Gebrüder Dorsch

Most science fiction deals with the future, but in general history is just a background to events that take place over a few years at most. This article concentrates on those SF writers whose stories take place over centuries or millennia of human history. Notes: due to extensive footnotes, article is shorter than it appears. An earlier version appeared on Radio Free Tomorrow. [Kuro5hin]

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Heute gibt es ein paar Publikationen, die älter sind, weil ich sie offline gesammelt habe. Es sind alles Rebloggings. Einfach nur, damit sie nicht vergessen werden.
Quasi als Sommerprogramm.
Für alle, die es nicht interessiert, einfach weiterblättern

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Hier was zum Thema i-mode und eplus

E-Plus offers an I-mode handset for £1. Given the recent press about I-mode failing to take off in Europe, is this an act of desperation?

First, let’s look at the figures which prove that I-mode doesn’t work in Europe. E-Plus in Germany has 7.1 million subscribers (source here), of whom 140,000 are on I-mode: 1.9% of their customers. By comparison, Vodafone Germany has 23 million subscribers (source here), 200,000 of whom are equivalent (i.e. Vodafone live! subscribers): that’s 0.8% of their customers. So, relatively, I-mode in Germany is selling about 2.5 times as well as Vodafone live! In the Netherlands, it’s even stronger - 2.74% of KPNs customers, or 3.4 times as well as Vodafone.

So what are these “several handicaps” which hamper I-mode’s long-term growth (according to the IHT article)?

• It’s not been available on prepay until now. So, now it is available on prepay, then presumably this won’t be hampering growth any more? Not that it’s unusual for new services to be restricted to monthly subscribers - in fact it’s very normal. WAP services were initially not available to prepay users here in the UK.

• Europeans don’t want to send email on their phones, because they can already send SMS messages. So presumably, MMS is equally doomed? Anecdotally, the folks I know with cameraphones have been mostly sending email with them, rather than picture messages (though that’s starting to change now that MMS is beginning to work across networks).

• “I-mode was marketed well in Japan, but Vodafone is marketed better in Europe”. From personal experience, I’d agree - and Vodafone have a range of promotional and sponsorship opportunities denied to their smaller competitors. But if so, why is E-Plus converting more of its customers to I-mode than Vodafone is?

• Operators are keen to disassociate themselves from I-mode, by not branding their products or services with the name. The “m-Mode” service was certainly slightly different from regular I-mode, thanks mainly to a different infrastructure (WAP/WML handsets, and no integrated billing infrastructure at first). I wouldn’t be surprised if DoCoMo wanted to distance themselves from a venture which ignores several key parts of what I-mode was all about. Meanwhile, I-mode services are in 5 territories across Europe. And why does the name matter? I’m no expert on international names, but I wouldn’t have thought that most consumers in these territories have heard of DoCoMo or I-mode… why does giving services local names imply that I-mode is an embarrassment?

Russ reckons the success of I-mode is down to their choice of markup language. I’m inclined to disagree, myself. Whilst this might be a good way to sell I-mode in to content providers (”it’s easy to work with us, you just use HTML“), in practice the kinds of things you want to do with mobile mean that you’ll end up building a dedicated mobile service anyway - and if you’re doing that, then the choice of markup language is really a very minor part of the effort.

There’s a lot of crap talked about WAP, and it’s understandably something the telcos want to avoid any association with in future. Which is why you get comments like “Analysts have been quick to pinpoint Vodafone’s success as a sign that mobile operators are finally exorcising the ghost of WAP“. These comments ignore the facts that (a) Vodafone live! uses WAP to deliver all its content services, as do other European operators, and (b) WAP worked in Japan; not quite as well as I-mode did, but companies like KDDI, who pushed WAP services, weren’t far behind.

IMHO I-mode works because it presents content providers with real, commercial opportunities. This means 2 things:

1. Consumers want to buy access to content; their phones are up to the job of delivering this content (preferably through always-on networks, though this isn’t a necessity), and the phones can display it attractively (larger, ideally colour screens).

2. Consumers can pay for content, and the content provider gets a reasonable share of this (that means, what the content provider considers a reasonable share, not what the operator can stomach handing over).

Of course, that’s not the whole picture: DoCoMo’s policy of vetting content for inclusion on their official portal was important, as was a marketing campaign which focused on utility, rather than technology.

Trying to work out why I-mode works reminds me of blind men feeling an elephant.

Posted by Tom Hume

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[Mobitopia]

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: : : : : Digital Data Porn : : : : :

: : : : : Digital Data Porn : : : : :

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UserLand has transferred ownership of its RSS 2.0 spec to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The spec is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. An advisory board was formed to support and advocate RSS. Its initial members are Dave Winer, Jon Udell, and Brent Simmons.

Dan Gillmor: RSS Moves a Step Forward. [Ranchero]

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