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There are plenty of practical applications too--sites that navigate train routes, make concert reservations, find restaurants and follow the stock market, all on the fly. Says Kirk Boodry, a senior analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, in Tokyo: "These are different animals. The fixed-line Internet is about richness of content. The mobile Internet is about reach of content."
DoCoMo figured that out early, in part because it's a radical company for Japan. Run by a collection of castoffs and misfits from parent company Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (think of the old AT&T, only slower), DoCoMo isn't bogged down by Japan's sclerotic management style. The company's $175 billion market cap now dwarfs NTT's, and it is projected to earn $3 billion on sales of $39 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31.
DoCoMo's phenomenal success came in large part because of Enoki's shrewd strategy: make it easy to use, easy to pay for and loaded with gimmicky content to dazzle and entertain Web novices. "The Internet scared Japanese people," says Yukiko Takahashi, a manager at Bandai Networks, a subsidiary of the toy company that gave the world the Tamagotchi virtual pet and created rudimentary games that have been big hits on i-mode. "It made people think about connecting a PC, using a keyboard, modems, ISDN lines, stuff they didn't understand and stuff that cost too much. The smartest thing DoCoMo did was not to use the word Internet in any of its promotions."
Indeed, Japan and the Internet have gone together like sushi and ketchup. It's still surprising that tech-savvy, gadget-happy Japan sat on the sidelines during the boisterous dotcom boom. (Remember that?) Even today, in Japan, the world's second largest economy, only 625,000 homes have high-speed Internet access, out of a population of 126 million people. PCs never caught on, in part because the first models were ugly and bulky and used keyboards the Japanese aren't comfortable with. "We're keypad people," says DoCoMo's president, Keiji Tachikawa.
But the more important obstacle was money. Telecommunications is still a tightly regulated industry in Japan. Local phone calls are expensive and charged by the minute. Money, in fact, is one of the reasons the Japanese send e-mail on i-mode instead of simply calling their friends. DoCoMo charges i-mode users according to the amount of data they receive or send, not the amount of time they are online. One message with 50 characters costs 1 yen. A 1-min. phone call? Twenty yen.
Even so, the typical i-mode subscriber racks up about $80 a month in charges. Take Koji Hakuta, 28, a truck driver. In his pre-i-mode days, he would deliver a load of pipes from Tokyo to Nagoya and then return empty. But a year ago, his boss launched a site for i-mode that brokers deals between drivers and cargo companies. One night, Hakuta logged on and found a client needing pipes trucked the other way, back to Tokyo. That load earned Hakuta an extra $230. "It's changed the way I work," Hakuta says. The only problem is, he's so hooked on i-mode, browsing sites and e-mailing friends that his boss complains his phone is busy all the time.