[MobileMusic @ Midem] The iMode Way of Life

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The biggest heavyweight at Mobile Music conference at Midem was Takeshi Natsuno
managing director and founder of i-mode for NTTDoCoMo. His clarion call: all of us have to work together: the triad of telecom, handset and content owners have to shun the politics…

iMode has 42.2 million subscribers…biggest Internet service in the world, not just wireless Internet…

We will launch 5 new phones for 3G in the next few days…

– mega pixel camera

– HTML mail

– videophone

Picture messaging not as big: not too many people are sending pictures…even though we have tons of camera phones…picture messaging is not really a big money spinner for operator…We are looking to expand that market: we are including a bar code reader into all our new phones: my card has a bar code on my business card, and my phone or somebody else’s can now scan that and store the info..think about it, the users are endless…

Video phones are big…Interesting fact: Ladies do not want to show their facs on the video phone without makeup…so they can start with showing cartoon avatars, and after they have finished their makeup, then they can turn on the camera…

Key driver of iMode is music and games…1 billion Euros market for content in iMode, currently…we take only 9 percent and rest is passed on to content owners…

Ringtones: 500 million Euros…so it is 50 % of our content is ringtones…in 2003, 1.4 billion ringtones downloaded…

iMode global expansion: we have already formed the iMode alliance…1.5 million active subscribers of iMode outside Japan…collective subscriber base of iMode Collective is already 555 million…

Goal outside Japan: reaching 100 million iMode subscribers in 2010

Lessons from iMode:

– mobile industry has to recognize FACTS as fact…the industry has to cut through politics and diplomacy…

– without content, technology and bandwidth are nothing more than expensive gadgets for engineers.

– without business models, content players never come up…

– without good user marketing, even the best service cannot be a big hit

– not so much different user behavior among countries and regions than expected.

At the same time, for music industry:

– Music industry has to recognize FACTS as facts

– Without easy technology, consumers will not pay any money

– without reasonable pricing, consumers will not pay any money

– without business model, mobile industry would face difficulty to position them as platformer

Natsuno iMode Philosophy

– Mobile content world is an ecosystem

– No one player or industry can rule the world

– Win-win and “positive feedback” relationship between operator and content provider is core

– Be ordinary-user centric: Ask your wife and mother, if they hate it, you are already a loser

– Be honest and simple: Forget pride. Stop excuse. Just do what’s simple and better for user

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