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Japan Internet Report No. 57 May 2001
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In this month's issue:
- Tokyo's Internet cafes
- Books: the good, the bad, and the filtered
- Wireless handsets and PCs: Full circle?
- Keep those trivial communications coming...
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Tokyo's Internet cafes
Last month I risked caffeine overdose and dodged
flyer-flogging street touts to make the rounds of
several of Tokyo's Internet cafes. This mission was
inspired by 1) Frank Yu's excellent overview of Internet
cafes throughout Asia (see http://www.asiainternetreport.com/AIR_0103.html#netcafes),
2) a need to get out of the office more, and 3) a desire
to see how people get along without broadband access
both at home and work.
With respect to 3) above, the answer is quite well,
thank you very much. In fact, the connectivity at these
places is outstanding. Read on for details.
Yahoo! Cafe
The Yahoo! Cafe, located on a side street off the main
drag in the heart of Tokyo's tony Omotesando district,
was pleasantly populated on a recent Monday night. The
relative quiet of the place struck me. The house music
is good and low-volume, helping visitors achieve the
true purpose of a cafe visit - conversation and reading.
It's a two-story space with five sections: two with
computers and two without, plus a standalone in-house
Starbucks from which you can order drinks and snacks
that can be enjoyed anywhere within the facility. No
charge for computer use, though users must register and
pay if they damage the equipment.
All of the machines have flat displays, and many are
laptops with wireless LAN connections, making for a
spacious feel and the ability to move about. There was a
30-minute wait to get online, and I was enjoying the
atmosphere too much to start staring into a screen
anyway, so I just registered and enjoyed one of my new
books. The 30 PCs available boast connection speeds up
to 100Mbps, no doubt making for some fiery surfing.
This is reportedly Yahoo! Japan's first "bricks and
mortar" venture, and Starbucks is a natural partner. The
company is doing everything right with this facility;
it's not only the best Internet cafe I've been in to
date, it's one of the best cafes I've enjoyed in Tokyo.
Pluses: Great atmosphere, free computing, good
refreshments, outstanding seating/ambience.
Minuses: Demand for computers high. Not a place to get
serious work done, if, like me, you are easily
distracted by good music and great people-watching.
Location: (http://cafe.yahoo.co.jp/)
New New
Lured by a full-color newspaper insert, I next made my
way to New New, a (what else?) brand new facility
located close to the heart of Shibuya, Tokyo's
playground for the young and hip.
This is the place to go for serious computing. There are
146 machines, and on the night I was there, a grand
total of five customers (that's a utilization rate of
3.4%). There's a 500 yen per hour usage fee, but a good
selection of free drinks with unlimited refills from
three dispensers. You are even supposed to be able to
order food from the default browser menu (I tried for
three different deserts but every one was "sold out").
Other than browsers, the only software available is
Word, Excel, and Acrobat, but every machine has a 10Mbps
connection and many are equipped with headset
microphones. Most of the seats are in semi-private,
single-person carrels, but "pair" (two-person) seating
is also available. Gaming and live chat capabilities are
key selling points.
Pluses: Unsurpassed computer availability, good
connectivity, spanking clean surroundings, privacy, free
drinks. Great place to concentrate and get work done.
Minuses: Office-like decor, no space for socializing.
Location: (http://www.dlg.co.jp)
Bagus
Just down the street from New New is Bagus, an
established Internet cafe. Bagus boasts a total of 100
PCs with 1.5Mbps fiber connectivity and an extensive
library of manga, videos, games, and paperback books. On
the night I was there only 30% or so of the seats were
taken, and there was an orderly, library-like quiet
about the place, although the carpets tell a story of
serious foot traffic and spilled drinks - a sharp
contrast to the squeaky cleanliness of Yahoo! and New
New.
But Bagus appears to be a reliable refuge for serious
surfers and readers seeking refuge from Shibuya's noise
and bustle, plus the drinks are free. Per-hour computer
usage fee is a modest 450 yen, with special lower rates
for all-night users.
Pluses: Excellent computer availability, good
connectivity, outstanding traditional media selection,
low hourly fee, free drinks, 24 hour availability.
Minuses: Somewhat dingy decor, uninspired service
Location: (http://www.bagus-comic.com/)
mr-Canada Cyber Cafe
Running an Internet cafe whose only entrance visible
from the street is through a Starbucks didn't appear to
me to be the best strategy for success. But that's
exactly what the owners of mr-Canada Cyber Cafe, which
is located at the base of the Kasumigaseki Building near
Toranomon Station, are doing.
This place is an odd combination of a Canadian travel
promotion center (information only, no booking), a cafe
with Internet access (whose computers are operated by
the travel promotion center), and an adjoining
Starbucks, which literally shares the same floor area
(the entities are separated only by different colored
tiles).
When I visited, there were six customers, none of who
were sitting at the 12 PCs neatly arranged along two
walls. But according to the cafe staff there is a plan
afoot to "convert the PCs to Canada-only information"
(??) so get your strokes in while this virgin territory
remains unspoiled.
Pluses: Excellent computer availability, free computer
usage with registration
Minuses: Slow connectivity, odd juxtaposition to
Starbucks
Location: (http://www.mr-canada.com/)
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Books: the good, the bad, and the filtered
If the wide availability of Internet cafes wasn't enough
to drive the point home, a trip to one of my favorite
Tokyo bookstores last night reminded me how much things
have changed in the last five years. In 1996, I was hard
pressed to find any books about the Internet at Tokyo
booksellers, even a technical bookstore in Akihabara. In
fact, at the time, there weren't even any current,
reliable statistics for Japan's Internet user population
(see http://www.jir.net/jir3_96.html#COMMENTARY).
But last night, I counted 22 books on Internet-enabled
mobile phone marketing alone, plus 28 books on
one-to-one Internet marketing. I didn't bother to count
the books on "Internet," since this has morphed into a
multi-subject category. There must have been hundreds on
the shelf.
Unfortunately, like many of the sites created during the
long Internet boom, most books about the Internet are
junk. Of the 22 volumes dealing with Internet-enabled
mobile phone marketing, only one was satisfactory, and
the bookseller succeeded in separating me from 1,680
yen.
Excellent value in this case, but I've come to realize
that good books are few and far between. One result is
that buying books online without first flipping through
them in a bookstore can be disappointing.
For example, I recently dropped U.S. $65 at Amazon.com
on an unreviewed English language book about Japanese
real estate that turned out to be a real clinker - full
of misinformation about Japan, order-of-magnitude
mathematical errors, and almost complete lack of any
practical insight. So I decided to search for some
Japanese language sources, and was pleasantly surprised
to find three different books covering my particular
topic of interest at Amazon.co.jp. Moreover, all were
supported by at least two reader reviews, which was
impressive concerning the recent publication dates. I
placed an order on a late Sunday morning and it arrived
the next day.
Outstanding service and good books! Thanks to
Amazon.com's reader reviews, I have just the right
takealong for my next cafe expedition...
The point is that as the amount of information available
in print and online snowballs, readers and Web surfers
alike are relying more and more on "editors" who help
them zero in on worthwhile content. These third parties
may be other readers, Yahoo! employees, or even DoCoMo
with its list of official i-mode content providers. In
any case, they will only grow more important, more
widely-used, and more influential as it becomes
increasingly difficult for consumers to filter content
on their own.
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Wireless handsets and PCs: Full circle?
Asian nations including Japan were slow to adopt PCs
because of a critical limitation - early PCs didn't
allow Asian users to input text in their native
language. Double-byte compatibility for personal
computers came years after the first English operating
systems. The Macintosh OS incorporated Japanese
character support before DOS and other alternatives, and
one result is that Apple's share of the Japan market is
larger than its share of the U.S. market even today.
Since all the key operating systems began supporting
Japanese, personal computers use has skyrocketed here.
Consumers were always interested in computing, but the
usability of the technology was extremely poor at first.
It has improved dramatically of course, but still needs
a lot of work.
I wonder if we'll see a similar pattern with
Internet-enabled cellular phones - but this time in
reverse, whereby the technology matures in Japan before
migrating to the U.S. Consumers in Europe and the U.S.
have been slow to adopt Internet-enabled cellular
technology, in my view for two key reasons. First, the
user experience is extremely poor. Second, there is
relatively less demand in the West for non-essential,
trivial, "touching base" communications.
There is not much vendors can do about the second
problem. Savvy Japanese manufacturers and carriers have
always known that new technologies and services rarely
create new consumer behavior. Rather, new technologies
and services function as "vessels" for pre-existing (but
ever-evolving) consumer needs. For example, over the
last 17 years we've seen the Japanese need for
non-essential communications transform the telephone
from 1) a boring tool for essential errands (the fixed,
landline phone), to 2) a personal communications tool
(cordless, pushbutton, multiline phone), to 3) a
wearable, always-on device for silly chatting and
"feeling connected" (the cellular handset).
With respect to user experience, in the West a lot of
the elements that make for a good user experience are
outside the control of individual manufacturers or
service providers. Adopting Internet protocol,
effectively assembling a core group of "content"
(actually service) providers, getting handset makers to
support a new cellular-based online service - these are
all tasks DoCoMo was able to accomplish in large part
because of the structure of the cellular telephone
industry in Japan.
In any case, DoCoMo has provided a blueprint for how to
create a wireless user experience far superior to
anything currently available outside of Japan. And
what's more, the test launch in Tokyo this week of
DoCoMo's 3G FOMA service means that handsets,
transmission technology, and applications will have a
few product cycles behind them well before 3G cellular
services become widely available in the West. Given
Japan's cutthroat consumer electronics market, that just
might lead to the kind of improvements that will make 3G
services irresistible overseas as well.
Besides, I do believe that we Westerners also have
latent needs for useless communication. Heck, recently
I've discovered myself phoning my wife several times a
day for not much reason. The Japanese cellular
experience may eventually come full circle in the West
as well - and in ways we haven't yet imagined.
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Keep those trivial communications coming...
...and support your local monopoly. It's exactly those
useless messages that make i-mode a success for DoCoMo
in a larger sense of the word.
i-mode packet revenues are impressive, but they only
account for about 6.5% of DoCoMo's revenues. The real
value of i-mode is in 1) the peripheral voice traffic
generated, and 2) the basic monthly cellular
subscription fees paid by consumers who are attracted to
the i-mode service, which they cannot enjoy without
purchasing a telephone...
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Tim Clark
Strategy Director, Japan
tim@jir.net
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