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Part - II

The market of content suppliers is highly fragmented and everyone is on the lookout for a niche which they can hold on to. One of the popular cellular shopping sites came up with a business model where it becomes easier for the big European fashion houses to target the Japanese market. The saturation of the youth market has got some of the players to look at the older segment of the population. The cell phone manufacturing industry recognized the shift in focus and developed phones that were more robust, had larger screens and icons. Old people who felt the need to be connected all the time lapped it all up. Content management companies began to provide health related information. One of the firms even offered a pedometer on the phone that calculated the number of miles that the person walked in the day.

The revenue model followed by these companies involved a fixed cost and variable cost where the user is charged depending on the content that he uses. The variable component has given rise to piracy where there is unauthorized peer to peer sharing of the content. Nokia has invented a system called "forward lock" which prevents users from forwarding copyrighted content.

According to analysts of the Wireless World Forum the worldwide market for mobile content will grow from approximately $5 billion in 2003 to $13 billion in the year 2006. But every big shark in town wants a bite - cellular phone manufacturers, cellular operators, operating system providers, software providers, media companies and content management firms. Battle plans have been adumbrated in board rooms all over the world. Nokia released the N-Gage, a horizontal phone that doubles up as a sophisticated gaming device with a Bluetooth chip. Nokia has also taken a majority stake in Symbian - the world’s primary cellular operating systems provider.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s leading wireless carrier proactively developed i-mode websites; this has resulted in the capturing of approximately 40 million subscribers. They bill the i-mode website developer a percentage of the total earnings. As a result the risk profile of the website developer drastically reduces. NTT DoCoMo has entered into licensing deals with Netherlands’s KPN, France’s Bouygues Telecom and Telefonica in Spain.

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* Contributed by: -
Anish Chandy,
PGP 2003-05,
TAPMI, Manipal,
Published in Bi-annual Journal of TAPMI - 'Amartya'.