@ MCW: iMode Gains Fans In Europe

[by Mike Butcher] Olivier Laury, content director of multimedia mobile, Bouygues Telecom (one of the three French GSM customers) which is, apparently, the most successful iMode service outside of Japan, spoke about their experience. One of the studies they did found that people want personalised content on iMode. They use specific sites on the Net, and want the same thing on the mobile. Customers tend to stick with their Internet expectations, so they tend to be very dissapointed with the WAP experience – while iMode depends totally on what the content providers have put into their iMode service. To this end he warned against content owners making iMode an exact copy of the web site.
But in the main he really thinks iMode is the best platforms for both content providers and consumers, because it provides an end-to-end solution for content, with “continuity, freshness, clear benefits, and depth”. Bouygues Telecom has 300 official sites, 19 categories, 400 unnofficial sites, with an average of 3 subscriptions per user at an ARPU of 10 Euros a month – ten times higher than on WAP. The UK’s O2, which plans its own iMode service, will no doubt be listening with interest.
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