if as
a consumer I am in a minority, not the other way round.
> Some new and interesting business models for mobile music are arising
> in
> Korea,
> building on their fixed internet experience. You have
> "all-you-can-eat" or
> "one month rental" formulas.
The head and shoulder leaders in this market is itunes - and they offer
a "you almost own it" model with tactical DRM. Yes, I am an old fart
with a CD collection. If a song does not live forever on my device and
is easy to backup, I will be *tempted* (this is web archived!) to
steal/rip one that does. I noticed on the wireless watch Japan website
that KDDI offer music downloads for 315 yen! That's THREE TIMES the
itunes price. Sod the "experience", give me the file, fast and cheap.
How much of that is 'coz of the additional cost of the 3G download and
how much the anal retentive attitude to licensing of the Labels in
Japan?
> Last, frankly, I think the argument of "high speed network" is nothing
> more than marketing.
> Even on fixed internet you do not need 40Mbps to browse the web
> and for P2P, you are mostly limited by your counterpart anyway...
Are you talking from a position of having had regular access to a
40mbps? (If your main broadband is 256 K, 3G may look all G-whizzy
rather than the sorry limping wimp that it is...)
I think this is where you and I fundamentally disagree. I used to
believe as you do, then I discovered Bittorrent and its ilk and started
to treat online video files in the 2gigabyte range as "tonight's
viewing". Swarm P2P (I can't remember the technical name) means that
you have multiple counterparts and you exchange parts of the file with
each other. I read somewhere that 30% of net traffic was now bittorrent
(I doubt the figure, personally). You want to watch the latest Star
Trek after is broadcast in the US? - you want a fast, fast connection,
with decent UPLOAD speeds (that's the way swarm downloads work). That's
not "marketing" (Piracy, possibly...)
Check out Suprnova. a LOT of people throw around gigs and gigs of data
on swarm downloads - and a lot of what is exchanged is TV shows that
people didn't catch. In other words, a kind of time-shifting. I
personally have totally stopped renting videos. That's a tech change
leading to a total change in behaviour.
If you are just browsing the web, sure - 40mbps isn't necessary. But if
you are bittorrenting, or buy a lot of stuff on itunes, or downloading
paid for movies - the faster the better. You don't know you want it
until you can do it... Then 'wow!'... And having experienced it on my
desktop, I now want it on the 'device in my pocket'.
There was a piece on the Reg a few months ago, with a survey, basically
laughing at the movie industry for being worried about people
downloading/pirating movies online. The Reg was wrong - looking at the
world down a 256kbps wire - Look at the same world down a 100mbs wire
and the media companies are right to be worried...
> On mobile and for files of a few MB, 3G is just fine.
It's MY pocket space. (rinse, repeat).
Again we disagree - for a few small files at a time, 3G is fine. But
for the mobile device I carry with me, I want BIG files - last nights
telly in Japan AND the US, as big as the tech will allow - and lots of
them, transferred cheaply - and 3G just does not hack it except for
phone calls. How is it suddenly for the CARRIERS to tell me that the
device I carry in my pocket can only download a few small files - and
that it must use their slow, expensive 3G system when wifi or whatever
else is available?!
In Japan we are fighting for the control and openness of....
> the only item
> for the last fifty years to make their entry in everybody's pocket.
And THAT is why this is so important. Not this month, but in 6 months,
when more models have hard disks in the gigabyte range. That's when 3G
looks wimpy as a means of downloading files.
As a consumer I say "It's MY pocket space".
In Japan, with 3G, the pendulum has swung too far away from the
consumer and towards the carriers.
Nick ("Freedom for Pockets everywhere!") May
Received on Wed Dec 8 05:46:41 2004