CTIA - DoCoMo In The �Lifestyle Infrastructure� Business at MobHappy


location based services

NTT DoCoMo CEO Masao Nakamura’s keynote address at CTIA didn’t hold anything too groundbreaking, apart from a segment on how the company views itself. While it’s partly some flowery corporate-speak, it also does give a little insight into how the mobile market is changing, particularly in maturing markets. He characterized DoCoMo as starting out in the telecommunications infrastructure business, selling mobile voice service. Then, in 1999, with the advent of i-mode, it became an IT infrastructure business.

Now, Nakamura says the company is in the lifestyle infrastructure business — not selling connectivity, but developing services that allow mobile technology to pervade every aspect of its users’ lives. The focus isn’t so much on coming up with new mobile-specific applications and services, but rather ones that simplify and build on everyday life and experiences. It’s an interesting way to think about mobility, particularly coming from a carrier.

One other note from the talk — DoCoMo says Japanese mobile penetration is at 71.1%. That’s a lot lower than many European nations, and not that far ahead of the US. If DoCoMo’s thinking about how to operate in a saturated market that’s at less than 75% penetration, what are the implication for carriers in markets with higher penetration that are still focusing on grabbing new customers?

Technorati Tags: mobile, ctia, docomo


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3 Responses to “CTIA - DoCoMo In The “Lifestyle Infrastructure” Business”
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1 Dean
Apr 6th, 2006 at 8:07 pm

Did Nakamura-san mention any details so to how DoCoMo or any others, could guarantee that disparate devices, desktop pc’s and mac’s and tv’s/ other appliances could sync/ handshake effectively with their “digital lifestyle services”?

I see this as a key challenge for DoCoMo or any carrier for that matter.

2 Jan Michael Hess
Apr 9th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

“Digital Lifestyle” is becoming a key concept in many strategies of MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) or FNOs (Fixed Network Operators). Some of them, such as the new challenger in Japan called Softbank are working on becoming what I call a UNO (Ubiquitous Network Operator).

DoCoMo, similar to SK Telecom in South Korea, is the market leader with over 50% market share. In such a situation the MNO is financially well equipped to kick-off new digital lifestyle enabling technologies such as FeliCa in Japan. FeliCa is Sony’s NFC (Near Field Communication) technology that DoCoMo already embedded into more than 10 million mobile phones. DoCoMo’s FeliCa strategy, recently adopted by KDDI and Vodafone, is a really good example on what it means to push new digital lifestyle infrastructure into the market.

In contrast, small MNOs being number 3 or 4 in a specific market usually cannot think that big and invest into new infrastructure technology such as FeliCa or, alternatively, into the content business. The smaller MNOs should realise more quickly that they are a bitpipe that should optimise the cost per bit transmission of their networks. Only then do they have a chance of keeping up during the industry’s migration to 3G and beyond.

3 Carlo Longino
Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:02 pm

Dean — in a word, no But one big push currently for DoCoMo is its FeliCA contactless IC platform, which bridges some disparate systems and could support some of these applications.