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published
15 September 2000
Talk, talk
by Dylan Tweney
The Tweney Report is back, after a long summer (and a busy one
-- see below for some of our recent publications).
It's September, and the Internet industry is getting into the swing
of the fall conference season -- traditionally, the time when hardware,
software, and Internet companies unveil their biggest press releases.
(For actual products, you typically have to wait until later in
the year, or, more commonly, until the following spring.)
But this year, Internet companies are playing to a new crowd. The
Web, it turns out, is looking a lot different than it did earlier
in the year.
During this summer, the Internet crossed a couple of major milestones:
- More than half of U.S. households now have Web access [1]
- More than half of Web users are now women [2]
The fastest-growing demographic, according to the latter research,
is girls age 12-17. Their favorite Web sites cluster around traditional
areas of girl interest: fashion, music, and teen magazines like
Seventeen. But scratch the
surface, and you see the what the Internet really does differently:
It gives these girls a voice. Turns out that teenage girls are eager
to tell their own stories, to express their opinions, and to participate
in community-building
sites. It's all about talk.
At the same time, another sea change is brewing: The shift to wireless
Internet access. Several research firms have published predictions
that there will be over a billion users of Internet-enabled cell
phones by 2004 [3].
It's barely begun here in the States, where Web-enabled phones
are still, for the most part, difficult and frustrating to use.
Many analysts refuse to take the wireless Internet very seriously,
and with good reason -- so far, it's been underwhelming for American
cell phone customers [4].
But just wait until every fifth person in the world has a data-enabled
phone -- far more than the number of wired, PC-using netizens.
Here again, the kids are leading the charge. Look to teenagers
and 20-somethings in Europe and Japan for a glimpse of what's to
come.
In Japan, the cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo's popular I-mode service
offers basic Internet access to mobile phone users. Among the most
popular applications: Phone-to-phone email.
DoCoMo bills for I-mode usage according to how much data you send
and receive, not how much time you spend online. Its simple billing
system also lets content partners easily collect small monthly fees
in exchange for access to their sites or applications. The result
is that people use the data services, a lot; DoCoMo had 11 million
I-mode subscribers at last count.
A similar phenomenon holds true in Finland, where 3 out of 4 people
have a cell phone and frequently use their mobile handsets not to
talk, but to send short text messages to one another [5]. Again,
the service is cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous.
Stateside, there's nothing like this. Many cell phone carriers
let you send short messaging service (SMS) notes, but only to cell
phone users with the same carrier. As for the wireless Web, forget
it -- with most carriers, you burn up minutes just as fast using
their Web services as you do talking on the phone.
It's not as if there's no demand. Just look at the popularity of
PC-based chat services, such as AOL Instant Messager, MSN Messenger,
and ICQ. Wildly popular among teenagers, these services are finding
their way into the business environment as well. It's often easier
to send a short IM to a colleague across the hall or in another
building, rather than sending an email or picking up the phone.
IM conversations are immediate, they can be very efficient, and
they don't require your full attention. The perfect application
for multitasking American businesspeople.
Again, it's all about talk. But so far, most of the action has
been limited to PCs.
Imagine how the world would change if U.S. cell phone carriers
offered cheap, easy instant messaging. So why don't any of the carriers
seem to take IM very seriously? There's no telling what percentage
of AOL's $6.8 billion in annual revenues come from instant message
and text chat rooms, but I'm sure it's a lot.
[1] Nielsen/NetRatings
(Click
here for press release on demographics)
[2] It's
a Woman's World Wide Web
[3] Cahners press release: Wireless
Data Users to Reach 1.3 Billion by 2004
[4] NetTrends:
Skeptics Downplay Wireless Net
[5] Time
Digital: Cell Phone Nation
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