March 27, 2000

Sense of Site
Japanese Cell-Phone Companies
Are Pushing Wireless Internet

By ROBERT A. GUTH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TOKYO -- Japan is applying its miniaturization expertise to Web sites, and it could change the way people view the Internet.

Furious growth of Japan's cell-phone market is spurring a universe of Web sites that can be displayed on phones with tiny color screens. At the center of the action are services like NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, which connects a handset to the Internet, and have enticed Japanese content providers to tweak their Web sites so they can be beamed directly to cell phones.

The minisites include sports scores, stock trading, banking, weather forecasts, maps, concert tickets, train timetables, recipes and horoscopes. I-mode sites now number about 7,000 and are growing at a rate of about 20 a day. This month, NTT DoCoMo, the mobile-telephone unit of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., said it has five million i-mode users, a fivefold increase since August, making it the world's largest mobile-Internet service.

Japan is far ahead of the U.S. in mobile Web service, but the kinds of sites being pioneered here are certain to reach the U.S. eventually. Sprint Corp. is expanding its Wireless Web service, which now offers its U.S. wireless phone subscribers access to Yahoo!, Amazon.com and CNN.com over their cell phones.

The Japanese services solve some of the stickiest problems preventing broader use of the Internet. "They're making the Internet accessible to people who don't have an interest in PCs, or the budget or space in their homes," says Tim Clark, Tokyo-based president of consultancy TKAI Inc. Plus, using Japan's cell-phone Web sites, he says, is "bonehead simple."

All that adds up to big business for service providers and the Web sites. Among the sites offered through NTT DoCoMo's i-mode:

• Bandai Co., the toy maker of Tamagotchi digital-pet fame, ships a different animated character every day to subscribers' i-mode phones. Silly? Maybe, but this service and others that Bandai offers over i-mode boast 1,148,000 subscribers, each paying about $1 a month.

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• East Japan Railway Co. offers train timetables, guides to shopping areas around train stations, and a service that automatically notifies users when trains are delayed more than 30 minutes.

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• Publisher Recruit Co. offers subscribers digital discount coupons that they download and use at participating restaurants just by showing their phones.

The i-mode content basically consists of features of full-blown Web sites that are reworked for small phone screens. To find the sites, phone users navigate a menu screen with a thumb joystick, or search for sites using any of 10 or so i-mode search engines.

Subscribers can order things over the phone by entering a four-digit PIN. Since the cellular provider already has the subscriber's personal and billing information, users don't have to input such data each time they place an order. Payments are worked into the subscriber's phone bill, eliminating the security risk of entering credit-card information.

Most critically, operators keep the sites simple and focused, and the technology hidden. There is no separate dial-up into the Internet, and there are no long Internet addresses to remember -- keywords and short menus do the trick.

"We wanted to attract ordinary people, not techies," says Takeshi Natsuno, media director at NTT DoCoMo. "So we never used words like 'Internet' or 'Web.' "

Write to Robert A. Guth at rob.guth@wsj.com