digidenki Japan Digital Lifestyle

Japan (and maybe Korea) is the leading high tech mobile countries on this planet. Different from other countries, in Japan the mobile phone, not the PC, is the device of choice for internet access. Now Over 80 million users access the internet through their mobile phones.

High Tech Mobile Workers
Millions of businessmen are equipped with high end mobile phones other countries could only dream about: Phones offer screen sizes of up to 800×480 pixel, some eve have integrated hard disks, document viewer software and OCR business card scanners. Connection speeds range from 250 Kbits up to 5 Mbit and many of the users are on a flatrate mobile data plan.

Old School Business
But when looking at the “business communication usage” of these mobile phones, over 70% only use them for making business calls. Only 8-10% use the mobile phone for checking or writing business related mails. More advanced functions like reading business documents on a mobile device (even it is possible) is something only a few tech geeks or web2.0 managers make use of.

The Non-PDA country
Mobile business devices like PDA’s never took off in Japan. This is also due to the fact that many phones were already capable of doing most of the things a PDA could do but also due to the fact that many simply do not want to spend their free “off-site” time dealing with business matters.

The chill-out digital nomad
Unlike their counterparts in the US or Europe, the typical Japanese businessman does not spend his out-of-office time on accessing company mail or working on a digital document or presentation. Instead they use this time to “chill-out” trying to escape the hectic business life by reading, sleeping or playing games. Here Japanese use their mobile phone for writing private mails, reading about the latest news, listening to mobile music or playing mobile games.

The smartphone age
In 2006 Japan saw a new category of mobile phones:”smartphones”. While other countries already had smartphones in their markets for quite a while, Japan was a “late adopter”. Even the range of available devices increased month by month, selling a smartphones to Japanese consumers turned out to be a challenge:

The fruitless Blackberry
RIM together with DoCoMo introduced their Blackberry service and device in 2006. Unlike the rest of the world Japanese users did not care much about what the device had to offer. Up until today the main clients for Blackberry in Japan are foreigners or foreign companies. It needs to be seen if the service will also be able to win the hearts of Japanese businessmen.

For many Japanese owning a smartphone also includes the pressure to devote more of their “off-time” to business matters. (apart from making phone calls). This is especially true for the generation over 35. So selling smartphones to this age group will be a difficult task to handle. But there is a target group who might happily embrace the new business mobility:

The NewBiz
Young Japanese businessmen represent a new breed of digital nomads: Different from their older colleagues they are eager to devote their free time to digital business communication. They spent their student life with services like Gmail, Mixi, iCal and Navitime. They would rather look up a company on Google and find out about their reputation on GREE rather than checking the newspaper or consulting an older colleague. Being able to communicate and access information at any given time is a key part of their daily business. There is a chance that they will embrace the recent smartphone boom and make room for a new work style: the new digital nomad, “un-chilled”!

What needs to be seen is how this will change the typical Japanese off-site working style in the next 3-4 years and also how it will affect the usage patterns of mobile devices. If Japanese salarymen will trade in their mobile entertainment for mobile business needs to be seen.

Mixi is Japans most popular SNS service with a claimed market share of close to 80%. When conversation in the media come to SNS, Mixi is also the most mentioned Social Network Service. Mixi had around around 7 million in August 2007 a quite impressive number achieved in less than 3 years. After going public last year the stock value doubled within 12 hours. Mixi turned into the Japanese showcase for 2.0 success. So far the good part. But looking a bit deeper into the service reveals that the glory days of rising users numbers seems to have reached its limit. More and more users move away from Mixi looking for alternatives. The reasons: too much advertisement and too little added value.

Heavy Competition
Competitors like Gree for example offer the possibility to upload and watch videos, other platforms allow users to play games, listen to the playlists of people in their network, locate friends using GPS or even enter into mobile 3D worlds.

Mixi tried to keep-up by introducing video and music functions a few month ago but still Mixi stays what it is: a pure SNS service with some extra services attached to it.

The New Breed
If sheer user number speak for themselves then these two example can show where developments are going:

MobileGameTown (MoBaGe) by DeNA combines casual mobile games and SNS services. Just within less than 6 month registrations surpassed 6.5 million and they are still growing. And different from Mixi (which is web and mobile based) MoBaGe is only available on the mobile phone

“Maho no Island” is a mobile novel platform which allows users to write their own novels on the mobile phone and submit it to the site. The site offers thousands of novels written by users. They even published a book featuring some of the novels and it sold over millions of copies and made it into the best seller charts in Japan. Maho no Island also offers SNS functionalities to its 5.5 million mobile users.

Beyond SNS
All of these services did not start as a SNS service but they offered a unique value on its own with SNS as an added value to its users. And this is where the trend goes.

For example LISMO, KDDI AU’s mobile music service started to offer a function called “Utatomo” in 2006 for finding people with similar interests based on a users individual play list and their general interests helping the company to increase their overall music sales by 15%.

Conclusion
The time of SNS only services will soon be over. (Expect for maybe specific B2B or special interest SNS offers). In the future a SNS service will not be able to survive simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead SNS functions will become part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and in the end to drive sales.