Nine years ago, I was lucky enough to work for Unwired Planet, a small Silicon Valley company with brilliant innovators trying to enable Internet services on the mobile phone (later morphed into Openwave Systems). Our task: to imagine what mobile phones could do with the capabilities of the Internet. What we didn’t know then was that it would take nearly a decade to realize these dreams, and that it would happen first in South Korea, not the United States.
Even then we knew that the mobile Internet was a different paradigm from the cable Internet: people would not buy books from Amazon.com on their phone and they would not do research with Google. Instead, we envision the mobility of the experience, with phones that know who we are and where we are. And since it’s hard to type on phones, services will rarely prompt for text input. To account for small screens, sites would remove all but the most important information. News or weather services would work with the phone’s location. Stock symbols or email usernames would be remembered automatically. We are mobile. We want fast and easy data. No, cable internet was not our model.
What happened? European and US carriers were selling “Internet on the phone” and developers were busily streaming their complex websites from PC to mobile phone, barely stripping them down for mobile use. Stock quotes were 18-40 clicks away. You couldn’t get the weather in less than 5 minutes. This was definitely not our dream.
I was lucky though, as Openwave sent me on annual research trips to Japan. Japanese culture and competition led them to develop the best mobile data services in the world. They soon exported camera phones and ringtone downloads to other countries. This was not our dream yet, but it was getting closer.
In 2005 I went to South Korea to research your services. They had quietly developed better consumer data services than he had seen anywhere else in the world. S.K. Telecom June The service is a masterpiece of the consumer.
After leaving Openwave early last year, I decided to look at these markets again, this time freely sharing the results with the public. This is what I found:
Imagine you are 7 years old. You ask your parents for a mobile phone. Do you understand? In South Korea you do. First, remind mom and dad that the phone will track you automatically (no, your parents don’t have to keep checking where you are; instead, your parents get an SMS when your phone leaves a specific geographic area, like around your school or House). He then reminds them that with SK Telecom’s jingle service for children, will have fixed limits on costs. The phones are also designed for young children, with a fixed limit on how many phone numbers can be stored or used (so you can only call Mom and Dad) and protection against inappropriate services or use. Also, you complain, “everyone else has one…”
You are now in high school. You move to SK Telecom TTL service (KTF has a similar service). TTL has TTL areas, which are cafeteria-style hangouts with free wired Internet access and other mobile services. Also, if you only use the phone in your areas, your costs are much lower. Children like music, right? Sign up to Cantaloupe Prayed fimm and get all the music downloads you want for just $5 a month. You want My space? In Korea this is cimundo, and is available on the phone of all mobile operators. It’s not your PC website, which is inappropriate for a phone, but an easy-to-use 2-3 click experience that’s so addictive it gets 20 million visitors a month (South Korea only has 48 million citizens).
As an adult, you may find cize useful for buying movie tickets and charging them to your phone bill (send an SMS with a code that you write at the movie theater to get the tickets). Golf helps you set up your tee times and keep track of your handicap. Do you need a taxi? Just press a few keys – they know your location and will send it right to you. Small business owner? You can remotely monitor your restaurant from your phone while you are away.
And yes, you can get a stock quote. How many key clicks? None. Just open your phone and 1MM scrolls your favorite stock quote on a line on your idle screen (along with weather and local news).
Many of these services are also available in Japan, but I found the user interface and reduced typing or scrolling on SK Telecom phones to be much more consumer-oriented. See the full reports at www.consumerease.com. These services are amazing and I can’t wait until they are available here.
