AFTER the schools turn out in downtown Tokyo, it’s a common sight to see
a gaggle of girls in their uniforms looking at a mobile phone and giggling.
Later, as darkness gathers on the packed train back to the suburbs, office
workers sit head-down, tapping obsessively on the buttons of their
phones.
These are just a few of the many people addicted to i-mode, Japan’s latest
technofad and the country’s answer to WAP phones. And what a fad it is: i-mode
was only launched in February 1999, but by August this year it had signed up 10
million people. Demand has been so fierce that DoCoMo, the company that runs
i-mode, had to stop advertising the service because it couldn’t keep up. Its
overloaded computer system kept crashing.
A million a month
DoCoMo is still signing on people at a rate of a million a month. It
reckons on having 14 million subscribers by the end of the year, and if it keeps
growing at its present rate, by next September it will be the world’s largest
Internet service provider. Just in case you still think the mobile revolution is
just a lot of hype, in the minute it’s taken you to read this far, at least 20
Japanese people have acquired their Internet-ready phones.
In much of the developed world, the Internet exploded onto the scene in the
mid-1990s. Most ordinary Japanese missed out on that revolution. What’s
happening with i-mode now is Japan’s own brand of Net revolution. Business
analysts are asking whether it will stop at Japan’s shores, or sweep round the
world, sinking WAP in the…
