Web 2.0 Asia

New York Times reported that Japan's NTT DoCoMo saw its market share in its domestic Japanese market fall below 50%, the first time in almost 10 years.

The winner in this fully saturated Japanese mobile service market (read: a zero-sum game) seems to be Softbank Mobile. (My previous piece about DoCoMo vs. Softbank Mobile is here).

Meanwhile, NTT DoCoMo will test mobile fragrance service: Like ringtones, "scents" can be downloaded and played back (ie. generated) by a phone-embedded aroma generator. Well, mobile fragrance service is surely cool and futuristic and all that, but I guess they should first do something about their "stinking" market performance.

Tangos of China Web 2.0 Review introduces the winners of Mobile Monday Beijing peer awards, including Tokiva:

Tokiva is a mobile virtual network operator which provide convenient and low-cost communication service to global traveler. Tokiva addresses key communications necessities for global travelers: inexpensively phone calls around the world, accessing email and sharing with peers.

After installing its mobile client and log in, you can call any number. Tokiva calls the user back and immediately connects the user to the called party. It also integrated with IM, so you can add its IM bot to use the service without downloading its client.

The service was privately launched in September 2007, and entered public beta with over 700k registered users on January 2008.

You can check out the rest of the winners here.

Mobile Monday Beijing is being spearheaded by our friend Benjamin Joffe, whose consulting work has recently been introduced on Read/Write Web.

The National Internet Development Agency of Korea (NIDA) announced the list of most popular mobile websites accessed via WINC.

As background info, WINC is the new and easier way of accessing mobile websites, proposed by NIDA and implemented on over 90% of mobile phones sold in Korea. Instead of typing the long and complex mobile URLs on cellphone keypads, users can just type a simple phone number and press the mobile internet key (you know - those buttons with "i" or "n" on them) to get connected to mobile websites. For instance, type "131", press the n key, and you are on the weather forecasting mobile website.


Obviously, not everyone who uses mobile internet accesses via WINC, so the "most popular WINC sites" list may not exactly represent the most popular mobile sites. Anyhow, the popular WINC sites for 2007 came out to be:

• Bus schedule service, City of Daegu
  
• Bus schedule service, City of Seoul
  
• Naver Mobile (portal)
  
• Daum Mobile (portal)
  
• Hanguk Economy News TV
  
• Chosul Ilbo (newspaper)
  
• Gamevil (mobile game)
• Com2Us (mobile game)
• Samsung Securities (stock trading site)

It's a bit surprising that bus schedule sites topped the list - But maybe it's understandable because young students use the mobile internet most and for them bus schedule might be very important information.

This morning I met with CEO Park of Japan's Ascent Networks, who is based in Tokyo but visited Seoul temporarily.

Ascent Networks has bunch of high-calibre people and runs several neat Web 2.0 services in Japan. Mr Park has been in Japan for quite a while and understands Japanese web industry thoroughly.

Park said that Japan's startup actions currently look very active, with many software engineers starting up venture companies and also quite a few VCs knocking on doors of those startups.

Park expects that the year 2008 will see lots of interesting mobile applications to come out of Japan, for which the two biggest drivers will be a) further penetration of fixed data plans and b) increased number of (already many) "non-official" mobile sites.

Of particular note is the mobile ads market - Park said Japanese advertisers are starting to discover the relevancy of mobile ads, and are poised to spend more budget on mobile ads. According to Park, "Mobile ads are especially relevant, because people are likely to search something on mobile when they are about to do something in five minutes, not five days or five months."

So I guess what Park says is, if I'm walking on streets and suddenly fall in the mood for Mexican food (don't you sometimes?), I might flip open my phone and look for nearby Mexican place, rather than going back to the office and Google "Nearby mexican restaurant". Therefore search results on mobile might be more aligned with the current/immediate intention of the user - that's my understanding of what Park says.

In any case, I think it's quite likely that some interesting new ventures, especially in the arena of mobile internet, might come from Japan next year. Japan might even lead the global innovation in the mobile web service industry, especially with their lead in the "transition from PC to mobile device."

Which brings my attention back to Korea and its wireless carriers, who are still largely trying to control the mobile value added services (VAS) value chain within their walled gardens. I wouldn't have to bother quoting many people to remind that, in this era of "2.0", innovations don't so much come from the center as from the edge. If Korea also wants to see mobile web service innovations, all "walls" will have to be lifted so that the "edgelings" can build interesting things in sandbox.

Point I, a Korean LBS (location-based service) company, will stream real-time traffic information via live video streaming for KT Wibro users. Wibro users can browse through live videos sent from 150+ CCTV cameras to find traffic conditions, in a way that allows them to feel as though they were actually on the spot. Given Wibro's high bandwidth, the video quality would be pretty good, I expect.

I think this is a more useful mobile high-speed internet service than, let's say, video calling. It's also a great improvement over the traditional application-based traffic information service. A CCTV traffic information live streaming service has been around for quite some time, but due to the limited bandwidth, the user experience was not as smooth as the Wibro (or other high-speed mobile network)-based service promises to be.


Meanwhile, Chosun Ilbo reports that Korea's mobile carriers are seeing decreased profits. In the third quarter of this year, Korea's top 2 mobile carriers, SKT and KTF, saw their profits fell by 29% and 27% respectively, over the same quarter last year. The biggest culprit for the profit decrease was high marketing costs for 3G mobile service. But in the long term strategic pov, the carriers should come up with 3G killer apps, instead of bombarding gobs of money on marketing on their 3G sub-brands.

Purohu is a shortened Japanese word for "profile". (The Japanese have knack for shortening words - they call digital camera as "degi-came", and department stores as "depato".)

A service called "Strategic Purohu", provided by cgiboy.com, a Rakuten company, is quite popular among the Japanese teens. The Strategic Purohu service is all about completing personal profiles. By simply answering the questions given by the service, user completes his/her profile. There are nearly a hundred questions including "What's your dream car?" or "Your favorite song at Karaoke" as well as pretty basic questions. While not all of these questions are mandatory, the more questions a user answers, the more complete the user's profile becomes. So it's like Linked In for teens on mobile, but the content is personal not professional.

Once they have their profile (purohu) pages set up, teens share the page addresses with each other. So there's a certain feeling that this mobile-only service is pretty secure and not entirely open to general public. As such, Japanese teens upload their real picture on their purohu pages - such a rare practice in Japan.

Purohu is a pretty simple yet interesting enough service. It reminds me again that a good mobile service doesn't have to be rocket science.

Today I stumbled upon a blog titled "Japan's Cellphone Edge". The blog says about itself:

Japan's wireless industry is where America & Europe can be in a couple of years. This blog invites you to have a look at the wireless future by discovering what is hot in Japan right now. Learn about the best practices for mobile business from one source.

Among many interesting articles, what especially caught my attention was the article about Mincle, a Japanese location-based mobile SNS.

Apparently, Mincle is a service where the GPS-phone users can post content (blogs/photos etc) about specific locations and share stories about their favorite spots with others. I should perhaps check out the service myself. By the way, the name "Mincle" comes from "mingle", according to the blog.

Including this particular post about Mincle, Japan's Cell Phone Edge blog offers a lot of good content.

Samsung Electronics has launched SCH-V960 (currently sold only in Korea) that supports a new way of navigating the phone menus. The central navigation button of SCH-V960 has a touch sensor, allowing the navigation buttons double as a "finger mouse". The finger mouse works just like touchpad on notebook computers. User can also customize the menus on the desktop.

Continued from the previous post...

6. Equivalent of ALT+TAB on mobile

If the small screen is one of the biggest limiting factors of mobile UI, why not provide a larger "virtual screen" that consists of layers of "sub-screens"? User can navigate through different layers by clicking on a hot key, equivalent of ALT+TAB on the PC. I'm talking about something like Apple's Spaces concept, only on mobile.

Yes, something similar to this may be available on smartphones today, but smartphones represent only (at max) 20% of the market - the rest 80% of users are still suffering from small screens, although to me this concept of "mobile ALT+TAB" doesn't sound something terribly difficult for the manufacturers to implement even on non-smart phones.

7. Better Java

Java certainly has its own limits, especially under mobile environment, but there's no doubt Java is currently the ruling platform for mobile applications.

The problem: mobile Java is supposed to enable platform-independent "one source multi use", but we all know that's not exactly the way it is now. The main culprit is different handset specifications - different MIDP versions, different screen sizes, etc.

So what should we do? Of course we should continue our efforts to move the whole Java ecosystem forward. But we should look to the present as well as into the future, and try to make the life easier for current Java content providers despite today's market inefficiencies.

So we can conceive a "Java sweatshop" - not so much a politically correct term, but I can't think of a better term. It's like this: Every manufacturer sends like 3 sets of every Java phone the company makes, as well as all the spec documents, to this Java sweatshop company. The company (can be either a non-profit or a for-profit) has specialists for optimizing Java apps for different phones, and also has applications testers. A Java application provider then just develops a single version using a standard Java SDK, submits the copy to this sweatshop, which will then optimize the app for all required phones. Possibly a good offshore opportunity here.

8. Killer accessories

With billions of people using mobile phones globally, I guess the world can now have a global-scale moblie phone accessories company. The Belkin of cell phones, so to speak.

No matter where you are in the world, you can check out this company's local online store to find the coolest phone accessories like audio speakers, arm bands, car kits, gaming pads, etc. Wouldn't that be cool?

I guess one hurdle to be overcome is the manufacturers not opening up their phone specs and software to the external parties, who can only produce these cool accessories after having full specs of the phones. This is especially true on the feature phones, which do not support "plug and play" by any means.

9. 10x better batteries

People talk about all kinds of reasons why the mobile data service market isn't taking off as expected, but the battery problem, arguably the most important issue, doesn't get mentioned very prominently.

I don't know if it's just me, but I assume quite a few people will have peace of mind only when they know they have at least one bar left on their phone's battery level indicator before they get an access to the charger.

You don't care as much when your iPod's battery goes dead as when your cell phone battery goes dead. Why? You don't know when someone will call you up or send a text message. The idea that the cell phone should be alive till the last minute deters some people from consuming multimedia content (music, TV, etc) in a lavish, free-of-worries way on their mobile phones.

By the way, I think I've read something about the cell phone holder-cum-charger I can clip onto my waistbelt. You attach your phone to this holder, plug the whole thing into the socket, and you charge the phone and the holder at the same time. Then the holder goes to your waistbelt, and when you put the phone back onto this holder, you are charging up the phone. So, in effect this is just like carrying two batteries, but more in style. I thought that was a cool idea - Is this thing around and used by many people ?

10. Improved refurb phone market

Indeed, no one wants a refurb phone. But what I'm talking about here is the specific practice of buying well-maintained secondhand phones from the developed world at a lower price and selling them to the underdeveloped part of the world.

Believe me, quite a few guys (especially youngsters) change their phones every 6 months. By the time they are trading their phones in, those phone are not exactly in bad shape - after all they've been around for only 6 months.

Even after 1-2 years of use, many phones remain still pretty usable - with a few quick fixes, the condition can improve even more.

To help things, can't we think of some kind of phone lease program, where deposits will be deducted depending on the phone's conditions as of the lease-end? To get more piece of the original deposit back, people might try to keep the phone's conditions good. This way we can source well-maintained secondhand phones in bulk, which can be shipped to underdeveloped areas and sold at a reasonable price.

I know that new phones are sold at under $100 in those markets - But then these phones are stripped-down versions that don't offer a lot of features. On the other hand, second hand phones from more developed countries will likely have a lot more multimedia features.

I haven't crunched the numbers yet so I'm not entirely sure if those secondhand phones can be sold at comparable prices as low-end new phones - but if they can, then these "high-end secondhand" models might be a quite good alternative to the sub-$100 new phones.

I'm sure there are folks already busy working to address these -- if not, I think these can present some nice business opportunities for mobile industry.

1. Smart handover agent

I want a piece of software on my mobile phone that automatically switches me to the most effective network (in terms of cost and/or performance), out of multiple protocols that are simutaneously available to me.

If I'm in a local cafe, my phone will switch to the free Wifi and by default run Skype when I make a phone call. Once I get in my car and start driving, my phone will then switch to Wibro (one of last week's hottest topics, with Sprint's announcement). Of course it can always revert to my good old cellular network if necessary.

Right now it seems all these different protocols (HSDPA, W-CDMA, Wibro, Wimax, Wifi...) are vying for the leader's spot. But as the 4G comes along, these protocols will learn how to live together, and accordingly, this so-called smart handover agent will become more significant.

2. My life cache

I want my service provider to back up all my mobile content - pics, video clips, podcasting, messaging, etc. for free and automatically. The service provider will capture this data in an "auto-sync" way using off-peak network, so that I don't have to do any additional work. I would be subscribed to the unlimited plan, so I dont't have to worry about additional data charges.

The tagline here is "Just use your phone, and we'll cache your life." Since all the content comes from mobile devices, the footprint (ie. file size) would not be huge, and therefore this kind of service won't likely cost the carriers huge investment. Google is giving 3GB to everyone and is not broke so far.

If the carrier has all the life's records of a user, it wouldn't be easy for her to change the carrier. So this would be a great way of customer retention. However, the carrier should not hold onto one's data in a walled garden manner - this goes against my assertion in the "Sleeping pills effect" post.

3. Very effective sync software

I want something like Micosoft ActiveSync on my feature phone. I just put the phone in the cradle hooked up to my PC, and the phone auto-syncs with Outlook, music playlists, newly updated content from my Widsets, etc. This could be neat.

4. Decent (yet simple) podcasting / videocasting client

I want to produce podcast and videocast right on my phone. Caution: I don't want anything fancy or overly complex - all those "media mixer" programs I've seen so far, especially mobile versions, have been too complex. I just want something very simple, that will let me "talk (shoot), send, and post". I can always go back to my post later on my PC and do any heavy-duty editing there. But being a simple service doesn't necessarily mean a barebone service: relevent actions such as server-side transcoding will have to take place.

5. Better voice technologies

I think I've seen SMS auto reader but I don't think I've seen an SMS auto generator. I want my mobile phone to write an SMS message for me when I just speak to it. This will come in handy while I'm driving.

Some might say "why don't you just call?" But text messaging is a great asynchronous way of communication, and under certain contexts, people prefer asynchronous communication. (For example, when you try to make up after a small argument with your girlfriend, you send a message, not call.)

Better voice-handling technologies will also allow on-spot language translation using mobile. With some carriers transitioning from CDMA to GSM, world's wireless networks are becoming more ubiquitous. This means you will be able to do the roaming nearly everywhere. If your phone can do the on-spot translation, you will be able to speak with foreigners even when you are traveling abroad. You will call a certain number or access a certain URL and start talking. Then the speech-to-text engine will change your voice into text, send the text to the translation server, which will translate the content and "tell" the result to the other person using text-to-speech engine. This way, you can effectively "talk" with foreigners.

In a subsequent post, I'll write about the other 5 things I wish. For a sneak preview:

6. Equivalent of ALT+TAB on mobile

7. Better Java

8. Killer accessories

9. 10x better batteries

10. Improved refurb phone market