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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Sélection de livres - Brand Hijack -

FROM UNDERRATED TECHNOLOGY TO TEEN MUST-HAVE

Hijacked brands do not necessariy have to be great products. It's all about the killer experience.
The author is talking about the rise of SMS text messaging in Europe and Asia and the subsequent failure of the WAP (wireless application protocol) technology.
Finland. 1991. Nokia and a consortium of other telecom companies had just finished creating GSM, a new protocol that would allow customers of the various wireless carriers to communicate with each other. As a minor part of the protocol, they included a simple technology for text messaging. SMS, for short message service, was developed primarily as a sales tool.
However, within a decade, teenagers took over. And once teen established this new habit, older consumers copied them. Text messaging became a social connector for busy European and Asian professionals, just as Instant Messaging has entered the American workplace.
-from Brand Hijack

It's true that Japanese teens type so fast on text or SMS messaging or e-mail using mobile phone. In fact, since1999 we Japanese teens and young people normally have had three kinds of e-mail address: business, home (i.e. hotmail, gmail, yahoo, and other ISPs), and mobile. Interms of mobile e-mail address, the mobile phone service providers such as NTT DoCoMo "FOMA", Verizon, Vordafone, and KDDI give us one e-mail address on each mobile phone, and we can e-mail to every business or home address. Subsequantly, the mobile e-mail address have become a byproduct of a commuter culture; I used to go to my workplace with 30 minutes subway and used to spend the time on communicating with my family, relatives, and friends since I used to come home around midnight.

But one thing is, that I couldn't use that Japanese mobile all over the wolrd; I needed to apply another service when I had business trips abroad.
So, I'm interested in whether I can use BlackBerry worldwide, which is distributed to many business people in NYC and both in the U.S. and Europe and in fact, introduced to Japan last September.

The first picture on this post is one of the handsets NTT DoCoMo provides nowadays since their primary target audience is young early adopters.
And images of the handsets in 1998 are here.

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