Japan Mobile Market

2010-02-20 @ BarCamp Kanazawa

Akky Akimoto

Asiajin.com / etc.

No photo of my face

• I am trying to keep anonymity
• If not close-up (in a mob), okay

Agenda

• Who is Akky?
• Japan Mobile Web

Who is Akky?

3 jobs

• Pro blogger for Cybozu Labs (hired, part-time)
• Asiajin (English Blog on Japanese IT/Web) Co-founder
• Narabe.com (user-generated comarison charts), etc. Entrepreneur

Cybozu Who?

• An independent packaged-software vendor
• No.1 groupware vendor in Japan (leading #2 IBM/Lotus and #3 Microsoft)
• Enterprise web collaboration package - scheduler, bulletin board, messaging, to do, project management, workflow, web database, etc.

Groupware Market Share

in Japan

1. Cybozu (25.6%)
2. IBM/Lotus (24.7%)
3. Microsoft Exchange (13.1%)

Cybozu and Akky

• 2002-2005 engineering director of Cybozu USA in San Francisco, USA
• 2005- researcher, then pro-blogger
• kind of evangeling company/products

Asiajin blog

• Group blog on Japanese Web/IT industory news
• started end of 2007 by Shun'ichi Arai and I
• 4800 feed subscribers, 75% of which from outside of Japan
• around 10 contributors: Japanese, German, Israeli, British, Korean, etc.
• 4 of core team. 3 of them are here :-)

What makes Asiajin unique?

• writes about very "unpopular" topic... "Japanese Web"
  • i.e. not Manga, Anime, Weird People (there are tons of English blogs/media on them)
• Half of us are Japanese and most are using Japanese websites daily
• Some articles are not release-baseds, things happening on the Japanese web

Is Asiajin a business?

• Not yet. Probably never
• as it is super niche.
• But we love sponsors and/or consulting requests

Being entrepreneur

• As an individual
• Small challenges
• Hope to get freedom

Web2.0 Comparison Narabe.com

• "Wikipedia for Comparison Chart"
• Japanese version is so so. No users on English version.
• symfony/PHP5.2/Apache/MySQL/Amazon EC2&S3

Japanese Cellphone Market

• Docomo, KDDI au and Softbank Mobile
• Sales share 2008: Docomo 51%, KDDI 31%, Softbank 18%
• Usage share 2009(by Kakaku.com traffic): Docomo 45%, KDDI 37%, Softbank 18%

"Galapagos" self-described

• Vendor share - even Nokia failed, but...

Why Japanese Cellphone have so much features?

• 3 Carriers decide what to provide
• Vendors just follow their opinions
• Competition urged people to replace their cellphone every year in few years ago
• Now regulated and people uses the same one longer, but that also paused evolution

Cellphone Contents Business

• long history (first Docomo app store started in 2001)
• open standard (Compact HTML, Java ME) but old and problematic
• apps/contents store charged on cellphone bills
• easy to collect money from careless people and parents

Japanese Cellphone Usage

• 30-120 min commuting on train, very packed - single hand, easy UI
• Only connect at stations in Tokyo metro - define application/page
• People use it for "killing time"

Another Cellphone Usage

• Young people without PC
• everything done on mobile (never touch QWERTY)
• unlimited plan for e-mail (no SMS. why we need SMS?)

iPhone? Successful or not?

• No.1 smartphone!
• But what is "smart" phone? (answer: non-Japanese phone)
• iPhone is one of the cheapest now. still slow but now has few percents.

What are misunderstood from oversea?

• "QWERTY" is the most comfortable input for every human being
• People want their PC experience on mobile
• Two handed multi touch is always easier than single handed

So Japanese-only cellphone last?

• No. World defacto will win at the end, history tells
• It happend at MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Word/Excel, Google
• Someday domestic market won't be able to support their original phones (but not this year)

That's all

ありがとうございます

Contacts