Seamless mobility 9781845442200, 9781845440565

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Volume 6 Number 3 2004

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ISSN 1463-6697

info The journal of policy, regulation and strategy for telecommunications, information and media Seamless mobility Guest Editors: Bertil Thorngren, Per Andersson, Erik Bohlin and Magnus Boman

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info Volume 6, Number 3, 2004

ISSN 1463-6697

Seamless mobility Guest Editors: Bertil Thorngren, Per Andersson, Erik Bohlin and Magnus Boman

Contents 166 Access this journal online 167 Abstracts & keywords Guest editorial 169 Seamless mobility: more than it seems Bertil Thorngren, Per Andersson, Erik Bohlin and Magnus Boman 172 Towards seamless mobility with personal servers Markus Bylund and Zary Segall 180 Practising mobile professional work: tales of locational, operational, and interactional mobility Masao Kakihara and Carsten Sørensen

188 Ubiquitous visions and opaque realities: professionals talking about mobile technologies Carsten Sørensen and David Gibson 197 Mobile communications: Europe, Japan and South Korea in a comparative perspective Anders Henten, Henning Olesen, Dan Saugstrup and Su-En Tan 208 Key technological trajectories and the expansion of mobile Internet applications Jeffrey L. Funk 216 Rearview

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advanced that support this observation (network independence, UI/device flexibility, and user experience continuity), and a possible solution is proposed that would take people in that direction (the personal server).

Abstracts & keywords

Practising mobile professional work: tales of locational, operational, and interactional mobility Masao Kakihara and Carsten Sørensen Keywords Mobile communication systems, Professional associations, Communication, Technology led strategy, Japan

Seamless mobility: more than it seems Bertil Thorngren, Per Andersson, Erik Bohlin and Magnus Boman Keywords Mobile communication systems, Telephone networks, Service industries The five papers in this special issue have been selected from presentations held at the 2003 Mobility Roundtable, held at Stockholm. Looks at the inevitable merge of the tele-centric and data-centric world and mobile Internet and how they have enabled mobile access in both professional and personal lifestyles. Evaluates demand, supply and culture. Opines that with future developments hard to predict new actors from other sectors, such as hotels and restaurants could, by merging their interests, provide a seamless roaming service. Conclusions drawn are that conceptions of mobility in all lifestyles will be broadened to expect an environment of continuous usage.

Ubiquitous visions and opaque realities: professionals talking about mobile technologies Carsten Sørensen and David Gibson Keywords Mobile communication systems, Flexible working, Professions

Towards seamless mobility with personal servers Markus Bylund and Zary Segall Keywords Computer hardware, Control technology, Telecommunications, Mobile communication systems Observes that the future of mobile communication networks lies not only in how successful people are in deploying technologies (2.5G or 3G with a high degree of coverage and roaming between operators), but also in how well people can create a functioning environment and usage situation for end-users in which they can get a homogeneous and continuous usage experience, despite the very heterogeneous world in which they, after all, will live. Concepts are

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · Abstracts & keywords q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697

Fueled by strong market forces as well as by increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive mobile technologies, shifts in working practices and the application of mobile technologies have been occurring around the turn of the millennium. One such change concerns the work of professionals. This paper discusses the emergence of the mobile professional, through a field study of more than 60 professional workers in Tokyo during 2002. The paper concludes that one must broaden one’s conception of mobility and conceptualize mobile professional work in terms of locational, operational, and interactional mobility. Furthermore, some implications for a new design of mobile professional work and technology use are drawn from the analysis of the field study: ICT as mobility-booster; maintaining multiple ongoing interactions; the importance of personal networks; and places as material foundations for interaction.

It is essential for professionals to have flexible access to information sources and interaction with clients and colleagues. Mobile phones, e-mail, pagers, laptops, and PCs all aim to facilitate the flexibility necessary for conducting their work. Ideally, professionals with intense demands on their time should not be supported by various information and interaction technologies, they should embed core domesticated technologies. This paper examines how the vision of iniquitous ICT support for professional work meets the harsh realities through interviews with 16 individual professionals from 16 different organisations. The paper aims to answer the question of the applicability and reality of ubiquitous computing in today’s work environment and where technology is in terms of limitations for the professional. The study demonstrates that the joint life of professionals and their technologies is not one best characterised by the technical and the social

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Key technological trajectories and the expansion of mobile Internet applications

merging seamlessly. It is instead one burdened by constant attention.

Jeffrey L. Funk Keywords Mobile communication systems, Internet, Computer applications, Japan

Mobile communications: Europe, Japan and South Korea in a comparative perspective Anders Henten, Henning Olesen, Dan Saugstrup and Su-En Tan Keywords Mobile communication systems, Statistical analysis, Marketing models This paper has two interrelated purposes. One is to provide an empirical overview of the developments of new mobile systems and services in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The other is to examine the discussions regarding the possible explanations for the present lead that East Asia has in new mobile developments. The motivation for making a comparative analysis of mobile developments in Europe, Japan and South Korea is the fact that Japan and South Korea have taken the lead within mobile communications during the last few years, whereas Europe, and in particular the Nordic countries, was leading the way with GSM.

This paper describes the key technological trajectories and their potential effect on the expansion of mobile Internet applications. The initial success of entertainment content in Japan in 1999 caused manufacturers to introduce phones with color displays, polyphonic tones, cameras, and Java programs, and these functions are supported by other technological improvements like faster microprocessors, larger memory, and faster network speeds. Coupled with an evolution in user behavior, these technologies are making the phone a portable entertainment player, a new marketing tool for retailers and manufacturers, a multi-channel shopping device, a navigation tool, a new type of ticket and money, and a new mobile intranet device. These trends will have a large impact on competition in the global mobile phone market as dominant designs emerge at the global level.

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Guest editorial Seamless mobility: more than it seems Bertil Thorngren Per Andersson Erik Bohlin and Magnus Boman Guest editors Bertil Thorngren is Professor and Per Andersson is Associate Professor, both at Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Erik Bohlin is Associate Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Go¨teborg, Sweden. Magnus Boman is Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology and Senior Researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Stockholm, Sweden.

Keywords Mobile communication systems, Telephone networks, Service industries

Abstract The five papers in this special issue have been selected from presentations held at the 2003 Mobility Roundtable, held at Stockholm. Looks at the inevitable merge of the tele-centric and data-centric world and mobile Internet and how they have enabled mobile access in both professional and personal lifestyles. Evaluates demand, supply and culture. Opines that with future developments hard to predict new actors from other sectors, such as hotels and restaurants could, by merging their interests, provide a seamless roaming service. Conclusions drawn are that conceptions of mobility in all lifestyles will be broadened to expect an environment of continuous usage.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

Info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 169-171 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549480

Seamless mobility was the title of a small workshop in Stockholm, held in September 2001 as a precursor to a series of Mobility Roundtables held over the past three years (in Tokyo, Stockholm, and Austin). The notion of “seamless mobility” has since become more prevalent in, for instance, public debates, industry magazines, research publications and programmes for future research (e.g. sponsored by the European Commission). Even back in 2001 it seemed inevitable that the tele-centric world of 2/2.5/3G cellular networkbased services was likely to merge with the datacentric world based on Ethernet with Wireless LANs (WiFi), as a natural extension providing Mbit/s access at hot spots outside offices and homes. From a user’s perspective, a combination of the two worlds held great promise. Even if WiFi could provide data communication at superior capacity and high speeds at a potentially lower price, there was (and is) also a need for greater coverage on an anywhere/anytime basis, where cell networks have a proven track record. For many cell phone users, even data-rates below 100kbit/s might anyhow be more than enough for most “convenience services” such as checking time tables and bank accounts, or even for sending pictures and streaming video. In less time-sensitive applications, the option of using WiFi or the fixed network has the potential of providing more capacity at a lower cost. It is largely a matter of perspective. If you start from a data-centric perspective, cellular networks can be an attractive extension, albeit at lower speed and at a higher price per Mbyte. If you start from a tele-centric perspective, WiFi can be an attractive extension, albeit with spottier coverage and qualityof-service. Either way, a more or less “seamless” combination, making the best out of two worlds, looked attractive from a user perspective – but back in 2001 it was decidedly less so from a vendor and operator perspective. Operators of enhanced (2.5/ 3G) networks looked on WiFi options as a negative challenge, or even as an outright threat “stealing the thunder” from their massive investments in licences and costly new infrastructures. In light of this general development, and of the three Mobility Roundtables completed since then (Tokyo in 2002, Stockholm in 2003, and Austin in 2004), the initial debate on seamless mobility already looks like history. Most operators have now adopted WiFi as part of their wireless offerings, in some cases as an outright extension of fixed-line and wire-bound services. Future developments are still hard to predict. Will WiFi simply be adopted as a valuable extension by established cellular and fixed network providers? Or will new actors coming from other sectors, like hotels, restaurants, and airlines be able to carve out new business opportunities on their own terms, perhaps by ganging together to provide seamless roaming or

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even free access (earning increased revenues from their core business, rather than from communications per se)? The traditional view of an operator or a third-party software house providing the user with mobile services is also, to an increasing extent, being challenged by individual users, who see themselves as altruistic, making services publicly available at no subscription cost. It might be tempting for us as academic researchers to follow plays in this rapidly changing theatre on an, if not day-by-day, at least quarterly basis. A hopeless endeavour it is, though, since other actors have far more resources tracking and shaping ongoing events. The (unique and important) role of academic research is rather to attempt to grasp a more long-term perspective, staying out of the (present) business events, and thereby detecting also the weak signals preceding later major shifts. Academics may even have a responsibility to blow the whistle, as we did back in 2001, at the height of spectrum auctions and operator beauty contests. As the Devil’s Advocate, academic researchers are free to make observations which even the most knowledgeable consultants and employees simply might not dare to state, without unduly risking their contracts. Voice services have been quite homogeneous. Carrier grade services providing anywhere/anytime access have been their very hallmark. By contrast, non-voice services have a heritage from the Internet world. The Internet services that have gained widespread acceptance on home and office computers do not readily transfer to small, mobile devices that are used on the move. To a large extent, this is due to the limited interaction and screen size, but also because mobile devices are used in completely different situations and environments. When a service “goes mobile”, the designer must take into account that the service will be used in public places by users with a very limited attention span. The vision also fails to realize the special features in small mobile devices. They are also highly personal and move with the user, and there is the possibility to use geographical location as an in-parameter to services. The cell phone is mainly a communication device, and services that fit PDA or laptop users may not readily transfer to the phone. When such services become available on phones, user confusion is the result. Many phones provide both MMS and e-mail services, for example. Although both can provide multimedia messaging between phones as well as between phones and computers, their configuration, access models, and cost models are entirely different. Moreover, the services available to the end-users vary both with the phone and the chosen subscription. Phone services that can be

categorized as multi-user, such as those that create awareness between friends regarding presence, availability, and even friendliness, or those that are used for multi-user gaming, are worthy of special attention, since they often create demand in an explosive and sometimes unexpected manner. It is clear that mobile services must be seen in their own right, naturally overlapping with computerbased services and other mobile devices, but with restrictions and opportunities of their own that relate to this particular mobile media. As a consequence, is the industry heading into a further split-up of the vertical value chain? There are arguments to the effect that WiFi is just a forerunner. There are also arguments for the contrary. The weak uptake of GPRS in Europe compared to i-mode looks like a case in point. Users might appreciate freedom of choice, but not the confusion created by gaps and bad handover between the different parts of the offerings. While cultural differences are often cited as a main reason for differences in supply of as well as demand for mobile phone services, the series of Mobility Roundtables have to some extent contested this. Many service availability discrepancies between countries are due to noncultural differences, such as billing policy, cost models, level of acceptance of a particular service, and more. Moreover, there are similarities between such apparently different cultures as Scandinavia and Japan when it comes to the personal sphere around a mobile phone user in public spaces. These similarities can even be measured quantitatively. For instance, one could measure the number of mobile flashers – people who use their phones in public spaces as if they were alone, usually causing inconvenience to people around them – e.g. as a function of the total number of users and the time of mobile phone acceptance. During the pre-roundtable meeting in 2001, a pivotal issue was why “seamless mobility” had come so much into focus for both business and academia. Possible explanations were proposed from both the demand and the supply side. It was argued that whatever the efforts from the supply side, it would in the end be a matter for the users/ customers to decide whether or not all these new services and applications would be really worth paying good money for. They would need to be not only widely available, but “seamlessly” fit into the actual needs of the users’ working lives, mobility included, as well as into their private life styles. The five papers presented here, selected from the 30 presentations held at the 2003 Mobility Roundtable at Stockholm, cover a range of both demand and supply side issues. Against the background of seamless mobility and the I-centric view of mobile networks – the

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marriage between 2.5G/3G and WiFi technologies – Bylund and Segall argue that the future of mobile communication networks lies not only in how successful we are in deploying technologies. Also important is how well we can create a functioning environment and usage situation for end-users in which they can get a homogeneous and continuous usage experience. The authors advance concepts that support this observation and propose a possible solution that would take us in that direction (the Personal Server). In their paper, they explore the added factors of user interface and device flexibility, and the notion of user experience continuity. The Personal Server concept illustrates that there are at least partial, technical solutions to the challenges of achieving seamless mobility. The following two papers also address important end-user issues, both focusing on mobile professionals. Against the background of increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive mobile technologies, Kakihara and Sørensen discuss the emergence of the mobile professional. A field study of more than 60 professional workers in Tokyo during 2002 forms the empirical foundation for their discussion. The paper concludes that we must broaden our conception of mobility and conceptualise mobile professional work in terms of locational, operational, and interactional mobility. A set of implications for a new design of mobile professional work and technology use are drawn from the analysis of the field study. The authors discuss ICTas a mobilitybooster, the importance of maintaining multiple ongoing interactions, the importance of personal networks, and finally places as material foundations for interaction. The third paper, by Sørensen and Gibson, continues the theme, trying to answer the question of the applicability and reality of ubiquitous computing in today’s work environment. They argue that the vision of ubiquitous computing provides an idealised framework that can be projected onto the relationship between modern professionals and their technologies. Their study demonstrates that the joint life of professionals and their technologies of choice is not one best characterised by the technical and the social merging seamlessly. It is instead one burdened by constant attention. Based on discussions with professionals on how they use and perceive modern pervasive and mobile technologies, Guest editors highlight some of the issues of a more pragmatic nature relating to the intricate relationships between professional work practices

and the use of technologies in carrying out these practices. The last two papers shift, from the user and usage situation, to a market perspective. Henten, Olesen, and Su-En Tan provide an empirical overview of the developments of new mobile systems and services in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. They examine the discussions regarding the possible explanations for the present lead that East Asia has in new mobile developments. The comparison is done against the background that Japan and South Korea have taken the lead within mobile communications during the past few years, whereas Europe and in particular the Nordic countries were leading the way with GSM. Factors explaining differences in mobile developments in Europe, Japan, and South Korea are grouped in three main categories: technology solutions, business models, and policy and regulation. The authors argue that the main reasons for the lack of success in developing mobile data and Internet services on the basis of 2G platforms in Europe are related to the slow introduction of packet switching technology and to the implementation of a business model inspired by the fixed Internet. They also discuss various reasons for the slow take-up of 3G networks and services. The fifth and final paper, by Funk, applies a model of industry formation to explore how mobile Internet services, technologies, and applications will evolve. A key part of the model is the interaction between technological trajectories and the expansion of applications. The application of the model to the mobile Internet is based on published information from both Japanese and English sources, and on interviews with more than 150 managers involved in the mobile Internet, mainly in Japan. Managers were asked about the current and future impact of the mobile Internet on their businesses with a focus on lead users. The author describes a few paths by which the mobile Internet may evolve in six contents/applications. The paper summarizes the origins of the mobile Internet using the model of industry formation, and also sums up the technological trajectories and their effect on these applications. These Stockholm Mobility Roundtable papers were selected in tough competition and were subject to two rounds of independent reviews. We hope that you agree with us that, together, these five papers go a long way to show why seamless mobility is more than it seems to be.

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1. Introduction

Towards seamless mobility with personal servers Markus Bylund and Zary Segall

The authors Markus Bylund is a Researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden. Zary Segall is Distinguished Professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Keywords Computer hardware, Control technology, Telecommunications, Mobile communication systems

Abstract Observes that the future of mobile communication networks lies not only in how successful people are in deploying technologies (2.5G or 3G with a high degree of coverage and roaming between operators), but also in how well people can create a functioning environment and usage situation for end-users in which they can get a homogeneous and continuous usage experience, despite the very heterogeneous world in which they, after all, will live. Concepts are advanced that support this observation (network independence, UI/device flexibility, and user experience continuity), and a possible solution is proposed that would take people in that direction (the personal server).

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 172-179 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549499

Seamless mobility (Thorngren et al., 2003), or the I-centric view of mobile networking, is often referred to as the marriage between 2.5/3G and WiFi technologies[1]. With the wide coverage of 2.5G/3G technologies, combined with the high but local performance of WiFi, it is argued that electronic services can be used seamlessly (Sawhney, 2003). However, we believe that there is more to it than performance and network connectivity coverage. In this paper, we explore the added factors of user interface (UI) and device flexibility and the notion of user experience continuity. In combination, these factors would allow a continuous usage experience of all sorts of electronic services, accessed from many different types of usage contexts, and mediated via a multitude of devices. We further propose the concept of a personal server as a solution to the challenges that these factors add. The concept illustrates that there exist technical solutions to the challenges of achieving seamless mobility. Still, we conclude this paper by discussing complementary regulatory and business initiatives that also need to be realized. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents network capabilities and coverage, UI and device flexibility, and the importance of true user experience continuity as key issues in achieving seamless mobility. Section 3 describes the personal server approach and its impact on seamless mobility. We conclude with a discussion of the personal server concept’s implications and outline a few future research challenges.

2. Expanding the concept of seamless mobility In this section we highlight three factors that we view as particularly important to achieve seamless mobility: network capabilities and coverage, UI and device capabilities, and the importance of true user experience continuity.

2.1 Network independence Many, if not most, discussions of mobility have so far been about network issues, ranging from how to provide support for mobility in network protocols (for example Mobile IP (Perkins, 1997)) to discussions of different solutions for wireless networking. The main reason for this is that different technical constraints largely influence what can be done in mobile settings[2]. For quite a few classes of applications, the performance of 2.5G and 3G networks is too low – for example,

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highly interactive applications such as games, where the latency is the most limiting factor. This is also the case for applications as simple as Web browsers[3]. To quantify this problem we performed a number of network traffic measurements, using a Sony Ericsson P800[4]. The experiments revealed that 2.5G networks (GPRS) offer exceptionally poor throughput and response time, compared to solutions that route the network traffic over, e.g. a Bluetooth connection. The latter, in combination with wired network connections, can be used as an alternative to 2.5G connections. It was also interesting to notice that the variation in response time for the slow 2.5G connections was surprisingly high[5]. The performance of network connections, however, is only one of several factors that influence mobility. Roaming between different types of networks and service providers is another factor. One could argue that, on the one hand, this is a technical matter with several existing solutions (Hansen et al., 1998; Perkins, 1997). On the other hand, it is a matter of more practical nature. For users to get seamless access to network connectivity from every possible place, all service providers need to agree on automatic roaming or users need to subscribe to all service providers. Given the diversity and large number of service providers, neither factor is likely to work well enough in order to take mobile network access for granted (Almgren, 2003). Pricing of network connectivity is yet another factor that influences how users make connections in mobile settings. For example, in the case of GPRS, the cost of service is often a combination of a flat and a traffic-based rate, while the cost of most wired connections (for example cable TV and ADSL) is only based on a flat rate. This means that users who access both GPRS and ADSL connections have reasons to plan their usage of bandwidth-intensive services for times and places where ADSL is available. A possible hypothesis is that some users reject GPRS only because of the variable cost associated with its usage. All these factors result in the uncertainty of adequate network connection being universally available. Considering this fact, we argue that to achieve seamless mobility we must not only resolve the issue of how to provide for mobile network connectivity, but also decide how to enable users to operate services independently of (Internet) network connectivity. This would partially unburden users from issues such as low bandwidth, high latency, roaming, and high traffic costs. We recognize that some services require a real-time connection, but most services include parts that could work without such network connection.

2.2 UI and device flexibility It is not productive to talk about seamless mobility if one does not consider that the user context, while mobile, is bound to vary over time. However, different contexts and situations require different types of devices and user interfaces. This has been acknowledged by the manufacturers of access devices. There exists today a wide range of devices for mobile computing – ranging from smart phones to tablet PCs and laptops. These devices differ in a great number of ways, but most often their differences are well motivated. The screen of a smart phone, and its adapted UI, is much smaller than that of the desktop computer, simply because it would be burdensome to carry a large display while walking around. Nevertheless, while sitting in an office, most users prefer a device with a large display. These differences can be seen on all levels of design of the artifacts that we use to access electronic services. Some artifacts have hard buttons that immediately trigger specific applications, while others have full-size keyboards. Some devices have scroll wheels for navigation while others have mice, and so on. Judging by the diversity of mobile devices available today, it would seem that the range of available artifacts provides good support for mobility as it is. This is not the case, however, because the device flexibility is not there yet. If one is to take full advantage of the differences between various artifacts, one must also be able to switch seamlessly between them. This is seldom possible with the infrastructure for electronic services and range of artifacts available today. Usually, it is not even possible to use the same service and data on different artifacts at all, let alone in a seamless manner. In some cases it is possible to synchronize data between similar, but different, services on different devices. This is only true for the data, though; the state of the service is seldom, if ever, included in the process. Therefore, we argue that in order for seamless mobility to become a reality, we must find the means to support flexibility in the choice of device and UI by allowing access to the same services and data from many different types of devices.

2.3 User experience continuity As stated above, seamless mobility requires some kind of network independence and flexibility in choice of user access device. These two factors would make it possible to introduce continuous user experience for mobile services. This would allow users to start working with a task on one device with a particular network connection, to continue the work on another device completely without network connection (on an airplane or at a

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hospital for example), and finally, to finish the task on a third device and network connection. From the users’ point of view, this kind of continuity can take two different shapes: continuity as in the remote access case, and continuity with adapted UIs. In the first case, the different access devices can be seen as remote controls to the electronic services of the user. The UI is identical in all cases, but the hardware running the UI changes. The electronic services of the user execute on one and the same computer (usually a desktop computer or a server) and, as the user switches access devices, only the stream of screen, keyboard, and mouse events needs to change origin and destination. The execution state and data of the service are kept the same over time, since they are never moved between the devices[6]. The second alternative, to adapt the UI to different user access devices, is more complex. In this case the UI of the electronic service is adapted to the capabilities and constraints of the device currently in use. A laptop may provide a wide overview of all functionality of the service, including full access to input features, while a much smaller smart phone might offer a simplified UI. Output may be filtered (certain kinds of media may, for example, not be possible to present) and the means for input may be reduced because of the limited keyboard. On some devices, the adaptation may go so far as to abandon the prevailing desktop and Windows metaphor in favor of something more suitable. This could, for example, be the case for a purely voice-based interaction device. However, this alternative for providing continuity is expensive and complicated to realize, mainly because it requires implementation and maintenance efforts that grow rapidly with the number of devices that should be supported. Another problem is that when a new device is introduced, a new adaptation (or version of the service) needs to be implemented[7]. From the user perspective, these two alternatives have both advantages and disadvantages. The remote access alternative is preferable because the UI always stays the same – users immediately recognize the service when using it on a new device and there is no learning time that needs to be accounted for. However, since no adaptation of the UI is done, the usability of some services may suffer. An example of the latter is the use of a complex application such as Microsoft Word on a smart phone. The small screen provides an unacceptably poor view of all actions and capabilities of the rich UI, and input is extremely awkward. The adapted UI alternative is powerful since it allows services to take full advantage of the unique features of each device, thereby building on the knowledge and design

expertise that was put into the development of each device. This means that special features such as hard buttons and scroll wheels can be assigned functionality that ties closely to the intentions of the designer of the device. However, since the same service will appear differently on different devices, some learning time will be required for each new device being used.

3. Personal server The term ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991; Kortuem and Segall, 2003) refers to a vision of invisible computers being embedded in our environment and participating in our lives. The envisioned usage, however, is far from the way that we use computers today. Instead of having multipurpose computers such as desktop or laptop PCs, computers will blend into our environment and turn into invisible and special-purpose devices that will help us to accomplish tasks everywhere, not only when sitting at a desk. Using computers for various purposes, according to the vision, will be as much of an unconscious activity as using the nowadays-ancient technology of writing for longterm storage of information. Recognizing the relevance of the three factors of seamless mobility outlined above, we anticipate that next-generation personal computers will support a variety of more interactive and proactive modes of computation than we can see today. As embedded systems and networks become mobile, personal mobile computers will act as both agents and intermediaries between their users and the embedded system infrastructure. Miniature, portable server systems will allow their users to seamlessly access networks, retrieve data from embedded sensors, control embedded actuators, perform functions proactively on the user’s behalf, and interact with other people’s personal systems as people come into proximity. For such systems, the locus of control moves through the environment, interacting proactively and often autonomously in response to real-time, environmental inputs. For the purposes of this paper, we will call such a personal control system a personal server (Bylund and Segall, 2003). Personal servers provide a variety of new, dynamic modes of operation and interaction depending on the environment and the user’s needs – in other words, they are potentially highly suitable for realizing seamless mobility. In the simplest case, we can visualize the use of a personal server in terms of the user equipped with such a device, walking up to a monitor, keyboard and other peripherals with wireless interfaces and beginning to work. His or her personal server

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connects to the surrounding peripherals, devices, and networks, allowing access to local data or control systems. Since the locus of control moves with the user, it arrives fully customized and able to personalize the user’s interaction with environmental systems (e.g. to the user’s job, capabilities, goals, age, etc.) and employ the user’s own set of application software. The type of hardware is not important on this level; it could be a desktop computer just as well as a virtual server on a multi-user machine, or a PDA. The important aspects of the concept are instead that it is uniquely tied to a single user, and that the user only needs to view the collection of functionality and data that the server constitutes as one single entity[8]. To use the services of the personal server, user access devices of different kinds are needed. Note that the user access device can be, but is not necessarily, the same device that hosts the personal server. In contrast to the uniqueness of the personal server (from the user perspective), user access devices are many, one for each context, situation, or perhaps even application[9].

users, while the personal server could be an individual user’s desktop computer at home or at work. This distinction, however, is not significant when evaluating the concept from a seamless mobility perspective.

3.1 Personal server characteristics The personal server concept encompasses a large number of solutions for electronic service mediation. In order to evaluate the concept from a seamless mobility perspective, we need to explore some of its characteristics somewhat more deeply. The most obvious characteristic is whether the personal server is remote (i.e. something that is placed at a fixed location and accessed remotely) or mobile (i.e. something that the user can bring along and access locally). 3.2 Remote server The advantage of having a remote server is that services get access to a wired, and possibly highquality, network connection at all times. Services can execute continuously assisting the user, even when the user is not in contact with the remote server (e.g. a broker service buying and selling stocks on behalf of its user). However, being remote also implies the need of a network connection between server and user access device in order for the user to interact with the services. The latter violates the desire to gain independence of network connection as described above, but depending on user needs this may be balanced by the possibility to have personal services executing continuously, regardless of the user’s whereabouts. The remote server can be further divided into two groups, depending on whether it is shared or personal. A shared server would typically be owned and maintained by a service provider or a corporation that would host services for individual

3.3 Mobile server The advantage of the mobile server is that its user can bring it along. This allows the user to access services, even when there is no network connection available at all. Of course, parts of the functionality of some services require a network connection in order to work, but most services can at least offer some functionality in a completely disconnected mode. A chat service, for example, inherently requires a network connection to other chat peers in order to function. But the service could at least offer history-browsing and the editing of preferences when no network connection is available. As discussed above, the user might even prefer a local off-line mode even if a network connection is available, in order to minimize the cost of network traffic. In such a case, services can be programmed to minimize network traffic by only sending and receiving necessary information. An e-mail client, for example, could be set to download only the headers of new e-mails, and the e-mail bodies only on explicit user request (just as most e-mail clients on PDAs and smart phones already work). Another network-related advantage of the mobile server is reduced latency. Highly interactive services such as games benefit from local execution, especially if the only available network connection is a GPRS connection with latency in the range of seconds (Figure 1). The mobile servers can be further divided into portable or wearable depending on how mobile they are. A portable server is typically a laptop computer that can be brought along by the user, but it is large enough to include full-size user I/O peripherals such as screen and keyboard. It is difficult to use when on the move or, for example, when driving a car; but if it is close to the user (e.g. in a back-pack or in the trunk of a car), more

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Figure 1 A taxonomy of different types of personal servers

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suitable user access devices can be used. In this case, all that is needed is a short-range wireless network connection such as Bluetooth or peer-topeer WiFi. In contrast, the wearable server (Segall, 2002) is small enough to actually be worn by the user at all times. This is likely to imply that there is no room for I/O peripherals, in which case all user interaction needs to be maintained via user access devices (just as in the case of the portable server on the move). In some cases, such as the aWare Messenger (Bylund and Segall, 2003), specialpurpose devices can provide dedicated UIs to certain services running on the wearable server[10].

be found in many public places ranging from cafe´s to airports and public libraries. For users without access devices of their own, these can provide access to remote servers with HTML UIs. They can also be used in cases where other access devices are too limited in terms of I/O capabilities.

3.4 User access devices In some cases, for example the portable server, the same hardware that executes the services also provides user I/O capabilities such as screen, keyboard, and mouse. When speaking of personal servers in general, though, this is not the case. Instead, users need to rely on user access devices in order to interact with their services. As suggested above, these should be chosen on the basis of the context and situation that the user is in at the time of usage. When sitting in an office at work, a desktop computer with a large screen, a full keyboard, and a mouse is probably one of the better alternatives. However, while on the move a smart phone or perhaps a headset and a head-up display is more suitable. Examples of currently available user access devices are 2.5/3G smart phones, PDAs, Tablet PCs, and desktop computers in the form of Web kiosks. The strengths of the smart phones are their small form factor that makes them highly mobile, and the nearly constant network access over 2.5/3G connections. These two features are also the weaknesses of the device – being so small also makes them unsuitable for many tasks (for example word processing, reading text, and viewing images), and the network connection is unreliable, slow, and with high latency. Many PDAs are slightly bigger than smart phones. This makes them somewhat less mobile but at the same time more useful for certain tasks. PDAs are usually better equipped in terms of network connectivity – PDAs with both WLAN and Bluetooth, and in addition GPRS as an optional feature, have been available for some time. This further makes them more capable in a mobile setting since more network solutions are available. Tablet PCs resemble PDAs in how they are used, but they are much larger, usually with full-size displays. They are also more powerful and thus often capable of hosting services locally (i.e. acting as a portable server) in addition to acting as access devices. Finally, Web kiosks can

3.5 Software support for personal servers There have been few attempts to provide serious software support for personal servers as described herein. Alan Dearle describes ubiquitous environments (Dearle, 1998) which could work as a software platform for personal servers, and some technical problems (from a software point of view) that need to be solved in order to realize them. Dearle also lists a number of platforms that address at least parts of what is needed in order to implement them (for example Grasshopper (Dearle et al., 1994), Telescript/Odyssey, and Aglets)). For the Intel Personal Server (Want et al., 2002a, 2002b), Want et al. have chosen to rely mostly on already existing support such as Web servers and file-sharing mechanisms as a means for connecting the personal server with user access devices. This makes the software platform for the personal server trivial – an ordinary OS (in their case Linux), a Web server, and services with HTML UIs are enough. This choice also makes the personal server quite limited. The number of access devices, for example, is limited in this case since they must have a Web browser. This also limits how well the UI can be adapted to the access device at hand, and hard buttons and other special I/O peripherals cannot be assigned service-specific functionalities. In the sView project, however, we have developed a system (Bylund and Espinoza, 2000; Espinoza, 2003) that supports all aspects of personal servers as described above. The system builds on the notion of personal service environments (Bylund, 2001) that store electronic services and data of individual users. When residing on a computer, the services can be accessed locally via the I/O peripherals of the computer, or remotely via network-connected access devices (such as PDAs, cell phones, and Web kiosks). This allows the system to implement both mobile and remote servers. The service environments are mobile, which makes it possible to move all services to a different computer if needed. During the migration, the execution state of each service is saved in order to achieve continuous user-service interaction. This makes it possible to combine the qualities of mobile and remote servers by running the service environment on a server (acting as a remote server) when

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needed, and moving it to a mobile device (acting as a mobile server) when that is more suitable. As part of our work with sView we have also developed solutions to support deviceindependent software components (Nylander et al., 2004) and peer-to-peer communication between personal service environments (Espinoza and Hinz, 2003). The former is a key component when realizing continuity as in the case of adapted UIs (described above), while the latter is vital when implementing services that rely on direct communication between different personal servers.

Nonetheless, since personal servers are such a wide concept, not all variants of them are equally well suited to handling all challenges of providing seamless mobility. In Table I we list a few such challenges in order to compare how well the two main categories of personal servers can handle them. The first two challenges (service access and autonomous execution) are mostly related to network independence. They address the solution’s degree of dependence on network connectivity in order for the user to access services and for the services to operate autonomously. The last two categories (remote control and adaptive UI) address how well the solutions support continuity, as in the remote control case, or adaptive UI respectively. When it comes to shifting focus from network technologies to a more holistic view of seamless mobility, though, technical solutions in isolation will not suffice. This is illustrated by the involvement of the European Commission (EC) in deploying GSM, which was driven by an urge to harmonize cellular networks within Europe. This technical goal was motivated by political goals of reinforcing European integration, which eventually would lead to a boost in competition since the deployment of GSM would break up old (national) PTT monopolies. As a side-effect, region-wide instead of national players would be able to enter the stage, which would lead to the possibility of challenging industry leaders in the US and Asia (Steinbock, 2002). While the EC, to a great extent, was successful in this quest, the strength of the region-wide players has turned out to be counterproductive for the development of seamless mobility. The strong telecom operators have the power to shut off local competition in mobile service deployment and provisioning, by exercising strict control over the service portfolio offered to their customers. Therefore, technical solutions to seamless mobility, such as the one offered in this paper, are doomed to be crippled as long as this situation prevails. For this reason, we can see an opening for regulators to support the same kind of initiatives that was once exercised to create the strength and dominance of a few players, in order to allow for solutions that provide true convergence not only of network technologies, but also of the functionality and user experience offered to end-users. However, the most important catalyst to technical innovation cannot be provided by regulators – but rather by the market leaders of the telecom sector. In order to really boost the evolution of seamless mobility, these players must dare to face competition to a greater extent than we see today. By competing in excellence on an open

4. Discussion and summary Mobile computing devices were first introduced as a complement to traditional mainframes and personal computers. We can now sense a convergence between different kinds of computing devices – mobile and wearable computing devices are becoming powerful enough to assist users in ways similar to stationary devices. Stationary computing devices, however, are (and will continue to be) more powerful than mobile devices in most respects. But the convergence of stationary and mobile devices is not necessary for realizing a convergence from a user perspective – this could just as well be done on a virtual level. The important thing is that stationary and mobile computing devices are equipped in a way that allows for seamless switching between different modes of operation. With networking, on the other hand, we foresee a complementary mix of wired solutions and a multitude of wireless solutions, in contrast to a complete paradigm shift from wired to wireless technologies (Sawhney, 2003). However, if this kind of complementary mix of technologies is to be successful, the means to perform all kinds of adaptation to variations in the quality of network connectivity must be available. All in all, we argue that the concept of personal servers in general, and wearable servers in particular, is highly attractive as a general solution for providing seamless mobility. First, the concept allows services to be (partially) independent of network connection and quality. Second, the concept is built on the notion of UI and device flexibility as a means of treating the variation in user needs that a mobile setting offers. And third, the concept allows coexistence of different solutions for providing user experience continuity. Further, the implementation of personal servers may range from wearable computing to future generations of smart phones (Table I).

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Table I A comparison between the two major categories of personal servers with regard to some seamless mobility challenges Mobile server Remote server Service access

Great opportunities since services can execute locally

Limited opportunities since a network connection is required in order to access the services. Off-line execution is not possible

Autonomous execution

Good opportunities, but services requiring a continuous network connection may suffer

Great opportunities since services can rely on a continuous high-speed network connection

Remote access

Great opportunities since remote control UI typically require low latency and at least medium high bandwidth

Good opportunities, but with connections between server and user access device with high latency and/ or low bandwidth, the performance may suffer

Adaptive UI

Equal opportunities. However, services with modest or no need of networked data that output large amounts of data to the user (e.g. single-user games) benefit from mobile server execution. On the other hand, services that require large amounts of networked data but only output a limited amount of data to the user (e.g. a personal search engine) benefit from remote server execution

(technical) arena, instead of locking up customers in closed and proprietary solutions, the room for technical innovations that create seamless mobility grows. This can be exemplified by the rise of the WWW. Before the Web, transfer of information between different systems was both impractical and costly, due to great differences in both hardware and software (Berners-Lee, 1996). Hypertext as a solution to some of these problems had been a hot topic in both academia and industry for several years, and several proprietary products had been proposed (for example Apple’s HyperCard). However, it was not until after the WWW, proposed by Tim-Berners Lee at Cern (Berners-Lee et al., 1992), had started to grow in popularity simply by the force of its own simplicity and openness, that market leaders really started to believe in business models building on the concept. Thus, what is essentially needed in order to rise above the present situation is for the industry to believe that this can happen again – that there is a market in open solutions to achieving seamless mobility. In summary, we have expanded the concept of seamless mobility to include UI/device flexibility and user experience continuity. The novel concept of a personal server has, for the first time, been suggested as an approach to achieve fully-fledged seamless mobility. We have presented a taxonomy of personal servers and performed experiments to characterize their mode of operation and performance requirements. Nevertheless, there is substantial research work yet to be done. To mention a few outstanding research issues: development of measures of user experience continuity, new UI and devices that are designed for UI flexibility, and new operating systems’

capabilities that are supporting the personal server concept and its modes of operation.

Notes

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1 See also proceedings from the Tokyo Mobile Roundtable 2002 and the Stockholm Mobility Roundtable 2003. 2 Bandwidth, for example, can easily vary by a factor of 1,000 depending on network connection (from GPRS with less than 100kb/s to wired networks with 100mb/s or more). Variations in latency are almost as dramatic – a factor of 100 can easily be found (from several seconds with GPRS down to milliseconds with wired networks). 3 A Web page is typically made out of several dozens of data entities which all need to be fetched with HTTP requests. For example, it typically requires several minutes to load the first page of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (a total of about 300kB and several dozens of entities to download) to a Sony Ericsson P800 smart phone over a GPRS connection. Loading the same page on a desktop computer with a high-speed wired connection requires less than a second. By introducing a proxy close to the wired-wireless border, the performance of GPRS can be improved (Chakravorty and Pratt, 2002), but the gap to WiFi technologies and wired networks is still huge. 4 A simple Java application running on the phone made a series of HTTP requests with the phone connected to the Internet via GPRS as well as Bluetooth and USB cable via a laptop computer (which was connected to a high-speed wired LAN). The response time between the network connections turned out to be about equal for Bluetooth and USB but many times higher for GPRS. A single HTTP HEAD request, which included less than one kilobyte of content, required several seconds to complete when operating via GPRS. When the request was changed to HTTP GET, which in addition downloaded a 55-kilobyte entity, response times were raised to 15 seconds on average. The response times for Bluetooth and USB were in the range of a few hundred milliseconds (about two seconds for the GET request). A complete description of these tests can be found in a separate technical report (Bylund, 2003).

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5 These variations could be explained by variations in GPRS channel availability, but also TCP retransmissions due to the high latency of the connection (Chakravorty and Pratt, 2002). 6 Applications such as the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client (Richardson et al., 1998) and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection can provide exactly this. Thin clients who are small enough to execute on PDAs and smart phones (in addition to desktop/laptop computers) mirror the screen, keyboard, and mouse of another computer. 7 In Nylander et al. (2004), we describe a methodology, including a fully functioning system, which reduces these difficulties when adapting UIs to different types of devices. 8 The second aspect should be put in contrast to something that is (possibly poorly and incompletely) duplicated on several different devices, such as the calendar on the desktop computer, the one in the PDA, and the one on the screen fridge at home. 9 Other definitions of the personal server concept exist, such as that of Want et al. (2002a, b) for example. Our concept is somewhat more comprehensive than that of Want et al., although theirs is included in the personal server and identified as a wearable server. 10 So far, there are few examples of hardware that can realize wearable servers of this kind, at least if high requirements on performance are placed. One exception is the Intel Personal Server (Want et al., 2002a, b), which is a computer of about the size of a deck of cards. It comes completely without user I/O peripherals, but includes a Bluetooth module that makes it possible to connect the server to user access devices.

References Almgren, G. (2003), “Roaming between wireless ISPs: closed club or commons?”, Stockholm Mobility Roundtable, Stockholm, May 22-23. Berners-Lee, T. (1996), “WWW: past, present, and future”, IEEE Computer, Vol. 29 No. 10, pp. 69-77. Berners-Lee, T., Caillau, R., Groff, J.-F. and Pollermann, B. (1992), “World Wide Web: the information universe, electronic networking: research”, Applications and Policy, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 52-8. Bylund, M. (2001), “Personal service environments – openness and user control in user-service interaction”, PhLic thesis, Uppsala University, Uppsala. Bylund, M. (2003), “An empirical evaluation of the performance of mobile network connections”, SICS Technical Report T2003:06, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista. Bylund, M. and Espinoza, F. (2000), “sView – personal service interaction”, 5th International Conference on the Practical Applications of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM’2000), Manchester, April 10-12.

Bylund, M. and Segall, Z. (2003), “Seamless mobility with personal servers”, Stockholm Mobility Roundtable, Stockholm, May 22-23. Chakravorty, R. and Pratt, I. (2002), “Performance issues with general packet radio service”, Journal of Communications and Networks, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 266-81. Dearle, A. (1998), “Toward ubiquitous environments for mobile users”, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 22-32. Dearle, A., di Bona, R., Farrow, J., Henskens, F., Lindstro¨m, A., Rosenberg, J. and Vaughan, F. (1994), “Grasshopper: an orthogonally persistent operating system”, Computing Systems, Summer, pp. 289-312. Espinoza, F. (2003), “Individual service provisioning”, PhD thesis, Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kista. Espinoza, F. and Hinz, L. (2003), “Generic peer-to-peer support for a personal service platform”, Saint, IEEE Computer Society, Orlando, FL. Hansen, J.S., Reich, T., Andersen, B. and Jul, E. (1998), “Dynamic adaptation of network connections in mobile environments”, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 39-48. Kortuem, G. and Segall, Z. (2003), “Wearable communities: augmenting social networks with wearable computers”, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 71-8. Nylander, S., Bylund, M. and Waern, A. (2004), “The ubiquitous interactor – device-independent access to mobile services”, paper presented at the Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces (CADUI’2004) Conference, Madeira, January 13-16. Perkins, C. (1997), “Mobile IP”, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 35 No. 5, pp. 84-99. Richardson, T., Stafford-Fraser, Q., Wood, K.R. and Hopper, A. (1998), “Virtual network computing”, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 33-8. Sawhney, H. (2003), “WiFi – networks and the rerun of the cycle”, Info, Vol. 5 No. 6, pp. 25-33. Segall, Z. (2002), Wearable Server, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Steinbock, D. (2002), “Wireless R&D: from domestication to globalization”, Info, Vol. 4 No. 6, pp. 27-49. Thorngren, B., Andersson, P. and Boman, M. (2003), “Seamless mobility”, position paper, Stockholm Mobility Roundtable, Stockholm, May 22-23. Want, R., Borriello, G., Pering, T. and Farkas, K.I. (2002a), “Disappearing hardware”, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 36-47. Want, R., Pering, T., Danneels, G., Kumar, M., Sundar, M. and Light, J. (2002b), “The personal server: changing the way we think about ubiquitous computing”, 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’2002), Go¨teborg, September 29-October 1. Weiser, M. (1991), “The computer for the 21st century”, Scientific American, Vol. 265 No. 3, pp. 94-104.

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1. Introduction

Practising mobile professional work: tales of locational, operational, and interactional mobility Masao Kakihara and Carsten Sørensen

The authors Masao Kakihara is Assistant Professor, School of Business Administration, Kwansei Gakuin University, Hyogo, Japan. Carsten Sørensen is Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Keywords Mobile communication systems, Professional associations, Communication, Technology led strategy, Japan

Abstract Fueled by strong market forces as well as by increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive mobile technologies, shifts in working practices and the application of mobile technologies have been occurring around the turn of the millennium. One such change concerns the work of professionals. This paper discusses the emergence of the mobile professional, through a field study of more than 60 professional workers in Tokyo during 2002. The paper concludes that one must broaden one’s conception of mobility and conceptualize mobile professional work in terms of locational, operational, and interactional mobility. Furthermore, some implications for a new design of mobile professional work and technology use are drawn from the analysis of the field study: ICT as mobility-booster; maintaining multiple ongoing interactions; the importance of personal networks; and places as material foundations for interaction.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 180-187 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549507

The last two decades have seen rapid adoption and intensive use of various information and communication technologies (ICTs) as an essential foundation for business activities. It is clear that although ICTs have not changed the basic nature of their businesses as dramatically as anticipated, newly developed ICT solutions such as groupware, ERP and video conferencing have offered the firms various alternative options for restructuring their business activities. Presently, we are witnessing the advent of the mobile and wireless technology era influencing contemporary businesses and organizations. Although mobile technologies such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) were first developed as consumer products rather than business solutions, a number of innovative firms are adopting those technologies for restructuring their business processes and organizational forms. The aim of this paper is to explore the emergence of a new kind of contemporary professional workers, mobile professionals, and their use of ICTs in their everyday work practices. Although various kinds of professionals have played an important role in contemporary business, they are likely to be a “neglected workforce” (Barley and Orr, 1997) which recedes from the “front stage” of management and business studies. One of the reasons for this could be that most of these professionals are “outsiders” to the organizations in which they work. They perform their jobs independently and bring their distinct skills and expertise to organizations on an ad hoc basis. Since business activities are becoming more and more “knowledge-intensive” (Alvesson, 1995), effective utilization of external experts who can bring distinct expertise to the organization is increasingly important for organizations. Furthermore, a blurring of formal organizational boundaries can be observed as a result of more flexible and fluid modes of organizing and of the uptake of interaction technologies (Kakihara and Sørensen, 2002). The characterization of organizational membership in terms of people being “outside” or “inside” the organization is therefore increasingly difficult when the notion of organization is based on economic transactions as opposed to the operational aspects of collaborative activities based on mutual interdependency (Schmidt, 1994). Based on a field study of more than 60 mobile professionals in Tokyo, Japan during 2002, we This research was partly funded by the Daiwa AngloJapanese Foundation, through the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, and the Matsushita International Foundation.

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propose in this paper the following three essential aspects of mobility in mobile professional work: locational, operational, and interactional mobility. In short, the nature of contemporary professional workers in urban areas cannot be fully appreciated in terms only of their extensive geographical movement, but rather should be taken from a broader perspective shedding a light also on operational and interactional aspects of their work practices. In the following sections, first the historical background of contemporary professional work is addressed, and then the results of the field study, particularly three focus cases of mobile professionals, are briefly presented. Finally, the analysis of the results and some implications for a new design of professional work and technology use are discussed.

of them are knowledge-based rather than materialbased professionals, such as consultants, designers, writers, journalists and planners of various kinds (Meager, 1992). They support themselves by selling their own distinct skills, knowledge and/or tangible and intangible products to firms. The emergence and rapid growth of such “postmodern” professionals freed from conventional employment relationships is becoming a critical factor in contemporary business environments, especially in knowledge-intensive sectors. Yet, surprisingly, little research has been done on such “post-modern” professionals and their work practices, which are not bounded by formal organizational structures, rules and constraints but play critical strategic roles in organizational contexts. Among the notable exceptions is Laubacher and Malone’s (1997) and Malone and Laubacher’s (1998) research. Seeing the Linux open source community’s success, the emergence of virtual companies, the rise of outsourcing and telecommuting, and the proliferation of freelance and temporary workers, they found that electronically connected freelancers, whom they call e-lancers, actively join together into fluid and temporary networks of business to produce and sell goods and services. This kind of independent professional workers can be seen at the forefront of the contemporary business environment. Although independent professionals outside organizations have already existed in various forms such as lawyers and accountants since the middle of the twentieth century, they have remained quite small in volume compared with workers employed by a particular firm including both white- and blue-workers. This is mainly because, as traditional economic theories of organization suggest, firms have benefited from internalizing a wide range of labor forces into the formal organizational structure and placing them in the same, fixed locations such as offices and factories to effectively manage them in a centralized manner. In other words, firms have seen it as costly and risky to utilize people who are outside of the organizational boundaries and largely distributed in a wide area, due to limited communication and coordination technologies in the industrial age such as trains, cars, telegraph, fixed telephone, and mainframe computers. In consequence, the firms have remained large. However, with the introduction of powerful and reasonably affordable personal computers, laptops and software, the Internet, Web-based technologies such as email, mobile phones and PDAs, firms have become capable of coordinating their business processes and utilizing outside

2. The rise of the mobile professional To be a professional is not at all a new occupation. Among the oldest professionals would be the clergy and teachers, although originally they must not have been called or even recognized as professionals. Architects also have a long history of contributing to society as professionals with their expertise of designing and constructing buildings. However, we in the contemporary society can see much more diversified kinds of professionals, including accountants, designers and artists, writers, doctors and nurses, engineers, lawyers, pharmacists, psychologists, counselors, social workers, scientists, librarians, professors, urban planners, and so on. As Scho¨n (1983, p. 3) argues, professionals have become “essential to the very functioning of our society”. However, the existing research has tended to study professionals only within a certain organization, be it private or public. As a result, professionals working independently have been largely neglected in contemporary research on professional work. Obviously, most of the “modern” professionals have been deployed within an organization. As Whalley and Barley (1997) argue, the need for the professionals’ expertise was “created” in response to changes of internal conditions of the firms. However, in the light of today’s turbulent business environments, addressing only professionals inside the organizational structure clearly does not suffice. In fact, during the last two decades we have seen a rapid growth of workers who are independent of a formal organization and, in many cases, do their jobs on a freelance and contract basis and establish ongoing relationships with several different client firms (Segal and Sullivan, 1995, 1997). And most

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workers, particularly those who have distinct skills and expertise. They no longer have to hold a large number of permanent workers inside the organizations for the sake of centralized coordination of business processes (Malone et al., 1987). Many of the highly skilled people in firms are actually spinning out and finding their workplaces outside of the firms, since being free and independent can provide them with much larger benefits such as gaining more rewards for their work and managing their careers and lives more flexibly, than staying inside the firms. Some of those people are getting together and forming a loosely-bounded, partnership-based organization such as a consulting firm or a design studio, but each of them still keeps much more autonomy and freedom than professionals inside the firms. Therefore, considering these shifts occurring around the “post-modern”, mobile professionals and their impacts on contemporary business activities, we must give careful consideration to how such professionals work with organizations and how particular ICTs are utilized in their everyday work practices.

infrastructures. Japan is in the middle of dramatic technological innovation and diffusion of mobile technology (Rheingold, 2002). Such a unique technological environment potentially influences Japanese mobile professionals’ work practices. The specific socio-technical environment in Tokyo, therefore, makes it a highly suitable setting for studying the emerging realities of mobile technology use. Having considered these facts, we conducted a field study involving semi-structured interviews and ad hoc observation of 62 mobile professionals from April to July 2002 in Tokyo. The occupations of the informants include independent consultants, entrepreneurs, marketing planners, designers, journalists, architects, freelance producers, and some others. Here, three distinct cases of the mobile professionals are chosen for closer examination[1].

3. Mobile professionals in Tokyo Tokyo, Japan is a particularly unique place to study mobile professionals primarily for two reasons. First, the distinctive institutional background of Tokyo is especially interesting as its work environment clearly differs from that of Western countries. The Japanese corporate system has typically been associated with three institutionalized traditions: lifetime employment; promotion by seniority; and the enterprise union system (Aoki and Dore, 1996). There is also still widely persistent, steep vertical structuring as well as administrative and corporate bureaucracy (Nakane, 1983). Within such a distinctive world, almost all Japanese professionals have been employed by the government or large corporations, which led to the highly elitist internal structure of organizations. Such institutional distinctiveness of the Japanese work environment could benefit us in understanding actual opportunities, problems, obstacles, and hopes that emerging professional workers are currently faced with, much more clearly and contrastively than looking at those in Western contexts. Second, Japan’s unique and advanced technological environment is also critical for the choice of fieldwork location. It is widely recognized that Japan has enjoyed advanced technological innovations that resulted largely from Japanese industries’ strength in R&D and manufacturing of technical devices, systems, and large

3.1 Case A: independent town-planning consultant Jun[2], 38, started his independent consulting business in 2000. His main consulting field is town planning for small and medium-sized municipalities. He works alone with no employees, but collaborates with many people, including other consultants and developers. The majority of his current clients are small and medium-sized municipalities, mainly in rural areas which lie hundreds of miles away from big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. He finds the high degree of mobility in his work activities the most conspicuous advantage as a professional worker. Town planning projects typically require the project members to see the actual site in which a certain plan is implemented. He also argues that visiting the site and seeing it with his own eyes is crucial for the town planning business, since the observation of the site offers invaluable data and insights for the project. Particularly acquiring a subnote PC and a mobile phone changed his way of working dramatically. With his mobile phone, he could easily contact and be contacted by his clients and co-workers virtually (not completely), anytime and anywhere. The subnote PC connected with the mobile phone provided him with almost the same PC environment during business trips and site observation. His work practices clearly show two basic patterns of geographical movements. The first is long-distance travel. He follows a working style where he can spend a considerable amount of time at the actual sites where his clients’ problem issues reside. Most of his clients are local governments in areas far away from Tokyo. Therefore, it is inevitable that he frequently travels hundreds of

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miles for a visit and explores the sites physically. Second is the intensive local travel. He moves around the Tokyo area to meet his clients and other members of the projects, since meeting those people face-to-face is extremely important for his business. In such local travel, he usually uses underground trains, taxis as well as walking. Just as when moving around Tokyo, he also travels intensively in and across the local areas when visiting the clients’ sites.

collaboration. Since each of the designers coming to the studio has a distinct background and expertise in design, they can easily find one another to be complementary in their design work.

3.2 Case B: freelance CG designer Yoshi, 35, is working as a freelance CG designer in Tokyo. He uses a room in his home in central Tokyo as his workspace where he does almost all his design work. After graduating from a university with a degree in graphic design, he got a job in one of the biggest design firms in Japan. Having worked as a graphic designer for eight years in the firm, he became a freelancer five years ago. He is an expert in three-dimensional CG (3D-CG) design, but most of the revenue of his work comes from projects relating to website design and coding. He earns most of his income from Website design work offered by music production companies. Due to the nature of CG design, he spends a considerable amount of time in front of the computers in this room. In this regard, he is mostly a static home-worker. However, he engages in intensive interaction with people outside by actively using the Internet technologies. Particularly interesting is that, while his physical movement is largely static, the range of his interaction with other people through the Internet spans the globe and the patterns are significantly intensive and diverse. Even though the intensive interaction with various people through the Internet greatly helps Yoshi get access to the latest information about hardware and software, he is still faced with a considerable lack of physical human interaction. In this regard, he has a special place. In 1997 Yoshi received the highly respected CG design award founded by a large entertainment company, one of the most reputable and widely known CG design awards in Japan. This company has established a special design studio in one of its office buildings in central Tokyo, exclusively for the winners and finalists of the award. For Yoshi, the special design studio seems to function as a “Ba” (Nonaka and Konno, 1998), a place where people can share a distinct context of working and exchange a variety of tangible and intangible goods. Such a place can provide people with broad opportunities for “real” human interaction, which facilitate exchange of valid information concerning new clients and jobs. Furthermore, the studio is a place for

3.3 Case C: E-business entrepreneur Hiro, 35, is CEO of a small software company. After being involved in the Internet service provider (ISP) business for a few years, he founded the company in 1998. The company primarily develops entertainment software and digital contents such as network-based games on the Internet, a music-composing tool for PCs, and more recently various tools and network contents for Internet-enabled mobile phone services such as the NTT DoCoMo i-mode platform. In contrast to the two previous cases, Hiro is subject to much more intense and dynamic interaction with other people. Whereas Jun and Yoshi primarily work alone and only interact with a limited number of clients and members of projects at the same time, Hiro has 20 members of staff in his company. Moreover, he is involved in constantly changing business situations where he has to interact with a diverse range of current and prospective stakeholders. In order to cope with this, he utilizes the combination of email and mobile phone technologies as the primary means of managing his interaction: He forwards all incoming emails to his Internet-enabled mobile phone. In fact, during the interview, his mobile phone notified him about received emails several times, and he checked them immediately. This emphasized the fact that he was engaged in a constant flow of multiple interaction threads. For him, it proved impossible at one particular time to focus on a single interaction at hand and to exclude others. He needed to juggle multiple interaction threads by effectively using technology.

4. Three aspects of mobility The close examination of the work practices of the mobile professionals clearly demonstrates that the conventional understanding of the concept of mobility cannot fully grasp the essence of emerging mobile professional work. By definition, the meaning of the concept of mobility spans a wide spectrum of humans and non-humans as well as concrete and abstract spheres. It can basically be applied to anything that is in a dynamic mode or transformation. However, in spite of such a wide and diverse extent of the original meaning, the concept of mobility has been traditionally understood and quite narrowly used in contemporary business and organizational contexts. For example, the concept is typically

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used in such forms as “mobile technology”, “mobile office”, and “mobile work”, being the most relevant to this research. All of these usages of “mobile” refer to some sense of geographical movement or remoteness from a certain fixed point or location. The commonly used concept of mobility implies a geographical meaning of movement or distance from a certain point. However, such usage of the concept ignores another important aspect of the original meaning, referring to transformation or motion of objects, states, conditions, or structures. As Sherry and Salvador (2002) argue, the conventional understanding of mobile work deals only with remoteness from a specific location and largely ignores the dynamism of work as such[3]. The results of the field study in Tokyo clearly demonstrate that the work practices of the mobile professionals exhibit not only an extensive geographical movement in daily work activities, but also intensive interaction with a wide range of people through both physical and virtual means. They also show flexible operation as an independent unit of business that can be flexibly mobilized by the firms. Based on the results, we found that the work practices of mobile professional work could be understood more fully and clearly by analyzing three interrelated aspects of mobility: locational mobility concerned with the workers’ extensive geographical movement, operational mobility in relation to their capability for flexible operation as an independent unit of business, and interactional mobility associated with their intensive and fluid interaction with a wide range of people. The mobile professionals’ work practices display a high level of those mobilities, although the levels of mobility are uneven according to the nature of each work practice. Table I shows the mobilities of the professionals exemplified by the three focus cases. For example, the work practice of the independent town planning consultant involves high levels of all aspects of mobility. The locational mobility of Jun’s work is particularly high: he worked across extensive geographical areas and demonstrated various modes of mobility such as traveling, visiting, and wandering (Kristoffersen and Ljungberg, 2000). His style of working in terms of such extensive geographic movement is

most typically seen as “mobile” work in a conventional sense. However, when taking a close look at his work practices, we also found relatively high levels of other aspects of mobility. In terms of operational mobility, his business of town planning consulting encompasses a high degree of mobility as an independent business unit. He primarily works alone and employs no formal members of staff, but acts as a distinct project unit in various forms such as a consultant, a planner, a facilitator of local events, an outside advisor for local governments, and so on. In this sense, his work operations would hold a relatively high level of operational mobility, although, of course, he has to collaborate with other stakeholders in actual projects. Furthermore, his interaction with other people appears quite intensive. He constantly interacts with various members of a project including client members, business partners such as major construction companies and media companies, and other professional workers such as architects and promotion planners. The ways in which he interacts with them also vary widely, from face-to-face encounters to mediation through the Internet. Thus, the interactional mobility of Jun’s work practices is also high. In the case of the freelance CG designer, Yoshi, work practices distinctively show a low degree of locational mobility, working at home for long periods of time. The level of operational mobility is, however, significantly high. As discussed previously, CG design work is increasingly unbundled from operational structures of large corporations. In his case, the music companies are seeking and utilizing skillful freelance CG designers like Yoshi to constantly create and update a number of artists’ Websites every month. In this kind of business environment, Yoshi can serve as an independent business unit outside of the established organizations. It can thus be argued that his work practices involve a significant level of operational mobility. Moreover, when considering the way Yoshi interacts with people, it can be characterized by a relatively high level of interactional mobility. By actively utilizing various Internet technologies and applications, he intensively interacts with not only his clients but also various people on the Internet, most of whom he has never met before. In terms of such virtually conducted and intensive interaction, Yoshi’s work

Table I Mobilities of mobile professionals in the three focus cases

A: Town planning consultant B: Freelance CG designer C: Software entrepreneur

Locational mobility

Operational mobility

Interactional mobility

++

+ ++

+ + ++

+

Notes: + implies a moderate degree of mobility; ++ implies a high degree of mobility

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practices exhibit highly mobile and fluid features of interaction. Finally, the case of the software entrepreneur, Hiro, shows a particularly high level of interactional mobility. On a daily basis, he constantly has to manage intensive interaction from a significant number of stakeholders, including 20 members of staff in his company and external business relations. Furthermore, the locational mobility of his work practices is also quite high in that he frequently goes out to meet people and to collect information in the field, for example in shops and on the streets of Tokyo. However, the operational mobility in his work practices is relatively low. Being CEO of a small company, his work activities are inevitably restrained to a large extent by various explicit and implicit conditions and obligations to keep the company’s business running. As seen above, the most fundamental finding from the field study of the mobile professionals is that the conventional understanding of the concept of mobility cannot explain the dynamic and diverse aspects of their actual work practices. As typically seen in various existing debates on mobile work such as Kristoffersen and Ljungberg (2000) and Bellotti and Bly (1996), the concept of mobility has been understood in terms only of the worker’s geographical movement in work activities. There is no doubt that contemporary mobile work is characterized by extensive geographical movement of the workers. Yet the concept of mobility originally holds much more diverse meanings referring to dynamic transformation of not only humans but also nonhumans such as objects, information, conditions, and structures. Hence, we should discuss the emerging mobile work from a broader perspective that can shed light on other aspects of mobility.

communication access, which thus maintain a high level of locational and interactional mobility. Internet technologies and applications are particularly important, supporting intense interaction with people. The Internet has been typically understood as a means for gathering information, but it can also function by facilitating interaction with people, coordinating interpretation of issues, and supporting human relationships (Sørensen and Kakihara, 2002). It is also clear that ICTs, particularly mobile technology, play a critical role in supporting mobility of work practices in general and locational and interactional mobility in particular. The combination of the Internet-enabled mobile phone and email forwarding provides the professional with an ability to manage intensive interaction effectively even when on the move. It is, however, important to look at actual work practices embedded in a local context to appreciate the significance of the utilization of ICTs. The impact of a particular technology on work might vary significantly depending on the conditions and occasion of its actual use. For example, the mobile phone has typically been regarded as enhancing locational mobility of users’ activities by affording them stable communication access irrespective of location. But such stable and constant access may hinder the users’ locational and operational mobility due to the overwhelming amount of interaction they are exposed to. As Suchman (1987) argues, human interaction is inherently situated in a particular context that recursively frames and is reframed by the actual practice of action.

5. Implications for a new design From the extended conceptual lens discussed above, which illuminates not just locational but also operational and interactional mobility, various new insights on mobile professionals and their everyday work practices can be drawn. In this final section we briefly discuss four implications for a new design for mobile professional work and technology use. 5.1 ICT as mobility-booster As we have seen in the three cases, ICTs play various roles in their work practices. The mobile phone and the subnote PC provide the professional workers with the continuity of work environment for PC usage and the stability of

5.2 Maintaining multiple ongoing interactions Mobile professionals, being subject to intensive interaction with a number of people, are coping with multiple on-going interactions rather than single, sporadic interaction. Issues of human interaction have attracted the attention of many scholars in a wide range of research fields concerned with technology including CSCW, Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), sociology of interaction, and workplace studies. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. Ishii and Miyake, 1991; Whittaker et al., 1997; Wiberg, 2001), most of the research has focused on “oneshot”, sporadic interaction taking place one by one, be it face-to-face or mediated. Yet when closely considering the cases where the mobile professionals show high levels of interactional mobility, such as Jun and Hiro, it is apparent that they frequently face occasions where they have to manage and sort out different kinds of interactions simultaneously. In the work practices of mobile

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professionals, particularly those having a high level of interactional mobility, the workers are subject to an increasing need for dynamic negotiation of multiple threads of ongoing interaction.

supporting and facilitating informal interaction. As Orr (1996) argues, such informal interaction can create various ad hoc collaborations among the workers. Various realities around the mobile professional work resulting from increased mobility in locational, operational, and interactional aspects of work practices tend to make us believe that most of their interaction can be established through technological mediation. On the contrary, a specific place or location still plays critically important roles to support and facilitate their everyday work practices.

5.3 The importance of personal networks The mobile professionals’ work practices are heavily dependent on personal human networks that have been built through collaborative work activities in the past. Work practices build and enact personal networks, which in turn support future effective work practices. Nardi et al. (2002) address in detail the increasing importance of what they call “intensional networks” in contemporary work environments. While such networking practices have been seen in a limited number of project-based industries such as film production and music, Nardi et al. argue that the importance of personal networks is also rapidly increasing in corporate life in general. Mobile professionals depend on such intensional networks in their everyday work practices more heavily than do ordinary workers, since work practices of mobile professionals inherently cross team, group, and organizational boundaries.

‘ ... In spite of increasing prevalence of technologically mediated and virtual interaction with people in work environments, physical spaces where people meet face-to-face still perform an important function for mobile professional work... ‘

Since mobile professionals usually cannot or are not willing to have strong and widespread institutional and infrastructural support from organizations for their everyday work practices, they seek to build and maintain their own personal networks, which penetrate a number of organizations, for keeping their businesses running. For them, personal networks are not merely networks of friends but rather an essential social foundation for current and future collaboration. 5.4 Places as material foundations for interaction The results of the field study also indicate that in spite of the increasing prevalence of technologically mediated and virtual interaction with people in work environments, physical spaces where people can meet face-to-face still perform an important function for mobile professional work. The office space can be a place for the material foundation of their work practices

Notes 1 Complete analysis and discussion of this research are presented in Kakihara (2003). 2 All names have been changed to protect privacy. 3 There are some notable exceptions such as Luff and Heath (1998) and Wiberg (2001).

References Alvesson, M. (1995), Management of Knowledge-Intensive Companies, De Gruyter, New York, NY. Aoki, M. and Dore, R. (1996), The Japanese Firm: The Sources of Competitive Strength, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Barley, S.R. and Orr, J.E. (1997), “The neglected workforce”, in Barley, S.R. and Orr, J.E. (Eds), Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in US Settings, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pp. 1-19. Bellotti, V. and Bly, S. (1996), “Walking away from the desktop computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team”, Proceedings of the ACM 1996 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘96), ACM Press, Boston, MA, 16-20 November. Ishii, H. and Miyake, N. (1991), “Toward an open shared workspace: computer and video fusion approach of teamworkstation”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 34 No. 12, pp. 37-50. Kakihara, M. (2003), “Emerging work practices of ICT-enabled mobile professionals”, unpublished PhD dissertation submitted to Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, London. Kakihara, M. and Sørensen, C. (2002), “Mobility: an extended perspective”, Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), IEEE, Big Island, HI, 7-10 January. Kristoffersen, S. and Ljungberg, F. (2000), “Mobility: from stationary to mobile work”, in Braa, K., Sørensen, C. and Dahlbom, B. (Eds), Planet Internet, Studentliteratur, Lund, pp. 41-64. Laubacher, R.J. and Malone, T.W. (1997), “Flexible work arrangement and 21st century workers’ guilds”, MIT Sloan School of Management Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, Working Paper, No. 4. Luff, P. and Heath, C. (1998), “Mobility in collaboration”, Proceedings of the ACM 1998 Conference of ComputerSupported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘98), ACM Press, Seattle, WA, 14-18 November. Malone, T.W. and Laubacher, R.J. (1998), “The dawn of the e-Lance economy”, Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober, pp. 145-53.

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Malone, T.W., Yates, J. and Benjamin, R.I. (1987), “Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 30 No. 6, pp. 484-97. Meager, N. (1992), “The characteristics of the self-employed: some Anglo-German comparisons”, in Leighton, P. and Felstead, A. (Eds), The New Entrepreneurs, Kogan Page, London, pp. 69-99. Nakane, C. (1983), Japanese Society, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S. and Schwarz, H. (2002), “NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks”, ComputerSupported Cooperative Work, Vol. 11, pp. 205-42. Nonaka, I. and Konno, N. (1998), “The concept of ‘Ba’: building a foundation for knowledge creation”, California Management Review, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 40-54. Orr, J.E. (1996), Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Rheingold, H. (2002), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA. Schmidt, K. (1994), “The organization of cooperative work: beyond the ‘Leviathan’ conception of the organization of cooperative work”, Proceedings of the ACM 1994 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘94), ACM Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 24-26 October. Scho¨n, D.A. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, New York, NY. Segal, L.M. and Sullivan, D.G. (1995), “The temporary labor force”, Economics Perspectives, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 2-19.

Segal, L.M. and Sullivan, D.G. (1997), “The growth of temporary services work”, Journal of Economics Perspectives, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 117-36. Sherry, J. and Salvador, T. (2002), “Running and grimacing: the struggle for balance in mobile work”, in Brown, B., Green, N. and Harper, R. (Eds), Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, Springer-Verlag, London, pp. 108-20. Sørensen, C. and Kakihara, M. (2002), “Knowledge discourses and interaction technology”, Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), IEEE, Big Island, HI, 7-10 January. Suchman, L.A. (1987), Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Whalley, P. and Barley, S.R. (1997), “Technical work in the division of labor: stalking the wily anomaly”, in Barley, S.R. and Orr, J.E. (Eds), Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in US Settings, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pp. 23-52. Whittaker, S., Swanson, J., Kucan, J. and Sidner, C. (1997), “TeleNotes: managing lightweight interactions in the desktop”, Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 137-68. Wiberg, M. (2001), “Between mobile meetings: exploring seamless ongoing interaction support for mobile CSCW”, PhD dissertation, Umea˚ University, Umea˚.

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1. Introduction

Ubiquitous visions and opaque realities: professionals talking about mobile technologies Carsten Sørensen and David Gibson

The authors Carsten Sørensen and David Gibson are both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Keywords Mobile communication systems, Flexible working, Professions

Abstract It is essential for professionals to have flexible access to information sources and interaction with clients and colleagues. Mobile phones, e-mail, pagers, laptops, and PCs all aim to facilitate the flexibility necessary for conducting their work. Ideally, professionals with intense demands on their time should not be supported by various information and interaction technologies, they should embed core domesticated technologies. This paper examines how the vision of iniquitous ICT support for professional work meets the harsh realities through interviews with 16 individual professionals from 16 different organisations. The paper aims to answer the question of the applicability and reality of ubiquitous computing in today’s work environment and where technology is in terms of limitations for the professional. The study demonstrates that the joint life of professionals and their technologies is not one best characterised by the technical and the social merging seamlessly. It is instead one burdened by constant attention.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 188-196 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549516

Much of the current, and indeed past, technology discourse on pervasive, mobile and ubiquitous computing in particular highlights the immense potentials of various kinds of technological innovations. These visions are mainly informed by the imagined potentials of technologies, and it is fair to assume that much of the debate focuses on visions rather than realities. Every new generation of mobile, pervasive or ubiquitous technology comes ready-packaged with the next generation of sparkling vendor-formulated promised lands. We have recently seen the drive towards equipping everyone with a Personal Digital Assistant, and currently we all seem to have a pressing need to carry tablet PCs and take low-resolution pictures of one another using our new mobile phone. We are sold the vision of 3G mobile telephony, and hope that the technology providers will solve the problems of shifting from 2G to 3G networks with the same handset, before we have to use them. Even before these technologies are diffused widely, there are already calls for 3.5 and 4G potentially offering very high-speed data transfer rates. Already now, emerging technologies allow relatively transparent shifting between various networks, such as GSM, GPRS, and WiFi. It can of course be expected that the heterogeneous elements in the data and voice infrastructure will converge and, from the point of use, become one. The aim of this paper is based on discussions with professionals on how they use and perceive modern pervasive and mobile technologies, to contextualise this largely technology-driven debate and to highlight some of the issues of a more pragmatic nature relating to the intricate relationships between professional work practices and the use of technologies in carrying out these practices. One dominant aspect of the technology debate has been the compelling visions of ubiquitous computing, where complex technologies of all kinds seamlessly blend into the background and form an invisible fabric of modern life itself, similar to the way in which clocks in general and wristwatches in particular gradually have blended with human practices of time management. Whereas the technology-driven discourse is obsessed with the new, the professionals are, naturally, more concerned with the utility of technologies. Obviously, for modern professionals, hired for their skills, time is quite literally money. They are concerned with the job at hand, and most often are not interested in concerning themselves with technology as such. It is of course interesting that Alan Kay with his vision of the Dynabook, Steve Mann with his wearable computers, Kevin Warwick’s cyborg

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projects and others have a professional interest in the matter and spend considerable time and effort in breaking new barriers. For the modern urban professional, however, the technology is simply a means of doing the job at hand. This paper critically examines the main issues emerging when the theory of ubiquitous and pervasive computing meets the realities of modern urban professionals’ experiences. This is accomplished by combining a theoretical analysis of empirical evidence obtained through interviewing 16 modern professionals about their daily life with mostly mobile information and communication technologies. Through these accounts of articulated experiences of technology use, we can investigate to what extent the vision of ubiquitous computing support is a reality – to what extent the professionals feel their core technologies disappear in the background. The study clearly demonstrated that all the core technologies indeed did not disappear. Some proved a stable and important aspect of working life, such as the invaluable mobile phone. Other technologies were very much present as a constant source of need for attention. Yet again, a technology such as the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was mainly present as a topic of failed adoption. The PDAs generally disappeared into desk drawers. The main issues raised highly complex underlying issues of infrastructure standardisation, and quite basic ones, such as poor usability due to short battery life of essential technologies. The most promising technology was found to be wireless email clients, such as Blackberry (www.rim.com), allowing professionals to check and send email while on the move. This enforces a message of simple services based on complex underlying infrastructures, thus providing flexible services for the professionals. We conclude that the successes of mobilising technologies have not been mirrored by increase in embedded services and applications. Technologies still occupy a front stage for the users. They are inadequate, in the way and a constant area of concern. The ubiquitous vision is still an opaque reality. The following section outlines the vision of the technical and the social merging in ubiquitous computing. Section 3 discusses professionals and their need for support from information and communication technologies (ICT). Section 4 outlines and discusses core technologies discussed by the professionals, and Section 5 emphasises infrastructure issues. Section 6 concludes the paper by discussing our findings in terms of the vision of ubiquitous computing.

2. The vision of ubiquitous computing One of the characteristics of many contemporary ICT innovations is the duality of a client application based on a common infrastructure, for example the mobile phone. Another is that the technologies are shifting from traditionally supporting information management and transactions towards supporting computermediated interaction (Braa et al., 2000). This implies that technologies increasingly will relate directly to the social context in which they are used – for example, the mobile phone storing a list of names and phone numbers, or the workflow management system through coordination mechanism modelling a collaborative work process (Sørensen et al., 2002; Sørensen, 2003). In this sense, we would argue that one of the persistent developments during the past 20 years is the increasing representation and modelling of the social in the technical. The vision of ubiquitous computing can be viewed as the ultimate convergence of the social and the technical. Here, there is no longer any distinction between the two. The technical has disappeared before our eyes and subsumed itself both in the social and in our understanding of what is in fact technical and what is social. Ubiquitous computing represents the utopian realisation of human-computer interaction (Banavar et al., 2000). As Mark Weiser stated in his paper from 1991: “the most profound technologies are those that disappear . . . they weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. He further argues that when technologies “disappear” we can focus on the true organisational tasks, “we are freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals” (Weiser, 1991). Weiser further argues that we will truly realise the practice of ubiquitous computing when machines “fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs (which) will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods” (Weiser, 1991). Lyytinen and Yoo (2002) explain the vision in terms of nomadic information environments, consisting of infrastructures and services critically relying on the convergence of core technologies, support for mobility and mass scale diffusion. Current ICT development from the corporate mainframe in the 1970s has led us from centralised support via personal desktop and laptop computers towards a whole range of personalised or person-centric technologies (Kalakota and Robinson, 2002; Sørensen and Cornford, 2004). Mark Weiser explained developments in terms of the historical development from the mainframe era, with many persons using one computer, over the PC era

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characterised by one person using one computer, to ubiquitous computing signalling one person using many computers (Weiser, 1999). Ubiquitous computing can also be characterised by distinguishing between the degree of mobility of the technology and the degree of embeddedness (Lyytinen, 2003). As illustrated in Figure 1, ubiquitous computing is characterised by both high degree of mobility and embeddedness, whereas mobile computing and pervasive computing have low degrees of embeddedness and pervasiveness respectively. Ishii and Ullmar (1997) expand on Weiser’s vision by observing that the world operates in that of “computation” (bits) and that of the physical (atoms). Ishii and Ullmar’s goal is to forge a much stronger relationship between the two, as they set out to describe and design a world in which both atoms and bits meet in unison (Abowd et al., 2002). Norman (1999) discusses the development from generalised computers to information appliances. Moving into a ubiquitous computing environment calls for an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand and model both the world of digits and the world in which we live and interact (Estrin et al., 2002). A large number of research programmes and projects have explored mainly technical challenges in establishing ubiquitous computing. Three of the most prolific people in the field are Alan Kay with his vision of the Dynabook, Steve Mann, who since the early 1980s has spent a considerable time wearing cameras and computers (wearcam.org), and Kevin Warwick, who has experimented with the organic merger of humans and computational elements (www.kevinwarwick.org). The EU Programme The Disappearing Computer (www.disappearingcomputer.org) has funded projects aimed at creating ubiquitous-computing artefacts, studying how these artefacts could interact together and support new user experiences. The ubiquitous-computing research community has since 1999 organised conferences on ubiquitous computing (ubicomp.org), and a

number of academic journals. Most of this research is exclusively guided by an engineering or design rationale aimed at pushing the technical limits. Although some of the research employs empirical studies, these will almost always serve the direct purpose of informing the design process. Little research aims directly at understanding how the realities of working life with computers relate to the visions of ubiquitous computing.

Figure 1 Characterising ubiquitous computing in terms of the degree of mobility and pervasiveness of the technology

3. Professionals in workplace interaction There has generally been a lack of empirical validation and fieldwork that look at professionals’ work practices and new technology-mediated styles of interaction (Nardi et al., 2002; Kakihara and Sørensen, 2004). Abowd et al. (2002) suggest “there has been surprisingly little research published from an evaluation or end-user perspective in the ubiquitous computing community”. The aim of the study was to study how modern professionals manage their information and interaction, and how they view the role of the ICT they choose to use. There is in particular, among highly skilled and specialised knowledge workers, a significant element of choice regarding what technologies are adopted and how they are applied (Robertson et al., 2001). Modern professionals must, as members of teams in knowledge-intensive organisations, be able to flexibly make decisions, interact with a large number of people and often be highly geographically mobile (Al-Taitoon et al., 2003; Kakihara and Sørensen, 2004). They must be able to work fluidly, buy and sell at real-time speeds, advise, approve, inquire, develop relationships, coordinate, collaborate, communicate and problem-solve on a daily basis. The adoption of new technologies, especially the widespread adoption of mobile phones and networked information systems, has provided these professionals with the ability to work both away from the office and while travelling, transcending both space and time with respect to device and human action respectively (Dix et al., 2000). Past research of theoretical work focuses on a narrow brand of organisational interpersonal communications, such as on those interactions that are extended, multiparty, formal and one-shot as opposed to ongoing, informal and person-toperson (Egido et al., 1990; Whittaker et al., 1994; Wiberg, 2001), rather than those that are flexible (Dahlbom and Ljungberg, 1998; Nardi et al., 2002). Castells (1996) links the technological development in the 1970s to the culture of freedom, individual innovation and entrepreneurialism, which grew out of the

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American university campuses of the 1960s, creating the “global village” and leading to a dramatic increase in project and team-based cooperation. Technologies, including desktop video conferencing, mobile phones, collaborative software, PDAs and Internet/Intranet systems, converge to forge the foundation of providing the professional with the tools to respond to the threats of the business environment. This new workplace would be unrestrained by geography, time, and organisational boundaries; and it would be a virtual workplace, where productivity, flexibility, and collaboration will reach unprecedented levels (Townsend et al., 1998). While the tools and technological environments used to gain agility lie at the heart of this paper, Weiser (1991) states that the technological devices are only a transitional step towards achieving the real potential of information technology. He extends this notion by explaining that the devices used by workers cannot be accountable for the true nature of ubiquitous computing. Instead, the nature of ubiquitous computing lies not in the technology itself but rather in the human psychology of the technology disappearing. Dahlbom and Ljungberg (1998) describe the term “flexibility” as an ideal scenario, in which professionals can use technology to leverage their ability to conduct work beyond geographical and temporal constraints (1998). In establishing a technologically flexible work environment, the professional gains and creates fluidity of work practices (Schwarz et al., 1999). However, as argued by several, mobile technologies can result in interaction overload through the inherent asymmetry of interaction (Nardi and Whittaker, 2000; Kakihara et al., 2004). In order to understand better state-of-the-art technology use, we conducted over three weeks in June/July 2002 a series of 16 interviews with professionals. The interviews were all recorded in participants’ work places in London except one interview conducted by phone to New York, USA. The aim of the interviews was to explore how the professionals utilised ICT for performing their daily tasks. All interviews were tape-recorded and each lasted around one hour. The interviewees were mostly high-level professionals and executives, or knowledge workers (Robertson et al., 2000; Newell et al., 2002). Please see Table I for an outline of the interviewees. The sample is, therefore, not representative in a broader demographic sense, but is biased towards highly skilled and educated professionals, and selected to represent modern professionals experiencing the demands of modern working practices in terms of accelerated pace, a dynamic constellation of

Table I Interviewee profiles 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Title and job nature Managing director Global Investment Bank European digital advertising director Hedge fund manager Paediatric surgeon Construction project manager IT director IT entrepreneur Energy broker Accountant Investment banker Security consultant – information technology Chief executive officer – interactive marketing Business consultant – information technology Vice President – ICT solutions provider Christian chaplain – religious work Global business development executive

professional relationships, and an advanced use of ICT (Schwarz et al., 1999).

4. Professionals’ working life with technologies The study not only demonstrates the professionals’ deep reliance on a range of ICT. It also clearly shows that professionals must devote time almost on a daily basis to both select, configure, tinker with and reflect on their core technologies. The research documents crucial encounters between professionals and their technologies of choice or rejection. It shows a rich picture of multiple complex technologies and services that do not effortlessly recede into the background. As argued by the Business Consultant, “. . . all of my devices add some complexity to work”. One of the aspects emphasised is that the professionals frequently change the context of work and that technology use must be adapted to a given context, as voiced by the Entrepreneur: “it’s context-specific, you use different tools in different situations”. We found two main barriers for widespread mobile and ubiquitous support, namely, bandwidth and battery life time. In a changing business environment, professionals must be given the tools and resources to respond effectively to those changes. Some business environments change more rapidly than others. Real-time industries such as financial institutions are good examples. The Hedge Fund Manager and the Energy Trader both work in high real-time industries. The current state of technology dictates that they must be positioned at broadband network PC terminals in order to cope at real-time speeds. This implies that they cannot easily rely on

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personalised mobile and wireless solutions simply due to the lack of bandwidth. The Hedge Fund Manager stated that the only instrument he would require to do his job anywhere would be a broadband connection. The Investment Banker’s biggest frustration with the technological environment was that it was slow. Out of the 16 people interviewed, three stated that battery power acted as a limitation of flexibility. As connection bandwidth constantly improves through the rollout of 3G and WiFi services, in particular battery life seems a major technical challenge (Malone, 2004). Email was used by all 16 professionals. In fact, all but one of the participants used email as the primary communication tool for work practices. The interactive marketing CEO stated that email provided the ability to communicate complex ideas instantaneously. The Vice President emphasised that email only provides data and not always the proper context for interpreting the data into information. The Accountant argued that email is information-rich since he felt that it provided him with a comprehensive source of information. The Advertising Account Director argued that email enabled him to get important points across. The Vice President of the technology company pointed out that:

reaffirmed this sentiment by stating that he had two PDAs but used neither of them. He had made several attempts to use PDA technology, but felt that the usability of the device is still far too low for the technology to be used. Only one out of all of the interviewees admitted to having an active relationship with a PDA, which was used when travelling and then only for reading downloaded Web-articles on, while commuting on the underground train. The comparison with the mobile phone, instant messaging and email offers striking similarities. Flexible networking services can easily be associated with direct measures of usefulness, even if they bring along associated negative consequences such as information and interaction overload when they really are successful (Ljungberg and Sørensen, 2000). As opposed to this, we can assess the relative lack of successful adoption of the PDA among the interviewed professionals. It represents yet another gadget that takes up time and effort in terms of synchronising contents, and it offers a complex and uncertain set of potential benefits. The phone naturally formed a core technology for the professionals. The Investment Banker categorised the phone as a medium used to indicate importance: “If it’s important, call me: if it’s not, then send me an email”. The Global Business Development Executive stated that she decided to use the phone in sensitive cases, since the phone conversation provided contextual information about the other party, faster and more tailored feedback. The Chief Executive Order argued that phone calls provided extra details to speed up the processes of a business deal. The Construction Project Manager concurred and stated that the telephone facilitated quick response to problems in a time-sensitive manner. The IT Security Consultant distinguished between functional and more psychological aspects of phone conversations:

.

. . . e-mail is for CYA. Cover Your Ass, because you need a trail. Unfortunately, too many people are concerned with that so they use a phone. I like the phone to solve problems because the phone is synchronous, so you talk to them and you make them come up with a resolution right then and there, whereas email doesn’t provide you with the definitive response.

The complete reliance on email, coupled with increased demands for flexible and mobile working, can be viewed as key explanations for several professionals voicing great interest in Blackberry technology (www.rim.com) supporting instant global access to email from small handheld terminals. It represents a simple client technology offering a highly flexible networking service of providing mobile access to email, but based on a highly complex underlying infrastructure (Mathiassen and Sørensen, 2002). For the professional, being able to envision the immediate benefits of adopting the technology – and investing time in learning how to use it – is essential, as clearly demonstrated by Robertson et al. (2001). Whereas several mentioned the Blackberry email client as an interesting and desirable technology, the general PDA was considered far from the preferred work tool. The Advertising Director explained that: “I just realised that hey, this is an extra device, it’s not a productivity device, so I sold them all on e-Bay and I’m glad they’re gone”. The Entrepreneur

If I have my mobile phone, I know I can be anywhere and not worry about it . . . the phone is for directness, and you can infer a lot from people’s tone of voice that you can’t get from email. Email, I think, is more political, because you’re writing it for a purpose and a point, as opposed to a telephone conversation, which is more interactive.

Whereas the crucial communication technologies, email and the phone, of course are digital, we found evidence for the continued reliance on the traditional ubiquitous information technology, paper, although the research also points to a progression towards a “paperless” office. Several of the professionals indicated the desire to implement paperless working. The IT Director reported the psychological attachment to paper with some people displaying the “‘must-print-it-

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to-feel-it-to-have-it’ mentality”. The Vice President stated that he printed most documents as he found them easier to read in print than on screen. Several professionals reported that their organisations were implementing the paperless office to increase efficiency, and in general there was a desire to engage in paperless working. The construction project manager voiced his frustration with a paper-based office in that accessing information via a computer would be easier. The paediatric surgeon stated that in hospitals, most of the paper-based information should be digitised, as it would facilitate instant access. Paper, however, displays such a diversity of uses, pervasiveness and flexibility in use that it is very difficult to replace (Hughes and King, 1993). It can be argued that removing paper from work processes around the world will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible (Sellen and Harper, 2003). The ways in which paper is brought into use may change, but precisely the ubiquitous nature of paper-based documents that are micro-mobile (Luff and Heath, 1998) carriers of information brings along a highly standardised storage medium and utilises a very stable reader technology – humans. In that sense, paper is perhaps one of the primary obstacles for ubiquitous computing since it represents an already established ubiquitous information infrastructure. Living in a world of a paper-based and an electronic infrastructure requires scanners and printers acting as gateways between the two. Instant messaging was seen as one of the most used and most context-rich means of social interaction. The Entrepreneur felt that his MSN Messenger conversations could be quite innovative, in particular when engaging in multiparty conversational spaces where many creative ideas emerged. For him the global availability of MSN was important. The Energy Broker dedicated three screens to the Instant Messenger at one of his work-stations and had around 30 of his clients engaging in on-line discussions with him at any time. He argued that introducing instant messaging technology had reduced phone calls by 50 per cent. However, as argued by the Entrepreneur, the de-contextualisation (Kallinikos, 2001) of face- and body-language would more easily lead to confrontation and difficult situations. Video conferencing garnered negative reactions from the participants. All of the participants who commented about video conferencing found it to be imperfect. As argued by the Business Development Executive, it was not found to be successful, and would need to support an atmosphere similar to that of meetings. The IT Director explained a scenario where a salesperson

at his company was advised to avoid a trip to Germany by using video conferencing when in fact the clients much preferred a face-to-face meeting. He further claimed that the video-conferencing vendors and proponents played down the real differences between co-located meetings and video conferencing experienced by all users in the organisation. The Investment Banker argued that video conferencing at times had proven effective when budget or time constraints had made travelling unfeasible, but that bankers mostly prefer face-to-face meetings. The attitudes towards video conferencing relate well to the fact that the overwhelmingly favourite means of communication, of course, was face-to-face meetings. This could indicate the clear and stark distinction between the context-rich fluidity of face-to-face communication and the lack of flexibility that current technology provides. The Technology Vice President completely disregarded technology for providing any context for interpreting information. The Entrepreneur expanded by saying that there were limitations to the use of the technology, and that it never will become a replacement for person-to-person interaction. The voiced preference for face-to-face conversations as opposed to video-mediated ones has been widely discussed in the literature (Heath and Luff, 2000; Olson and Olson, 2000). However, by directly comparing video conferences to face-to-face meetings, standards are set that probably can never be met. Through using a certain mediating technology we gradually adopt notions of presence. Over time, we accept telephone presence because we are used to talking with others on the phone. We may perhaps establish a similar, yet distinct, notion of presence when connecting and interacting with others through instant messaging. We may even gradually develop some behavioural patterns accommodating 3G mobile videophone conferencing. However, in neither of these examples would we characterise the un-mediated and the mediated situations as the same.

5. Infrastructure issues The previous section discussed the client technologies used by the interviewees. This section focuses on the underlying issues of infrastructure standardisation. The infrastructure issues were related to problems regarding, and limitations of, the standardisation and can be divided into three groups: standardisation of information sources, standardisation between devices, and standardisation of networks.

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Regarding information source standardisation, the Entrepreneur highlighted lack of real-time file sharing as a major limitation. He further emphasised the practical difficulties in maintaining consistent versions of documents, appointments and messages across several computers. The Investment Banker, whose organisation created a mandate of a “paperless” office, explained that there is no information standardisation between the offices in London and Toronto. This attests to the lack of coordination and standardisation between the information sources of the two parts of the same organisation. The Advertising Account Director explained how he had to extract a file from the server at work and download it onto the harddrive of his laptop. He then proceeded to take the file, on his laptop, to Paris and amend the update to the file with his client. Once the changes were completed in Paris, he then travelled back to London in order to transfer the file from his laptop back to the server at work. He argued that a real-time standardisation of information transfer would greatly save the time and the effort of extracting, changing and replacing the files. The professionals clearly expressed the need for collaborative services providing a shared workspace, awareness support and coordination mechanisms (Mathiassen and Sørensen, 2002). These collaborative services would, in more substantial ways than networking services, support collaboration across working contexts. Device standardisation relates to the convergence of multiple devices into one, or the provision of easy interoperability of several devices. The IT Security Consultant expressed frustration with the lack of integration between devices. The Business Consultant confirmed this when outlining his ideal technological set-up. He would like a centralisation of his important information on a server combined with device-convergence so that, instead of four or five devices, he would only need one or two. The devices would ideally be synchronised from the server. Some aspects of this service have been implemented in Apple’s iSync (www.apple.com/isync/) allowing users to synchronise address book data, bookmarks and appointments between PC, laptop, PDA, iPod and mobile phone via a centralised server. Standardisation between devices is of course closely related to standardisation of information sources. This is also an important issue related to the support for flexible working practices. Device standardisation would encompass the mobile phone, the PDA, the Internet, and any other device that is used. Illustrating some of the experienced complications, the Managing Director stated that in order to get his laptop

connected to the Internet he would engage in a complex procedure: . . . you’ve got your pin numbers, you’ve got your bank card, your personal stuff, work ID, telephone ID, mobile phone, voice mail, and it’s impossible to remember all of the different security codes. So I’m in China and I have to figure out what phone to use and I have to boot it up and I figure out passwords and get all that in, then I got to figure out where I’m dialling-in to . . . you need some type of standardisation, otherwise you have different people using different systems, it just doesn’t work. . .when you’re in different countries and you need different adapters for the plugs and the phones and things like that.

Network standardisation, or connectivity, was the most heavily criticised problem. As argued by the Managing Director, the technology must work and it must work everywhere. The Advertising Director illustrated network standardisation problems with the example of needing to log off and on again when moving the laptop from one IP connection to another and thus changing network address. Obviously, some of these problems have technical solutions, such as the increasingly popular wireless networking connections. The Construction Project Manager voiced the frustration of at times not being able to fulfil others’ expectation of being constantly available and in touch. The IT Director pointed out the need for the networking infrastructure at least functioning in hotels. As the mobile professional will spend many working hours in early mornings and evenings in a hotel room, providing easy and flexible network connection here is important. Standardisation between networks was a predominant complaint in real-time professions such as stock trading, brokering, and hedge fund managing, rather than project-based professions such as sales, strategy, and accountancy. As argued by the Hedge Fund Manager, “timeliness in everything – anything that is recorded is technically out of date. [. . .] Information is out of date in an hour or two”. This can attest to the fact that the need for coordination and standardisation between networks is crucial for the professional’s agility. The Energy Broker highlighted this by arguing that flexibility essentially boils down to accessibility, and was supported by the Investment Banker who argued that daily operations consist of constantly emerging decision-making, and that not being available for half-an-hour was highly problematic. If an infrastructure can be characterised as enabling, pervasive and in the background, then a ubiquitous computing environment can be viewed as an infrastructure. Regarding the standardisation of networks, the professionals’ comments clearly demonstrate some highly pragmatic obstacles for the much touted “anytime, anywhere” society (Kleinrock, 1996), for example, the complexity of

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juggling phone and power adapters along with corporate login procedures and ISP telephone numbers. Most of the highly successful services are networking services where the essential aspect is the infrastructure standardising the connection (Sørensen et al., 2002). Standardising the information infrastructure elements is an ongoing process; for example, the Open Mobile Alliance (www.openmobilealliance.org) works on the SyncML standard for synchronising data from mobile wireless clients.

we need to redefine the notion of embedding in a human and social context. It could be argued that, to the extent wristwatches and glasses represent ubiquitous technologies in that they are everpresent and, for us, glide into the background as essential everyday appliances, then the mobile phone is rapidly assuming the same position. Most research in ubiquitous computing seems to be concerned with establishing new infrastructures and with building new technical gadgets utilising these infrastructures. Few empirical studies explore state-of-the art technology experiences. This could be interpreted as relying extensively on a traditional model for scientific innovation where the research effort drives technology development, which in turn increases the general welfare of society, when the relationship is more complex (King and Lyytinen, 2003). It can be argued that with flexible platform technologies, the ways in which technologies are used determine their true characteristics. Also, in terms of state-of-the-art technology use, the world of organisational practices may be less technologically advanced in comparison to the hypothetical technological opportunities, but will often be more advanced than research in the application of advanced infrastructures and in the complex socio-technical assemblage. The mere complexity of real-life technology use will not be captured in small-scale laboratory design projects. Hence, the proper understanding of the technological possibilities for establishing ubiquitous computing environments is only possible in the context of organisational settings. Consequently, design research on ubiquitous technologies must be accompanied by proper understanding of the everyday practices of people.

6. Ubiquitous visions – opaque realities The combined consequences of mass diffusion of converging mobile technologies have enabled dramatic developments where computer technologies have been redefined as both mobile and pervasive. Technological developments have made this possible, but it has also been accomplished through a demand for computing power in increasingly mobile settings (Norman, 1999; Sørensen, 2003). The current debate distinguishes between the issue of mobility and the issue of embeddedness, where mobile informatics focuses on the socio-technical use of mobile technologies, and the debate of ubiquitous computing focuses more on embedding these mobile technologies so that they disappear. When considering successful technologies supporting professionals, there is an extensive use of mobile technologies, such as mobile phones and laptops, although much less use of PDAs. Mobilising computing and communication is, of course, a significant technical challenge and the study showed how bandwidth problems and lack of standardisation caused constant problems. Nonetheless, the respondents generally required extensive mobile technologies, enabling them to be connected continuously. However, the study clearly showed that the computing support was by no means embedded and pervasive. It was a constant source of conversation, problems, and negotiation. When we review much of the research conducted within the fields of mobile and ubiquitous computing, it seems that the central aspect of rendering computing power pervasive has been much less successful than that of mobilising the technology. The vision of the computer disappearing out of sight, into walls, into cars, into appliances, and into us, is of course still strong, but the realities of modern working life are much more visible and disturbing than disappearing technologies. Embedding computers into toasters, washing machines and cars has been a much more successful endeavour than providing pervasive support for working processes. However, perhaps

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Dahlbom, B. and Ljungberg, F. (1998), “Mobile informatics”, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 10 No. 1-2, pp. 227-34. Dix, A., Rodden, T., Davies, N., Trevor, J., Friday, A. and Palfreyman, K. (2000), “Exploiting space and location as a design framework for interactive mobile systems”, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 285-321. Egido, C., Galegher, J.R. and Kraut, R. (1990), Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work, L. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. Estrin, D., Culler, D., Pister, K. and Sukhatme, G. (2002), “Connecting the physical world with pervasive networks”, Pervasive Computing, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 59-70. Heath, C. and Luff, P. (2000), Technology in Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hughes, J.A. and King, V. (1993), “Paperwork”, in Benford, S. and Mariani, J. (Eds), COMIC Deliverable 4.1: Requirements and Metaphors of Shared Interaction, Lancaster University, Lancaster, pp. 153-70. Ishii, H. and Ullmar, B. (1997), “Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms”, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 97), Atlanta, GA. Kakihara, M. and Sørensen, C. (2004), “Practising mobile professional work: tales of locational, operational, and interactional mobility”, INFO, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 180-7. Kakihara, M., Sørensen, C. and Wiberg, M. (2004), “Negotiating the fluidity of mobile work”, in Wiberg, M. (Ed.), The Interaction Society: Practice, Theories, and Supportive Technologies, Idea Group Inc., Hershey, PA. Kalakota, R. and Robinson, M. (2002), M-Business: The Race to Mobility, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Kallinikos, J. (2001), “Recalcitrant technology: cross-contextual systems and context-embedded action”, London School of Economics, London. King, J. and Lyytinen, K. (2003), “When grasp exceeds reach: will fortifying our theoretical core save the information systems (IS) field?”, in Ja¨rvi, T. and Reijonen, P. (Eds), People and Computers: 21 Ways of Looking at Information Systems: Festschrift Celebratinge Markku Nurminen’s 60th Birthday, TUCS General Publication, No. 26, Turku Centre for Computer Science, Turku, pp. 143-65. Kleinrock, L. (1996), “Nomadicity: anytime, anywhere in a disconnected world”, Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 351-7. Ljungberg, F. and Sørensen, C. (2000), “Overload: from transaction to interaction”, in Braa, K., Sørensen, C. and Dahlbom, B. (Eds), Planet Internet, Studentlitteratur, Lund, pp. 113-36. Luff, P. and Heath, C. (1998), “Mobility in collaboration”, Proceedings of ACM 1998 Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work, ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 315-24. Lyytinen, K. (2003), “The next wave of IS research: design and investigation of ubiquitous computing”, paper presented at the Mobile Interaction and Pervasive Social Technologies Panel, ECIS, Naples. Lyytinen, K. and Yoo, Y. (2002), “The next wave of nomadic computing: a research agenda for information systems research”, Information Systems Research, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 377-88. Malone, M.S. (2004), “Moore’s second law: if we don’t do something about increasing battery life, we’re toast”, Wired, April, pp. 37-8, available at: www.wired.com/ wired/archive/12.04/start_pr.html

Mathiassen, L. and Sørensen, C. (2002), “A task-based theory of information services”, paper presented at the Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS’25), Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen. Nardi, B. and Whittaker, S. (2000), “Interaction and outeraction”, Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 79-88. Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S. and Schwarz, H. (2002), “NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks”, ComputerSupported Cooperative Work, Vol. 11 Nos 1-2, pp. 205-42. Newell, S., Robertson, M., Scarbrough, H. and Swan, J. (2002), Managing Knowledge Work, Palgrave, Basingstoke. Norman, D. (1999), The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail: The Personal Computer Is so Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Olson, G.M. and Olson, J.S. (2000), “Distance matters”, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 15 No. 2-3, pp. 139-78. Robertson, M., Sørensen, C. and Swan, J. (2000), “Managing knowledge with groupware: a case study of a knowledgeintensive firm”, paper presented at the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-33), Maui, HI. Robertson, M., Sørensen, C. and Swan, J. (2001), “Survival of the leanest: intensive knowledge work and groupware adaptation”, Information Technology & People, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 334-53. Schwarz, H., Nardi, B. and Whittaker, S. (1999), “The hidden work in virtual work”, paper presented at the International Conference on Critical Management, Manchester, July 14-16. Sellen, A.J. and Harper, R. (2003), The Myth of the Paperless Office, MIT Press, New York, NY. Sørensen, C. (2003), “Research issues in mobile informatics: classical concerns, pragmatic issues and emerging discourses”, in Lyytinen, K. and Yoo, Y. (Eds), Workshop on Ubiquitous Working Environment, available at: www.weatherhead.cwru.edu/pervasive/, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Sørensen, C. and Cornford, T. (2004), “Situating software”, in Whitley, E., Cornford, T. and Sorensen, C. (Eds), Social Study of IT, (forthcoming). Sørensen, C., Kakihara, M. and Mathiassen, L. (2002), “Mobile services: functional diversity and overload”, working paper, Mobile Computing in the 21st Century, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, No. 118, available at: http://is.lse.ac.uk/ Townsend, A., Demarie, S. and Hendrickson, A. (1998), “Virtual teams: technology and the workplace of the future”, The Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 17-29. Weiser, M. (1991), “The computer for the 21st century”, Scientific American, Vol. 265 No. 3, pp. 94-104. Weiser, M. (1999), Ubiquitous Computing, available at: www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html Whittaker, S., Frohlich, D. and Daly-Jones, O. (1994), “Informal workplace communication: what is it like and how might we support it?”, paper presented at the ACM 1994 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, MA. Wiberg, M. (2001), “In between mobile meetings: exploring seamless ongoing interaction support for mobile CSCW”, PhD dissertation, Department for Informatics, Umea˚ University, Umea˚.

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Mobile communications: Europe, Japan and South Korea in a comparative perspective Anders Henten Henning Olesen Dan Saugstrup and Su-En Tan

The authors Anders Henten and Henning Olesen are Associate Professors, Dan Saugstrup is Research Associate and Su-En Tan is a Doctoral Student, all based at the Center for Tele-Information, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.

Keywords Mobile communication systems, Statistical analysis, Marketing models

Abstract This paper has two interrelated purposes. One is to provide an empirical overview of the developments of new mobile systems and services in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The other is to examine the discussions regarding the possible explanations for the present lead that East Asia has in new mobile developments. The motivation for making a comparative analysis of mobile developments in Europe, Japan and South Korea is the fact that Japan and South Korea have taken the lead within mobile communications during the last few years, whereas Europe, and in particular the Nordic countries, was leading the way with GSM.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 197-207 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549534

1. Introduction The reason for choosing to compare Europe with Japan is obvious: Japan has clearly taken the lead over Europe in new mobile developments[1]. While Europe – in particular the Nordic countries – seemed to lead the way during the 1990s with the successful GSM system, Japan has taken over since the introduction of i-mode in 1999. The reason for including South Korea is that this country, similarly to Japan, has shown remarkable advancements in new mobile systems – as in other fields of communications. However, the South Korean course of development is somewhat different from the Japanese and may, therefore, be used as a reference case when comparing Japan and Europe. Factors explaining differences in mobile developments in Europe, Japan and South Korea can be subdivided into the following categories[2]: (1) Technology: . circuit switching vs packet switching; and . transition from present 2G standards to 3G standards. (2) Economy: . general economic development; and . financial crisis of the ICT sector. (3) Market development and structure: . relative strengths and strategies of different market players; . research and development activities; . installed bases of stationary Internet terminals and of mobile terminals; and . business models. (4) Marketing: . service and/or technology focus; and . pre-announcement. (5) Socio-cultural factors: . housing and commuting; and . technology enthusiasm. (6) Policy intervention and regulation: . public support for network development; and . prices of frequency bands. Analyses of different development paths most often include a combination of several of these elements. In the concrete analyses of mobile developments in respectively Europe, Japan and South Korea, the elements or explanatory factors are grouped in three main categories: technology solutions, business models, and policy and regulation. However, discussions tend to center on the concepts of value chain/networks and business models – especially business models, as this concept encompasses and correlates many factors including the environment in which developments take place and the strategies of market players[3].

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Business model approaches often take their point of departure in Michael Porter’s writings on value chains – even though Porter himself has sharply criticized the term “business models” for being imprecise and possibly leading to bad strategy decisions (Porter, 2001). The problem with the term “business model” is that it is very loose and difficult to pin down. The term, however, has the advantage that it points at the necessity of positioning the different market players in relation to one another and determining what the value propositions for the users are. Paul Timmers[4], for instance, has defined the term “business model” to encompass: . an architecture for the product/service and information flows, including a description of the various business actors and their roles; . a description of the potential benefits for the various business actors; and . a description of the sources of revenues.

equipment manufacturing, where the intention of the European Community of creating a truly European internal market has succeeded to a large extent. Where formerly, before liberalization, there was a much higher degree of symbiosis between national network operators and national equipment manufacturers, there is on the European market today just a handful of larger European-based international companies, first and foremost Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Alcatel. The fact that the network operation market is organized as national markets, however, does not mean that there are no international network operators. License holders in the different countries are to a large extent owned by companies with ownership interests in a number of countries. The most striking example is Vodafone with ownership interests in 12 of the existing EU member states; but there are other companies such as Orange, T-Mobile and TIM, which have interests in different European countries. An interesting and noticeable fact is also that, in spite of operators with operations in different countries, there are practically no trans-European service offerings. Operators tend to treat their customers not as European customers but as national customers paying excessive charges when traveling to foreign countries. On the service side, European mobile operators tried to introduce mobile Internet on the basis of WAP running on circuit-switched GSM connections. This never succeeded, as the set-up time is too slow and the costs too high for the users when they pay for the airtime. With GPRS, a new possibility for introducing mobile data in Europe has been introduced. However, this has not yet been a great success even though the system is packet-switched. At the end of September 2003, there were about 16 million active users of GPRS in Europe[5].The development of GPRS is anticipated by network operators to be closely related to the diffusion of MMS. But this is very dependent on the achievement of a critical mass of subscribers and, therefore, on the cooperation between different operators, e.g. with respect to mutual accounting agreements – and this has been a problematic issue. There is one kind of mobile data service which has become immensely popular in countries with GSM systems including Europe, namely SMS. On a worldwide scale there are presently more than 45 billion SMS sent each month[6] – of which Europe has its fair share. SMS has become an important source of profit for mobile operators as the cost of delivering an SMS service is much lower than prices charged. The next step is MMS, and in spite of the cooperation problems between operators, there have been many launches of MMS

This definition focuses on the different “flows” between the actors in the value chain/network: the flow of products/services, the flow of information and the flow of money. These are the three basic elements in a business model. However, other elements can be added in order to constitute a more encompassing definition of a business model. Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2000) add: articulating a value proposition for the customers and identifying a market segment and, furthermore, formulating a competitive strategy. With these elements put together, we have a more comprehensive description of what the term “business model” can mean: . value proposition for the users and identification of market segments; . flows of products/services; . flows of information; . value creation, cost structure and profit potential; and . position in the value chain/network.

2. Mobile development in Europe “Europe” is in this document confined to signifying the existing EU member states (EU15). These member states are, indeed, different in many ways, but with respect to mobile developments there is, in the present situation, a high degree of similarity. In general, the telecom market in Europe is organized as separate interconnected national markets with respect to network operation. The same does not apply to

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services in Europe since Telenor as the first operator in the world in March 2002 introduced MMS into the market. In August 2003, there were 109 network operators worldwide that had launched MMS, 69 of these being located in Western Europe[7]. Looking at UMTS, a total of 62 3G licenses have been issued in the EU area with three-six licenses in each country, with a considerable overlap of 2G and 3G licenses. There is also an “overlap” of network operators having licenses in the different EU countries, where Orange and Vodafone have licenses in ten and eight countries, respectively. An important issue in Europe has been the costs of the 3G licenses. At the peak of the dotcom and telecom euphoria, or in reality just after the peak had been reached, high auction prices were paid in the UK and Germany in April and August 2000. Thereafter, prices sloped down to a more realistic level, although with the prices paid in France in May 2001 as a new peak. This “extortion” has been used as a main argument for the financial crisis of the telecom sector and especially the mobile part of the sector, and there is no doubt that the high prices in these three important markets have put a great pressure on the sector. However, another important factor is that operators have not been able to develop mobile data/Internet markets in Europe which could justify the high prices paid. This situation with financial problems and lack of market developments has led to postponements of the introduction of 3G systems in Europe, and even to handing back of licenses which had been acquired. The development of 3G systems has been much slower than anticipated when licenses were auctioned and otherwise sold just a couple of years ago.

An important reason for choosing W-CDMA among the recognized IMT 2000 standards, instead of CDMA2000, is probably that CDMA2000 is an extension of the 2G CDMA One systems functioning in, for instance, the US and South Korea. If CDMA2000 had been chosen, this would have put non-European equipment producers in a strong position and would have been a great challenge to the European-based manufacturers. The development of a time division system like the Chinese TDSCDMA could also have been chosen, which would have been a clear extension of the time division-based GSM system, and it would probably have led to easier and cheaper development of mobile terminals. Europe has, in a sense, chosen to take a real leap from 2G to 3G with a system which, to a large extent, is incompatible with the existing GSM system. However, an important question is to what extent this high-bandwidth system is necessary if the technology of WLANs really spreads. They will be able to provide high bandwidth in hot spots, while lower-bandwidth systems can take care of subscribers on the move.

2.1 Technology solutions Since the GSM frequency bands were allocated in the early 1990s, based on a standard politically mandated by the European Community, the GSM standard has spread all over the world and become the most successful 2G system with 987 million subscribers worldwide in January 2004, constituting about three quarters of world-total mobile subscribers[8]. This has been a sizeable success for the mobile network operators in Europe, but just as importantly, it has been a vast success for the European-based equipment manufacturers, making Nokia the largest handset producer in the world. The success with developing and implementing this unitary and monolithic standard is an important foundation for the intention to introduce a similarly unitary and monolithic 3G system in Europe.

2.2 Business models The first attempts with mobile Internet in Europe were with WAP on circuit-switched GSM. The major reason most often put forward to explain the obvious failure of introducing mobile Internet in this way (apart from slow set-up procedures and high air time prices) is that it was WAP as a technology which was marketed, and not the services which it can carry. Most customers do not care much about the underlying technology; they are interested in the services offered. The same story applies to GPRS, which has also been marketed as such – as a technology and not as part of a more encompassing service offer. This kind of business model, where network operators offer a bit-pipe to customers, who then can get service offerings from external service and content providers, has worked on the fixed Internet. In fact, this model has been a major success in that context and the “Internet model” has constituted the ideal business model for new technology developments. In Europe, network operators have generally scaled down on their R&D expenses. There are still innovation activities, but they are much more focused on immediate service developments and no longer on long-term development activities. Equipment manufacturers, on the other hand, have generally up-graded their R&D activities. This changes the relationships between operators and equipment manufacturers in the sense that operators become technology receivers and not

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technology developers, while manufacturers acquire a stronger position vis-a`-vis operators. This division of labor between network operators and equipment manufacturers could potentially lead to a situation where network operators, to a higher degree, would focus on customer demands and center their activities on service provision – and not the technology focus which the WAP introduction was an expression of. However, at present, it seems as if most of the European operators are still in doubt as to the role they are going to play in a new environment with new service possibilities and new content offers. Operators have been fluctuating between positions as a mere bit-pipe and being in full control of the whole value chain. Lately, however, European operators have presented different initiatives in Europe, where the three main initiatives hitherto have been i-mode, Vodafone Live! and the UMTS services of Hutchison 3G (“3”). Although i-mode has been promoted in six European countries (Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy), i-mode has not been the expected success in Europe and, at any rate, does not live up to the take-up rates from Japan. After a slow start-up phase with problems related to the limited number of terminals, the number of i-mode subscribers has now reached 2 million, according to NTT Do-CoMo. At present, NTT DoCoMo is striving to expand the window of opportunity by cooperation with new operators on the European market, e.g. in Greece, where they will start services in connection with the Olympic Games in Athens together with COSMOTE. Vodafone Live! is a relatively new mobile service concept encompassing handsets, applications and content, and with its own branded menu and payments for downloads based on set prices. Vodafone is thus among the first operators on the European market to launch a service concept building on some of the same thoughts as i-mode. Vodafone Live! mainly builds on a 2.5G platform (GPRS) but will, according to Vodafone, be extended to use a 3G platform. In addition to this, Vodafone launched the Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GRPS data-card in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK during February and March 2004, with data rates of up to 384kbps. An important facility is apparently picture messaging (MMS), which may be one of the reasons for the relative success of Vodafone Live! In any case, Vodafone Live! is one of the first steps on the European market to deliver new mobile data services and to focus more on a service concept than on the underlying technologies. The brand name “3” is used by Hutchison Whampoa for their 3G networks and services and

is a pure 3G operator. They do not have 2G licenses, and in their own understanding this is an advantage, as they do not have to take older technological assets into consideration. They can focus on developing new networks and services, but they need to form alliances with 2G operators in order to cover larger geographical areas than can be reached with their 3G services. The aims of “3” are at developing partnerships with companies which are in the content and service areas, and explicitly advertises an interest in building such partnerships. The areas where “3” aims at delivering services and developing partnerships are entertainment, information services, positioning, transactions and support services. In the business area, they focus on developing company solutions, including integration with IT systems such as ERP, CRM, etc. 2.3 Policy and regulation An important principle in existing EU communications regulation is technology neutrality, meaning that all electronic communication technology solutions, in principle, should be treated uniformly. However, with mobile services the allocation and assignment of frequencies and the license conditions attached play an important role, and the way 3G licenses in Europe have been awarded has created controversy and considerable problems for the sector because of the high license prices in some countries. The principle of technology neutrality also applies to the choice of different 3G technologies. With the 2G licenses awarded in the 1990s, GSM (900 and 1800) was the only possible choice, but with the 3G licenses there has, in principle, been an option to offer other technological solutions. However, in reality only licenses for UMTS (WCDMA) networks have been awarded in Europe. The implications of this technologically monolithic solution are not yet really known. It is possible that such a one-string solution will be as successful as it has been in relation to GSM. But it may also be that a greater technological diversity will turn out to be more fruitful in relation to new mobile solutions. The main policy prescription for the mobile area, like all other communication areas, is to create a competitive environment in order to improve performance of the operators. In contrast to the fixed network area, where incumbents own an overwhelming share of the networks, there is in mobile communications a much better possibility for creating network/infrastructure competition and not only service competition. This possibility and the political intentions to realize it have, for instance, led to decisions regarding limitations on

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the common usage of infrastructure facilities. However, with the financial crisis in the sector, there has been pressure from operators to soften up the strict license conditions regarding, e.g. network coverage and common usage of infrastructure facilities.

3. Mobile development in Japan The Japanese mobile market has seen huge growth figures during the last couple of years and is one of the largest markets in the world, with more than 85 million cellular phone and personal handyphone system (PHS) subscribers at the end of December 2003. At the same time, the use of fixed-line telephone service has declined substantially[9]. The number of cellular subscribers has been increasing steadily by approximately 13-23 percent per year over the last five years. Also, the Internet penetration has seen explosive growth, in the number of households, schools, and workplaces that use the Internet, during the last couple of years. Regarding households, the average rate of utilization of Internet in households in Japan is 42.9 percent (September 2003), which includes households where one or more persons have access to the Internet from any device[10]. In Japan there are three major mobile operators, and the overall numbers of subscribers for the three mobile operators are for Vodafone K.K. 14.9 million, for NTT DoCoMo 45.4 million and for KDDI/au 16.2 million, as of January 2004[11]. NTT DoCoMo is by far the largest mobile operator in Japan, more than twice the size of its two competitors – the main reason being the success of i-mode. Looking only at third-generation mobile technologies and services, the picture is very different, where NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone K.K. are deploying W-CDMA technology and KDDI is using CDMA2000 technology. Here, KDDI/au is leading by quite a margin with 12.3 million subscribers, whereas NTT DoCoMo has 2 million subscribers and Vodafone 122,800 subscribers, as of January 2004. The huge market lead of KDDI is believed to be partly the result of better and more advanced terminals and services, both at the launch time and in the continuous development of services and terminals. Furthermore, KDDI has made it very cheap for customers to change terminal, and the lack of backward compatibility between the FOMA system and i-mode has reduced the switching incentives for NTT DoCoMo customers.

3.1 Technology solutions The three Japanese mobile operators are deploying different technologies for providing their different services to the end-users regarding both the second- and third-generation of mobile technologies. In Table I, the different mobile operators, their technology systems and numbers of subscribers as of the end of January 2004 are depicted. With respect to i-mode, the main difference is that i-mode is based on the cHTML (compact HTML) markup language and not WML, which was used in the first version of WAP. This choice of technology has made it much easier for “oldfashioned” HTML application and service developers to develop services and applications in cHTML[12]. The main reason for this is that cHTML is a cut-down version of HTML; it is more suited for small displays and furthermore makes pages faster to load, compared to pages written in HTML. The two main differences between HTML and cHTML are that cHTML does not support the JPEG standard and frames. In addition, open standards are used throughout the system, which makes it much easier for the different entities in the value chain to cooperate and exchange information. Furthermore, the service guideline specifications and other related information are available for developers on the NTT DoCoMo Web site[13]. Basicallym, the i-mode service is built around four main components: the mobile phone, the mobile network, the i-mode server and the information providers. The i-mode network is packet-switched, which makes it possible to charge the user according to amount of data sent or received, and for the users this means “always-on” functionality. The alwayson functionality provides a more convenient access to services and applications, where the user does not have to set up a connection each time she/he wants to access the network. The i-mode server is the center of the i-mode system, connecting the mobile phone to the imode server, which then connects to the “official content providers” through the i-mode menu in the mobile phone, and to the “unofficial” content providers and the Internet. Today the i-mode Table I Mobile operators, technology and subscribers Technology Operator Subscribers PDC

CDMAone W-CDMA CDMA2000

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43,415,900 3,651,800 14,715,300 3,945,100 2,013,700 122,800 12,264,200

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platform offers easy access to more than 76,000[14] Internet sites, as well as specialized i-mode services through the i-mode menu. The i-mode menu currently provides the user with easy and fast access to more than 4,000 Japanese and English-language Web sites – just by clicking on the i-mode menu. In relation to the 4,000 “official” i-mode Web sites, NTT DoCoMo approves the quality of the content available through the i-mode menu, meaning that all content is continually updated and supervised by NTT DoCoMo.

DoCoMo deducts a 9 percent commission. All in all, this means that NTT DoCoMo receives three revenue streams from the i-mode business model: monthly charges from subscribers, 9 percent commission from content providers, and charges from packet transmission.

3.2 Business models The business model described in this section will mainly focus on the relationship between the different market players, e.g. network operators, equipment manufacturers, platform operators and content providers. In addition, the main focus will be on the i-mode business model, as it is the most wide-spread and successful mobile business model, by which the other operators have been inspired when developing their own models. The i-mode collaboration model contains four main entities: NTT DoCoMo, platform vendors, handset vendors and content providers. Basically, the collaboration model or value chain is made up of a mobile ecosystem of partners, where the mobile operator plays a central role in coordinating most activities. NTT DoCoMo in the center coordinates and synchronizes the activities in order to continuously improve the service for the subscribers. One of the main reasons for the huge i-mode success is believed to be rooted in this constellation among the different entities in the value chain. Looking at the advantages, the most obvious one is that all entities in the value chain are working towards the same goal of satisfying the end-user, as their own success depends on this. This means that all partners have aligned on a common interest, serving the end-user and, thereby, maximizing their own and other entities’ value within this value chain. This objective is mainly achieved by exchanging information throughout the value chain, thus also providing beneficiary feedback to one another and sharing responsibility and development costs. The main task of getting the customers and marketing the services or applications is more or less assigned to the operator in the center, NTT DoCoMo, whereas the other partners in the value chain can focus on their core competences. Looking at the payment model, NTT DoCoMo collects charges on behalf of the content providers, meaning that the i-mode customers only receive a single consolidated bill for all their activities. For this clearinghouse billing system service, NTT

3.3 Policy and regulation On June 30th, 2000, the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) granted NTT Do-CoMo, DDI (today known as KDDI) and J-Phone (today Vodafone K.K.) licenses for third-generation mobile communication services[15]. This approach was quite different from most European countries, where operators have paid huge sums for the third-generation frequency bands, with consequences of debt that will influence them in years to come. In general, the Japanese telecommunication market can be characterized as deregulated – based on an ongoing reform starting in 1985, which is almost completed[16]. However, some aspects still need to be further pursued, for instance an independent regulatory authority that is free from political pressure and capable of enforcing actions against abuse, which is very important in order to ensure, among other things, competitive market conditions[17]. Other unresolved questions are mainly related to the perennial issue of the regulation of NTT, the old incumbent operator[18]. The OECD has noted concern that new regulations have shifted the onus of proof to the regulator, so that the regulator must argue why NTT should be kept out of new business areas rather than NTT arguing why its entry would not be bad for competition.

4. Mobile development in South Korea Although Japan was the first country in the world to launch a 3G mobile network, it is actually the South Korean mobile services provider SK Telecom which is making headway with the introduction of its CDMA2000 1xEV-DO network. South Korea has the fastest-growing mobile penetration rates in the Asia-Pacific region and has the largest penetration of mobile Internet users in the world[19]. South Korea has around 12.5 percent of the world’s wireless Internet users[20]. What is more, South Korea has achieved this number of subscribers without having to offer any forms of subsidy because of the ban on subsidies by the South Korean government, while in Japan terminals have been heavily subsidized.

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The total number of mobile subscribers (with or without Internet access) in South Korea is 34 million. There are two main mobile operators in South Korea. SK Telecom is the largest, and Korea Telecom’s KT Freetel is the second largest operator. At the end of January 2004, SK Telecom had about 53.8 percent of the market or about 18.3 million users. KTF had a market share of about 31.8 percent, corresponding to approximately 10.8 million users. LG Telecom had 14.4 percent of the South Korean market, corresponding to about 4.9 million users[21]. Mobile operators in South Korea have emphasized their commitment to bring popular and useful services to mobile users. Keeping to their promise, a wide variety of services have been provided to users on the mobile Internet platform. Services have been introduced that allow mobile users to subscribe to, and to customize, services to their liking and to access the Internet whenever they desire. These services are accessible not only through mobile terminals but also through other devices such as PDAs and PCs. With the introduction of CDMA2000 1x EVDO, multimedia services such as video streaming have been added to the list of services provided by mobile operators in South Korea. Other services are financial enabler services for payments to be made through the mobile terminal. Some examples of financial transactions through mobile terminals and mobile networks include shopping, auctioning, ticketing, advertising and information management. In December 2003, SK Telecom launched the 3G (W-CDMA) version of the “MONETA” chip, which acts like a mobile credit card and allows users to pay for goods through infrared financial messaging or through physical terminals using radio frequency[22].

are likely to want to see on their mobile terminals. For example SK Telecom (2001) collaborated with content providers to upgrade data-intensive content such as game applications, so that users would have a better experience with these applications. At present, the priority is to attract new users to mobile Internet services and the way to do this is to introduce popular content that is in line with common daily activities such as access to news and location-based services. These services have been identified as the ones that are more likely to be attractive to users, both existing and new.

4.1 Technology solutions The technology used most abundantly in South Korea is that of CDMA2000 1x. Due to the amount of available content and services on the CDMA2000 1x platform and the network’s ability to support the higher speeds of transmission, users are willing to take up the new technology and the services that come with it. The latest technology is that of CDMA2000 1x EV-DO, which is the most adaptable wireless-connection standardizing technology for transmitting large packet-sizes of data at high speeds. With the CDMA2000 1x EV-DO platform, transmission speed of up to 2.4Mbps is technically possible. This is 16 times faster than the previous CDMA2000 1x platform, which allows for speeds up to 144kbps. Mobile service providers in Korea, such as SK Telecom, work closely together with content providers to come up with applications that users

4.2 Business models The mobile service providers in Korea work closely together with the other entities in the industry such as the mobile handset and other equipment providers, as well as media companies, content owners and content creators to create massive amounts of content and services for the new generation of mobile phones. In this way, they create a demand not only for the actual 2.5G mobile phones, but also for the content available on the new phones[23]. They have, in effect, taken the lead in next-generation mobile service provision. In South Korea, the operators have long accepted that in order to bring the mobile industry to the next level, it is up to them to take the lead within the industry and drive the market for new mobile services (Strand Consulting, 2002). It is clear to the operators that in order to bring the industry from 2.5G services to the new 3G services, they will have to play a leading role. As the market player having the most contact with mobile users, as compared to content providers and equipment manufacturers, the mobile operators realize that, for next-generation services to take off, they will have to work closely together with all the other parties in the provision of these services to end-users. The mobile operators believe in the revenuesharing model and the vast prospects of the new mobile technology. Because of this, they have managed to encourage the development and marketing of high-quality services that are embraced by the users. The high quality and quantity of services have, in turn, been very attractive to users and have encouraged them to make the switch to the more expensive handsets and to subscribe to the new services. 4.3 Policy and regulation 3G licenses were awarded to Korean Telecom and SK Telecom. The government had, in actual fact, wanted to have more operators in the market; but when the licenses were first offered, the government had rejected LG Telecom, which had

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requested a WCDMA license, and Hanaro Telecom, which had requested a CDMA2000 license. What the government chose to do has in many ways shaped the Korean telecom industry into what it is today. One of the major influencing factors for the high rate of mobile usage in South Korea is the government’s strong involvement in the country’s development of next-generation core technologies, which include both wired and wireless communication[24]. To have South Korea ready for the new communications era, the South Korean government in 2000 implemented several policies, including strengthening the competition among telecommunication providers. This was done by the selection of IMT-2000 service providers and also the introduction of standard price models which these providers have to follow so that there will be fair competition in the industry. Mobile service providers have to offer attractive rates and packages to their users and this has, in turn, generated a large number of cellular users in the country. From September 1999, the number of mobile subscribers exceeded the number of fixedline subscribers, and this can only be attributed to the aggressive marketing strategies of the mobile service providers, which have been targeted at persuading people to use mobile telephony. Overall, the push from the South Korean government has spurred the telecommunications operators to revolutionize their mobile industry.

With respect to market development and structure, it has often been claimed that the lower penetration of fixed Internet in Japan is one of the reasons for the explosive development of mobile Internet. This may be so, although fixed and mobile Internet services are substitutable only to a minor extent. But it does not explain the lack of mobile Internet development in Europe. The two technology solutions are very likely to be complementary, which the development in South Korea illustrates. South Korea is in the absolute world top with respect to fixed broadband connections and at the same time the leader in high-speed mobile services. The arguments concerning socio-cultural factors have only been briefly touched on in this paper. An important reason is that their explanatory validity seems questionable. It may be true that homes are generally smaller in Japan than in Europe and that commuting time is longer. It may also be that both Japanese and Koreans are very technology-savvy and that their enthusiasm for technology is big. But this does not explain why mobile data and Internet services have been so slow in developing in Europe. It is apparent that the service packages offered really have struck a market demand, especially among the young urban populations in Japan and South Korea, and that these service offers reflect the socio-economic environments in which they are marketed. Yet neither does this explain the lack of success in Europe. Service packages in Europe probably have to be somewhat different, taking other sociocultural circumstances into consideration.

5. Comparative analysis

5.1 Technology There seems to be an element of technological leap-frogging in the differences in development paths. With respect to 2G mobile voice telephony, Europe has been doing considerably better, especially at first, than Japan and, in particular, South Korea. In relation to mobile data and Internet services, Japan has far outpaced Europe. However, the last leap comes from South Korea, where 2.5G and 3G developments exceed the developments in both Europe (where nothing much has happened until lately) and Japan. The leap-frogging argument in itself does not hold much explanatory power but invites explanations. On the other hand, large installed bases of actually functioning technological solutions do constitute the foundation for a certain lock-in, which may be part of the reason for a lower take-up of new mobile data services in Europe and the reluctance among existing i-mode users in Japan to switch to the FOMA 3G solution. The success of SMS in Europe is an example of this phenomenon. Unexpectedly, SMS has

One of the explanatory factors examined in the paper deals with developments in the general economy and economic developments in the ICT sector, in particular. It is noticed that the Japanese i-mode adventure started before the burst of the dotcom and telecom bubble and the general economic downturn since the beginning of 2000. However, it should also be recognized that the general economy in Japan has, in fact, been in economic recession during the past decade, and that South Korea witnessed a serious economic crisis in the second half of the 1990s. Problems in the general economic setting thus, cannot in themselves explain the slow development of new mobile networks and services in Europe. More important is the financial crisis in the ICT sector itself, especially in the telecom area. Newer telecom operators have gone bankrupt and incumbents have severe financial problems, especially in raising capital for the investments in new networks and service developments.

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experienced huge growth rates’ limiting the need for other data communication solutions. Furthermore, the operators are making enormous profits on SMS, which holds back their initiatives to launch new expensive and uncertain service offers. Moving closer to the actual technological solutions, an important and well-known reason for the lack of take-up of mobile data and Internet services in Europe is that a WAP solution on top of circuit-switched connections was chosen. This is far too slow and too expensive for data services. The problem is not WAP in itself – WAP-based solutions have been successful in both Japan and South Korea. The problem is that it has not been based on packet switching. However, there may also have been a problem with the markup language used in connection with WAP, i.e. WML, in contrast to the solution used in i-mode with cHTML, which more easily allows for a translation from regular HTML used on the fixed Internet (cf. Sect. 3.1). These differences are likely to vanish over time, as WAP and i-mode are on a convergence path towards XHTML and possibly XML. The last technology issue touched on in the paper is the choice of W-CDMA in Europe and by NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone K.K. in Japan. The compatibility and, therefore, transition from GSM to W-CDMA can be discussed. But it has to be noticed that CDMA2000 is the leading 3G technology in the present circumstances, primarily in South Korea but also in Japan with KDDI. There may be several good reasons for not choosing CDMA2000 in the EU countries. One of the most likely reasons could be that such a choice would have played it into the hands of the nonEuropean CDMA producers, first and foremost Qualcomm.

and South Korea. It is not inconceivable that a more fixed-Internet-like business model will eventually succeed in Europe and the US, but at the moment a more closed business model seems to be the winner. The success of the mobile data and Internet development in Japan is to a great extent due to the business model implemented with close cooperation between content providers and aggregators, handset and network manufacturers, and network operators – with the network operators sitting as “spiders in the net”, in the lead position. The South Korean example does not point in any other direction than the Japanese example, in this respect. Close cooperation between different players in the value chain/ network has also been the recipe for success in South Korea. In explaining the strong position of the network operators in Japan and South Korea in relation to the other players in the value chain/network, the strong market positions and sizes of the large mobile operators have often been emphasized. NTT DoCoMo is, indeed, a gigantic operator, and SK Telecom and KTF also have strong market positions in South Korea. But compared with the largest European operators, there is not much difference. The German market, for instance, is also very big and T-mobile has a very strong market position there. T-mobile has, in fact, more mobile subscribers in Europe than NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Furthermore, an international operator like Vodafone has an enormous subscriber base in Europe, far greater than NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Therefore, it cannot be the strength as such of the operators which is the important factor. But it may be their relative strength in relation to the equipment manufacturers. While in Japan the number of equipment manufacturers is larger than the number of network operators, in Europe there is a substantial number of operators spread out on the national markets and a very small group of large equipment manufacturers. Formerly, in most national markets there were a monopoly network provider and a leading equipment producer working in close symbiosis. But the success of the European policy in creating a truly open internal market for telecom equipment has resulted in a concentration of the market in the hands of few suppliers. The same does not apply to the network operation market, and the strong position of the manufacturers, vis-a`-vis the network operators, may be one of the by-products of the success in creating an internal equipment market and the lack of success in creating a corresponding panEuropean network operation market. An important aspect of this situation is that while the European network operators have scaled

5.2 Business models In terms of business models it is possible that the larger penetration of fixed Internet in Europe, and the prevalent business model with a loose connection between the different players, manufacturers, operators and service and content providers, has played an important role in ruling out a business model with a closer connection between the players. Close relations between complementary players are not unknown to the European setting (e.g. Minitel in France), but this business model was swept away with the massive introduction of fixed Internet in the middle of the 1990s. The lack of mobile data and Internet takeup in Europe is, consequently, not caused by lack of a business model but perhaps by lack of an appropriate business model leading to service and content developments such as those seen in Japan

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down on their R&D activities during the past decade, and presently focus solely on short-term service developments, NTT DoCoMo, for instance, has retained its R&D activities – with a longer time horizon. The causal connection between R&D activities and strongholds in relation to equipment manufacturers is not clear, but it is likely that there is a correlation between the two. The early development of mobile data and Internet services in Japan, and the corresponding slow development in Europe, opened a window of opportunity for NTT DoCoMo to enter the European market. However, the start-up has been slow, and i-mode has not been a real success in Europe. Many good reasons can be presented for this development, such as the lack of variety in terminals. But it also illustrates that it may be difficult to transfer a concept from one setting to another. And it may be that mobile data and Internet developments in Europe, to a larger extent than in these two Asian countries, will be based on more open relationships between the different complementary market players. But operators in the European market have apparently learned the general lesson from the success stories in Japan and South Korea. Vodafone Live! and “3” have clearly taken up elements of the “i-mode” business model. One of the often-repeated explanations for the failure of mobile Internet in Europe has been that WAP was over-hyped before actually hitting the market, and that customers, on the basis of marketing campaigns, would expect to have an Internet connection similar to the fixed network connection. This obviously was a marketing failure, but the real failure was probably not the over-hyping phenomenon but the fact that it was a piece of technology which was marketed, and not a package of services fulfilling different demands of the customers. This is general knowledge today and was also general knowledge at the time. The problem was not that there was less customer orientation among the European operators compared with the Japanese and South Korean ones. The marketing of a technology instead of a package of services was the result of the business model applied – inspired by the fixed Internet.

frequency bands in some European countries. This has exhausted large parts of the mobile sector – especially in connection with a financial crisis in the sector – making it difficult to raise new money. This has really become a problem for the transition from a 2G to a 3G environment in Europe.

6. Conclusion In summary, it can be concluded that the main reasons for the lack of success in developing mobile data and Internet services on the basis of 2G platforms in Europe have been related to the slow introduction of packet-switched technology and to the implementation of a business model inspired by the fixed Internet. The reasons for the slow take-up of 3G networks and services are primarily connected with the financial crisis of the telecom sector in Europe, partly related to the high prices for frequency bands and partly related to the general financial crisis of the sector. Furthermore, the business model issue has still not been resolved in Europe.

Notes

5.3 Policy and regulation Finally, policy and regulatory factors have been discussed. Public authorities in Japan and South Korea have heavily promoted the development of new mobile networks and services, but the same applies to Europe. Policies are, in fact, very similar, emphasizing the establishment of a competitive regime in the market. The major difference between Europe and Japan and South Korea has been the high prices paid by mobile operators for

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1 Presented in an earlier version at the Stockholm Mobility Roundtable 2003, May 22-23. 2 These are the kinds of factors listed in most publications with comparisons of developments in different regions. See, for instance, the IPTS research project report of Burgelman and Carat (2003); ITU Internet Reports (2002); Derefeldt et al. (2002). 3 Examples of contributions using a value chain/network or business model approach are represented in, for instance, Maitland et al. (2002); Olla and Patel (2002); Sabat (2002). Other examples are represented in Lindmark and Bohlin (2003), Benzoni et al. (2003). Another recent example is a paper by Faber et al. (2003). Furthermore, many of the reports from the UMTS Forum also use a value chain/ network and business model approach; see www.umtsforum.org 4 Timmers (1998). Other more recent contributions on business models are, for example, Bouwmann (2003), Seddon and Lewis (2003). 5 See www.vnunet.com/News/1152331 (accessed 28 January 2004). 6 See www.gsmworld.com/news/statistics/index.shtml (accessed 29 February 2004). 7 See www.gsmworld.com/technology/mms/launches.shtml (accessed 29 February 2004). 8 See www.gsmworld.com/news/statistics/index.shtml (accessed 29 February 2004). 9 TCA see www.tca.or.jp/eng/database/daisu/yymm/ 0401matu.html (accessed 29 February 2004). 10 MPHPT see www.stat.go.jp/english/data/joukyou/2003qi/ index.htm (accessed 29 February 2004). 11 TCA see www.tca.or.jp/eng/database/daisu/yymm/ 0401matu.html (accessed 29 February 2004).

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12 The new version of WAP, WAP 2.0, makes use of XHTML Mobile Profile, and is equally user-friendly for the developers. 13 See www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/imode/ (accessed 29 February 2004). 14 See www.nttdocomo.com/corebiz/imode/what/index.html (accessed 29 February 2004). 15 See www.soumu.go.jp/english/ 16 Deregulation of telecommunications and un-regulation of the Internet in Japan, see http://faculty.web.waseda.ac.jp/ agata/vortrag/duis.pdf (accessed 10 April 2003). 17 Telecommuncations working group meeting, see www.ustr.gov/regions/japan/fact-tele.html, (accessed 12 April 2003). 18 See www.idg.net/idgns/2002/11/19/ OECDScoresMixedForJapanTelecom.shtml (accessed 13 April 2003). 19 ITU Internet Reports (2002). It should be noted that the South Korean operators are considering the possibility of switching to W-CDMA in a couple of years’ time. 20 See www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq-wap.html (accessed 23 March 2003). 21 See www.google. dk/search?q ¼ cache: 4iL- 8E24X9IJ: asia.news.yahoo. com/040204/4/1bz4s. html+Korea%27s+SK+Telecom+Fined+for+Unfair+ Business+Practices&hl ¼ da&ie ¼ UTF-8 (accessed 10 February 2004). 22 See www.3g.co.uk/PR/Feb2004/ 6620.htm (accessed 22 February 2004). 23 See www.content-wire. com/Unwired/Index.cfm?ccs ¼ 116&cs ¼ 2297 (accessed 15 March 2003). 24 See www.mic.go.kr/index.jsp, White Paper 2002 on informatization (accessed 20 February 2004).

References Benzoni, L. et al. (2003), “Turning the mobile multimedia offer into an ecosystem: the Nippon-Korea pattern”, Communications & Strategies, Vol. 52, pp. 215-37. Bouwmann, H. (2003), State-of-the-Art on Business Models, Telematica Institute, TU Delft, TNO and KPN Research, Delft. Burgelman, J.C. and Carat, G. (Eds) (2003), Prospects for Third Generation Mobile Systems, IPTS, European Commission, Seville. Chesbrough, H. and Rosenbloom, R. (2000), The Role of the Business Model in Capturing Value from Innovation, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Derefeldt, P., Djerf, K. and Waldo¨, T. (2002), Affa¨rsmodeller fo¨r mobilt Internet (Business models for mobile Internet), Ekonomi Ho¨gskolan, Lund University, Lund. Faber, E., Ballon, P., Bouwman, H., Haaker, T., Rietkerk, O. and Stern, M. (2003), “Designing business models for mobile

ICT services”, paper presented at the 16th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, 9-11 June. ITU Internet Reports (2002), Reports Internet for a Mobile Generation, ITU, Geneva. Lindmark, S. and Bohlin, E. (2003), “The i-mode success story”, Communications & Strategies, Vol. 52, 4th quarter, pp. 193-213. Maitland, C., Bauer, J.M. and Westerveld, R. (2002), “The European market for mobile data: evolving value chains and industry structure”, Telecommunication Policy, Vol. 26 No. 9-10, pp. 485-504. Olla, P. and Patel, N. (2002), “A value chain model for mobile data service providers”, Telecommunication Policy, Vol. 26 No. 9-10, pp. 551-71. Porter, M. (2001), “Strategy and the Internet”, Harvard Business Review, March, pp. 63-78. Sabat, H. (2002), “The evolving mobile wireless value chain and market structure”, Telecommunication Policy, Vol. 26 No. 9-10, pp. 505-35. Seddon, P.B. and Lewis, G.P. (2003), “Strategy and business models: what’s the difference?”, paper presented at the 7th Asia Pacific Conference on Information Systems, 10-13 July 2003, Adelaide, 10-13 July. SK Telecom (2001), Annual Report 2001, SK Telecom, Seoul. Strand Consulting (2002), Korea – A Window to 3G, Strand Consulting, Sola, available at: www.strandconsult.dk. Timmers, P. (1998), “Business models for electronic markets”, Electronic Markets, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 3-8.

Further reading Anderson, T., Talborn, H. and Weikert, M. (2002), “Business models for mobile internet”, Institute of Economic Research, Lund University, Lund. Bekker, R. (2001), Mobile Telecommunications Standards, Artech House Publishers, Boston, MA. CEC (2002), “Eighth report from the Commission on the implementation of the telecommunication regulatory package, paper presented at the Brussels, COM(2002). Gandahl, N., Salant, D. and Waverman, L. (2003), “Standards in wireless telephone networks”, Tele-communication Policy, Vol. 27 No. 5-6, pp. 325-32. Natsuno, T. (2000), I-mode Strategy, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Wessman, M.-O., Tapio, M., Uhlemann, E., Eriksson, T., Queseth, O., Pettersson, S. and Gold, R. (2002), Explaining the Differences between the Mobile Telecommunications Market in the EU, USA and Japan, available at: www.itm.mh.se/Summerschool/Reports/ FinalReportTrack3.pdf Whalley, J. (2002), “Change within the mobile communications market”, Communication and Strategies, Vol. 45, 1st quarter, pp. 177-94.

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1. Introduction

Key technological trajectories and the expansion of mobile Internet applications Jeffrey L. Funk

The author Jeffrey L. Funk is a Professor at Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, Kunitachi, Tokyo.

Keywords Mobile communication systems, Internet, Computer applications, Japan

Abstract This paper describes the key technological trajectories and their potential effect on the expansion of mobile Internet applications. The initial success of entertainment content in Japan in 1999 caused manufacturers to introduce phones with color displays, polyphonic tones, cameras, and Java programs, and these functions are supported by other technological improvements like faster microprocessors, larger memory, and faster network speeds. Coupled with an evolution in user behavior, these technologies are making the phone a portable entertainment player, a new marketing tool for retailers and manufacturers, a multi-channel shopping device, a navigation tool, a new type of ticket and money, and a new mobile intranet device. These trends will have a large impact on competition in the global mobile phone market as dominant designs emerge at the global level.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-6697.htm

info Volume 6 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 208-215 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6697 DOI 10.1108/14636690410549543

Growth in mobile Internet services and contents expanded from Japan and Korea in 2000 to Europe in 2003, and it is expected that this growth will become a global phenomenon by the end of 2004. Growth first occurred in the Japanese market (see Table I) through the creation of a critical mass of young users and entertainment applications where micro-payment systems played a key role in the availability of these entertainment contents. This growth led to improved mobile Internet-compatible phones with color displays, polyphonic tones, cameras, and Java programs. Korean service providers quickly copied the Japanese services, and European service providers like Vodafone and Bouygues Telecom have subsequently done the same following the growth in SMS (short message services). As of late 2003 there were more than 3 million subscribers to European mobile Internet services like Vodafone Live! and i-mode, both of which are based on Japanese technology. Understanding how these mobile Internet services, technologies, and applications will evolve is a critical issue for managers and policy makers. The mistaken initial emphasis on business users and applications by most Western service providers (e.g. Morgan, 2000) underscores the difficulties with doing this. Even Western academics and analysts have placed far more emphasis on business than other applications in the mobile Internet (Bergeron, 2001; Burkhardt et al., 2002; Kalakota and Robinson, 2002; Sharma, 2001). This paper uses a model of industry formation to explore how these mobile Internet services, technologies, and applications will evolve. A key part of this model is the interaction between technological trajectories and the expansion of applications. The application of the model to the mobile Internet is based on published information from both Japanese and English sources and interviews with more than 150 managers involved in the mobile Internet in Japan and to a lesser extent elsewhere. I asked these managers about the current and future impact of the mobile Internet on their businesses, with a focus on so-called “lead users” (von Hippel, 1986). I use this information to describe a few paths by which the mobile Internet may evolve in six contents/applications; additional paths are described in Funk (2004). The paper first summarizes the origins of the mobile Internet, using the model of industry formation, followed by a summary of the technological trajectories and their effect on these applications.

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Table I Size of Japanese mobile Internet in 2002 (billions of Yen)

implemented (Anderson and Tushman, 1990). Growth in these initial applications causes subtrajectories to emerge from the main trajectories and drive an expansion in applications. The technological trajectories that led to the formation of the mobile Internet are improved displays, packet technology, digital content, and microprocessors, which were being driven by other industries like laptop computers, the Internet, and personal computers. The key interaction between products and users in the Japanese mobile Internet that led to industry formation was between entertainment contents and young people. The early success of NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode entertainment contents led to positive feedback between content providers, users, and phone manufacturers (Funk, 2003, 2004), which can be interpreted as both a bandwagon (Rohlfs, 2001) and agglomeration (Marshall, 1920) effect. KDDI and Vodafone began to become part of this phenomenon in early 2000. The success of i-mode caused NTT DoCoMo’s competitors, KDDI and Vodafone, to introduce micro-payment and packet services as part of their mobile Internet services, which they both had introduced in 1999 (KDDI uses the WAP protocol). Micro-payment services facilitated the entry of entertainment content providers, and packet services reduced user costs and waiting times. The reason why KDDI and Vodafone quickly introduced these services and the US and European service providers did not is that the success of i-mode provided evidence that investments in mobile Internet technology could pay off, and it was relatively easy for Japanese content providers and manufacturers to modify their contents and phones for the services offered by KDDI and Vodafone. The success of entertainment contents and the positive feedback that these successful contents created between contents, users, and phones provided this evidence. Evidence that a mobile Internet service (e.g. WAP) could succeed in the European and US markets did not quickly emerge because the service providers did not introduce micro-payment systems, which were a prerequisite for entertainment contents like screen savers, horoscopes, and ringing tones; instead they focused on business contents like financial, travel, and shopping services that do not require micropayment services. On the other hand, the success of SMS with young people, including their use in downloading ringing tones and screen savers in 2000, caused European and subsequently US service providers to recognize the importance of young users and entertainment contents. This encouraged a number of European and subsequently US service providers to introduce mobile Internet services that emphasize young

Type of market Services

Contents

Firm or market

Size of market

NTT DoCoMo KDDI Vodafone Total Ringing tones Screen savers Games Other entertainment Other contents

697.7 138.7 185.7 150 80 25-30 15-20 10-15 10-15 30-40

Shopping Source: Firm home pages, author’s analysis

2. The origins of the mobile Internet Figure 1 summarizes a model of industry formation (Funk, 2003, 2004). The model represents the origins of new industries as the interaction between multiple technological trajectories, where progress in a single trajectory occurs through improvements in the trade-offs between relevant technological variables (Dosi, 1982). The speed with which these multiple trajectories cause industry formation depends on finding a set of initial users for whom the new technology is economically attractive. The latter process occurs through the interaction between product designs and user needs (Clark, 1985; Bijker et al., 1987) and results in the emergence of a dominant design, which will define the interfaces for complementary products and many of the incremental improvements that are subsequently Figure 1 Model of industry formation

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people and entertainment contents; the most successful services as of late 2003 are i-mode services and Vodafone Live!

3. Key technological trajectories Growth in the initial applications in the Japanese mobile Internet has caused sub-trajectories, where competition in the mobile Internet currently takes place (as of late 2003), to emerge. Some of these technological trajectories will quickly fizzle out as customer needs are quickly satisfied. For example, increases in the number of polyphonic tones appear to have stopped at about 40, and color displays appear to have reached their limit at 250,000 different colors. Although some camera phones now contain more than one million pixels, two million pixels will provide quality that is equivalent to what is found in traditional photographs and probably enable camera phones to read and process finely printed URLs, mail addresses, and bar codes. On the other hand, other technological trajectories will probably continue for many years. For example, increases in display size are likely to remain a key technological trajectory for many years to come, since small displays are one of the largest problems with mobile Internet-compatible phones. Displays based on EL (Electro Luminescence) are expected to be widely used by early 2004. These displays are thinner and thus 20-30 per cent lighter than TFT-based displays because they produce their own light and thus do not require a separate light source. Displays that are based on light-emitting polymers (LEP) also create their own light; more importantly, by applying a thin polymer film to a plastic substrate, firms can make displays that are thinner than onetenth of an inch and can be rolled and folded. Thus, it may be possible to double, triple, or even quadruple the size of existing phone displays over the next five years, thus dramatically improving the user interface. 3.1 Processing and network speeds More immediate effects on the user interface are expected from increases in processing power, memory, and network speeds, since they can improve the user interface without increases in the size of the display. Increased processing and memory capabilities reflect Moore’s Law. Decreasing semiconductor line widths have caused computing speed and memory size to roughly double every 18 months for the last 40 years, and similar trends are already seen in the mobile Internet where the need for lower power consumption requires different circuit designs.

Phones released in late 2002 and early 2003 had speeds in the 100MHz to 200MHz range, and speeds greater than 500MHz are expected by 2005. Phones with more than five megabytes of internal memory also were released; some could save 2,000 photos (taken with a 300,000 pixel camera), 2,000 ringing tones (with 40 polyphonic tones), or 100 Java programs. Network speeds will also increase, primarily through the diffusion of third-generation services; and according to Qualcomm (2000), these services may cause packet charges to fall as low as $0.022 per megabyte, or 1/500 of current i-mode charges. If data charges were to fall as low as $0.022 per megabyte, a three-minute MP3 file could be delivered for as little as $0.07 and a two-minute, medium-resolution video clip could be delivered for a cost of about $0.13. We can also expect other forms of networks to play an important role in the mobile Internet. For example, phones with infrared functions that use the IrMC standard are already being used in Japan to connect phones with cash registers, concert ticket machines and one another (e.g. play games and exchange name cards), and to control televisions and karaoke machines. New infrared standards like IrFM enable credit card information to be securely transferred between phones and cash registers. Non-contact smart cards that rely on short-range radio transmission are being used as transportation, concert tickets, and pre-paid cards (US$50); phones that contain these smart card functions are expected in 2004 (Harui, 2003). It is possible to download data from WLANs and exchange data between devices with Bluetooth, infrared, and short-range radio transmission. NTT DoCoMo and other Japanese service providers are planning to make their phones compatible with WLANs and Bluetooth. These technologies and faster processors could enable the use of so-called personal mobile servers that allow short-range communication between various “wearable” devices (Bylund and Segall, 2004). 3.2 Client-side processing and improved user interfaces Increased processing power, memory, and network speeds can improve the mobile phone’s user interface through more client-side processing of pre-loaded or downloaded programs. Java is currently the most popular program for doing this, although other programs exist and the competition between these programs is not over. Users can download a Java program once and then utilize the program either independently of the network or in conjunction with data that is subsequently downloaded from the network. Alternatively, the

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Java program could be pre-loaded in the phone, thus eliminating the need for downloading the program at all. Although games were initially the most popular content for Java programs, many news and other text-based sites now offer their contents as part of a Java program since the use of Java programs can reduce the data downloading requirements of text and the user waiting time by as much as 80 per cent. Faster processors, ones with lower power consumption, and larger memory will facilitate the use of Java and other client-side programs. Faster processing times reduce the time to activate a program, and thus enable the use of larger programs. Lower power consumption enables the longer use of these programs. Larger memories increase the size and number of programs that can be saved. Although some phones can now save more than 100 Java programs, if all content providers offered their own Java programs from which users were expected to download information, users would still only be able to save a small fraction of these programs. Another alternative is for content providers to format their contents for standard Java programs. Phones released in the spring of 2003 facilitate the use of such standard programs since they can access data for a Java program from different servers. Added advantages of defining standard programs (or “objects” for making these programs) would be lower development costs for content providers and better control of viruses for service providers. Of course, determining the appropriate standard Java programs and making your program one of these standard programs is a more complex issue. Increased processing power, memory, and network speeds may also improve the user interface in more radical ways. Increased processing power will improve the performance of voice recognition systems and 3D rendering techniques. Single-word voice recognition systems have been available for several years in Japanese phones, and it appears that user resistance to making voice commands is a bigger bottleneck than actual technical problems. As for 3D rendering techniques, phones with 50 MHz processors can display 10,000 “polygons” per second, while phones with 500MHz processors can display 640,000 polygons per second; the latter will probably be available in phones in 2005 and are currently available in the newest versions of the Playstation2. While most 3D contents are screen savers and games, 3D images of products might facilitate mobile shopping, 3D maps might facilitate navigation services, and 3D representations of data (which could provide the data on six faces of a cube) might facilitate business applications.

4. Expansion of applications This section discusses how the technological trajectories are expanding the applications for mobile phones in six contents/applications. Several of these trajectories, including Java and 3D rendering techniques, will have an impact on all of the applications, while other trajectories will have a much larger impact on some applications than on others. 4.1 Entertainment Games, ringing tones, screen savers, and other entertainment contents are already making the mobile phone a portable entertainment player; and faster network speeds, increased processing power, Java, and 3D rendering techniques will reinforce this trend. The success of KDDI’s vocal ringing tone service (almost seven million 15-second songs were downloaded in September 2003) suggests that lower packet charges will probably make the downloading of music and video on phones a common activity. However, it is the unexpected changes that are of greater interest and the mobile Internet will probably create its own form of entertainment just as the radio, TV, video recorder, and the Internet have done. Java-based and 3D screen savers became possible with the phones released in 2002. These screen savers have menus that enable users to manipulate the 3D images on the screen and raise pets such as fish on other screen savers, an activity that was popularized in Bandai’s Tamoguchi toys. Phones released in 2003 can activate these Java programs with an incoming call or mail message, and the Java program can be customized for the caller. Further, it is possible to add music to these programs, suggesting that the distinctions between ringing tones, screen savers, and games are beginning to disappear. Even better processors that have lower power consumption may enable screen savers to be used as browsers, where Java programs or contents are downloaded from a Java-based screen saver. The use of screen savers as an entry point for games is an obvious candidate, with game providers offering a screen saver as part of the Java game. If the PC browser wars in the mid-1990s are any indication, a wide variety of content providers along with retail outlets and manufacturers may give away such screen savers as a way to guide consumers to their sites. 4.2 Mobile marketing Phones have already become a new marketing tool for retailers and manufacturers, due to the lower cost of sending mail to mobile phone users than traditional methods. More than 100 retailers and

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manufacturers are using the mobile Internet to send discount coupons, conduct surveys, and offer free samples to registered users via mobile mail. For example, more than 100,000 Japanese redeem coupons with their mobile phones each month in Japan’s leading video retailer, Tsutaya Online, and the total redeemed in Japan could easily exceed several million per month. New technologies like in-store bar code readers, short-range infrared, and Java offer additional ways for retailers to develop stronger relationships with these young people. For example, Jeansmate uses in-store scanners to read the bar codes displayed on the phone’s screen in order to identify the customer and thus integrate its mobile and POS databases. Furthermore, when a customer purchases a product with or without a discount coon, their name is displayed on the cash register screen including the status of their mail address. Jeansmate can register or update the customer’s mobile mail addresses by inserting a special device into one of the customer’s phone ports; this activates the mail function and automatically sends mail to the Jeansmate server. The acquisition of mail addresses enables Jeansmate to move more of its marketing activities from postal to Internet mail. It is also possible to use the phone as a point card for loyalty programs in place of magnetic or paper point cards. One method is to use a bar code as user ID and provide point information to customers when purchases are made. A second method is to use the phone’s infrared function to validate the user ID. Users download a Java program, which is activated with the infrared connection. One advantage of this method is that it facilitates two-way information transfers at the time of purchase or in mail messages.

cameras, bar code readers and faster processing speeds will drive growth in this market. As opposed to users scrolling through several menu screens or inputting a URL, they can use a camera phone to photograph a URL or a bar code reader to read a bar code that is printed in a magazine, and the phone’s processor uses a pattern recognition algorithm to identify the URL. Television broadcasters are also attempting to integrate mobile Internet sites with their programs in order to provide paid information services or sell products that are used in the programs. Television broadcasters hope that some young women will be interested in purchasing the clothing and cosmetics that are used by actresses, or in accessing information about the program or the program locations. Japanese firms have already begun linking these programs and sites to support the phones containing television and radio reception capabilities that appeared in late 2003. However, the bigger market involves linking these sites with conventional radios and televisions, and infrared techniques appear to have the best chance of success.

4.3 Multi-channel shopping While it is possible to use the mobile phone by itself to purchase products (US$270 million market in 2002), the small screens and keyboards make it difficult to search for products, which is the largest advantage of finding books or travel services on the PC Internet. This is why most of the products purchased with a mobile phone are selected from personalized mail services that provide information on recent releases for a specific artist, genre, or authors. This severely limits the range of products that can be sold over the mobile Internet. The fastest-growing segment of mobile shopping combines sites with magazine advertisements or items worn by celebrities on television programs. More than 50 fashion-related magazines offer mobile shopping services and many of them believe that higher-resolution

4.4 Navigation Lower packet charges, larger displays, and 3D rendering techniques may enable mobile phones finally to become an important portable navigation guide. The basic problem with current GPS devices is that they use too much power for their inclusion in mobile phones. One alternative is to use network-assisted GPS, which requires less power, has less effect on phone weight, and in some cases can be combined with base-station triangulation techniques that are useful when the phone is inside or very near a building. KDDI currently uses this approach with its cdma2000 services. The disadvantage of network-assisted GPS is that it requires a connection to the network, which increases the time it takes to acquire position data (typically 45 seconds) and costs more than $0.07 per connection at current packet charges. Monitoring an employee’s location every five minutes for ten hours would cost almost $80 a day as compared to almost zero for a conventional GPS device. Of course, lower packet charges will eventually solve the cost problem. Larger displays and/or 3D rendering techniques are also needed. Current displays are too small for users to understand their location on the map. Although GPS and a compass function help somewhat, currently they are insufficient for effective map usage. This is why map services have less than 10 per cent of the number of subscribers and less than 1 per cent of the traffic as compared to train and bus information services. Restaurant search services, which charge restaurants to be on

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the site, also have far more traffic and income than the map services.

use these data to set better schedules for materials and specialists like plumbers and electricians. Manufacturing companies allow their sales personnel to access sales, price, and inventory information, and to input orders on their mobile phones. An improved user interface and standard software packages will drive further growth in the market. Larger displays, Java programs, 3D rendering techniques, and voice recognition, which are being driven by entertainment applications and other technologies like faster processing speeds, will enable business people to access data more easily. A key question is the extent to which the standard software programs drive the emergence of a dominant design (discussed in Section 2) or are driven by some other dominant design for the mobile Internet like Java programs, 3D rendering techniques, or compatibility with popular desktop PC functions like Power Point.

4.5 Tickets and money Improvements in infrared and non-contact smart card technologies, and increases in processing speeds, can enable phones to be used as tickets and money, thus continuing the move from physical to electronic money that was started with credit cards 50 years ago. Credit card information is already being exchanged between phones and cash registers using the IrFM standard in Korea, and such phones are expected to appear in Japan in 2004. More than 50 million non-contact smart cards are currently in use in Asia, primarily in transportation ticket applications. They are also used as money in convenience stores, principally in Hong Kong, and are now being used as concert tickets in Japan. Placing these smart card functions in phones will probably expand the existing applications for these cards. Phones will reinforce a single standard, which will reduce technological uncertainty and the cost of readers and may enable supporters of such smart cards to create a network of stores and users that can challenge credit card networks. Furthermore, faster processors in phones enable the use of biometrics (Wilson, 2001) and thus the verification of user identification, which will facilitate the purchase of more expensive items without the need for signatures or other identification. 4.6 Mobile intranets The rapid diffusion of Internet-compatible phones and several technological trajectories have finally led to strong growth in business users. There are more than 500,000 subscribers to various mobile mail services that facilitate access to PC mail, and several times more business people probably do this on their own or rely on their firm to provide the service. Furthermore, there were probably more than 150,000 business people accessing information in corporate databases from their mobile phones as of April 2003, and this number may reach one million by the end of 2005. The largest applications in the accessing of corporate databases are delivery, maintenance, construction, and sales. Some delivery companies have replaced their proprietary handsets with mobile phones, and enable customers to request delivery times on both their PC and mobile phone. Maintenance departments send information about the next customer to workers via mobile mail that often includes URLs for access of more detailed information. Construction companies send mail to their construction workers asking them to update their work status; the project management people

5. Discussion This paper describes the key technological trajectories and their potential effect on the expansion of mobile Internet applications. These trajectories include the number of polyphonic tones, color display and camera resolution, Java program size, microprocessor speeds, memory size, and network speeds. While some of these trajectories will fizzle out as user needs are satisfied, it appears that increases in Java program size, microprocessor speeds, memory size, and network speeds will continue for many years to come. Services with faster network speeds are expected to have lower packet charges, and this may drive usage in a manner similar to what occurred in the PC Internet. Faster network speeds and, to a lesser extent, faster processor speeds enable the use of larger Java programs and better 3D rendering techniques, both of which can improve the user interface. These technologies are making the phone a portable entertainment player, a new marketing tool for retailers and manufacturers, a multichannel shopping device, a navigation tool, a new type of ticket and money, and a new mobile Intranet device. Larger Java programs and 3D rendering techniques will have a large impact on all contents and applications, and their first effect has been on entertainment. Bar code readers and infrared connections will enable retailers to strengthen their relationships with customers. Better camera resolution and faster processors will probably improve the integration of magazines and

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mobile shopping services. Cheaper GPS functions will improve the navigation capability of phones. These technologies will also change competition in the mobile phone market as dominant designs emerge for the mobile Internet. New industries like the mobile Internet are one big experiment where firms try various technologies, users learn how to use the products and services, and firms learn about what works and what doesn’t work. This offers tremendous opportunities to those firms that participate in this experiment. The dominant designs that emerge from the initial domestic competition often become globally dominant designs as other countries adopt them instead of re-inventing the wheel. Table II summarizes types of emerging dominant designs in the Japanese mobile Internet. Some of them are or will be impacting on all of the applications discussed in this paper, while others will only impact on specific applications. In some cases, winners have started to emerge, while in others it will take many years for the winners to be decided. In some cases this competition will impact on server software, while in others the competition will also impact on competition between phone manufacturers. For example, the importance of display size, and thus of folding phones, increased with the start of i-mode services in 1999. NEC had been making folding phones for many years, while Matsushita was slow to recognize the change to folding phones. This led to a change in mobile phone

market leadership from Matsushita to NEC in the year 2000, 2001, and 2002. Similarly, Sharp’s faster introduction of camera phones led to increased market share for it in 2002 and further increases are expected in 2003. A larger battle may occur in the move from markup languages like c-HTML to programming languages like Java in Japan. For example, if standard Java programs emerge that facilitate an overall move by all content providers towards Java, the owners of these Java programs will probably increase their power in the market. The emergence of standard application processors, 3D rendering techniques, or even improved GPS functions or infrared techniques may also impact on the dominant design for phones, and thus on the shares of hardware and software manufacturers. The Japanese market is already impacting on the European and US markets via the success of i-mode and Vodafone Live! in Europe, both of which are based on Japanese technology. As these and similar services diffuse, many of the technologies that are being developed in Japan and are discussed in this paper will be introduced in Europe initially via these services. The early start of the Internet in the US has led to far greater success by US technology than US Internet service and content providers in foreign countries, and similar things are likely to occur in the mobile Internet. As the winning dominant designs in the Japanese market are introduced in Europe and the US, this will provide large global opportunities for Japanese technology suppliers.

Table II Emerging types of dominant designs in the mobile Internet Application Examples of emerging platforms Brand General

Entertainment

Mobile marketing Mobile shopping

Navigation Mobile intranet

Phones as tickets and money

i-mode, Vodafone Live! Browsers, micro-payment systems, Java virtual machines, application processors, external memory cards, inter-phone and device communication protocols (e.g. Bluetooth, infrared) Ringing tone delivery systems, music delivery systems, image processing systems, multi-player game platforms, client-side Java/Brew programs, location-based game platforms Discount coupon delivery systems, integration of mobile mail and POS systems, point-card systems Mobile commerce solutions, payment systems, barcode readers for phones, integration of site access with barcode readers, integration of radio listening and site access, integration of television watching and site access GPS platforms, intelligent schedulers, global navigation services Security systems, business card management and exchange systems, mobile intranet software for applications like salesforce automation, maintenance, construction, home health care, or delivery Smart cards and systems, electronic credit cards, electronic ticket systems

References Anderson, P. and Tushman, M. (1990), “Technological discontinuities and dominant designs: a cyclical model of technological change”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, pp. 604-33. Bergeron, B. (2001), The Wireless Web: How to Develop and Execute a Winning Wireless Strategy, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Bijker, W., Hughes, T. and Pinch, T. (Eds) (1987), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Burkhardt, J., Henn, H., Hepper, S., Rintdorff, K. and Schack, T. (2002), Pervasive Computing: Technology and Architecture of Mobile Internet Applications, Addison-Wesley, New York, NY. Bylund, M. and Segall, Z. (2004), “Towards seamless mobility with personal servers”, INFO, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 172-9. Clark, K. (1985), “The interaction of design hierarchies and market concepts in technological evolution”, Research Policy, Vol. 14 No. 5, pp. 235-51. Dosi, G. (1982), “A suggested interpretation of the determinants and directions of technical change”, Research Policy, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 147-62. Funk, J. (2003), “The origins of new industries: the case of the mobile Internet”, The 2003 Best Paper Proceedings of the

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Portland International Conference on the Management of Technology (PICMET): Technology Management for Reshaping the World, 20-24 July. Funk, J. (2004), Mobile Disruption: The Technologies and Applications that Are Driving the Mobile Internet, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Harui, R. (2003), “NTT DoCoMo, Sony to develop smart cards in mobile phones”, Wall Street Journal, online ed., 22 October. Kalakota, R. and Robinson, M. (2002), M-Business: The Race to Mobility, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Marshall, A. (1920), Principles of Economics, 8th ed., Macmillan, London. Morgan, J.P. (2000), “Wireless data: the world in your hand”, M-Business: The race to Mobility, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 2 October. Qualcomm (2000), The Economics of Mobile Wireless Data, available at: www.qualcomm.com/about/downloads.html Rohlfs, J. (2001), Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Sharma, C. (2001), Wireless Internet Enterprise Applications, John Wiley, New York, NY. von Hippel, E. (1986), “Lead users: a source of novel product concepts”, Management Science, Vol. 32 No. 7, pp. 791-805. Wilson, C. (2001), Get Smart: The Emergence of Smart Cards in the United States and their Pivotal Role in Internet Commerce, Mullaney, Richardson, TX.

Further reading Natsuno, T. (2003), The I-mode Wireless Ecosystem, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Tushman, M. and Anderson, P. (1986), “Technological discontinuities and organizational environment”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 439-56.

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Rearview A regular column on the information industries

DOes this COmpany need to make MOre write-offs? There is nothing new about companies seeking to expand overseas, although their motives for so doing can be contradictory. On the one hand, for example, the motivation may be to introduce a successful product into overseas markets, while on the other, it may be an attempt to distract investors’ attention from poor trading results in the domestic market. In the former case, if the company is also very large, has access to huge reserves of cash and is renowned for its technical expertise, the results should be predictably positive, so why, one may reasonably ask, has DoCoMo been obliged to write down the value of its overseas investments, and has the process come to an end? During the late 1990s, DoCoMo, majorityowned by parent NTT, was busy building on its initial success in developing 2G cellular services in Japan. For this purpose it used primarily the technology known as personal digital cellular (PDC) on the 800 and 1,500MHz bands, rather than either GSM or CDMA as used almost everywhere else in the world, but the domestic market was sufficiently large, and growing at such a pace, that this was not considered to be a particular drawback. As for the introduction of data over cellular networks, here DoCoMo was the world leader even though, once again, it chose to go its own way, eschewing WAP/GPRS and cdma2000 1xRTT in favour of its home-grown i-mode technology. That i-mode, a play on the Japanese word for “anywhere” – the “I” stands for “information” – has been a monumental success cannot be in doubt, as subscriber figures reveal. Commencing on 22 February 1999, it acquired subscribers as follows: 8 August 1999 ¼ 1 million; 15 March 2000 ¼ 5 million; 6 August 2000 ¼ 10 million; 22 November 2000 ¼ 15 million; 4 March 2001 ¼ 20 million; 1 July 2001 ¼ 25 million; 24 December 2001 ¼ 30 million;

20 September 2002 ¼ 35 million; 30 October 2003 ¼ 40 million. Although the quarterly growth rate has inevitably slowed during the past two years, figures on this scale indicate that i-mode has only ever been exceeded in terms of a consumer purchase by the Sony Walkman. In May 2002, DoCoMo launched the 504 series of handsets, capable of infrared connectivity and data transmission at 28.8Kbps. This was replaced by the 505 series, including the SH505i – incorporating a 1.3 megapixel camera – and F505i featuring fingerprint authentication. Clearly, here is a technology which should excite overseas operators. However, the prospects for exporting the i-mode model were not the only thing on the minds of DoCoMo’s management. By the end of the 1990s, agreement had been reached on the technological underpinnings of International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000), the blueprint for what is now universally known as 3G – a packet-based technology permitting data transmission speeds of up to 3mbps. DoCoMo had decided to throw in its lot with the European Union (EU) and press for the use of Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) – known in the EU as the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) and in Japan as freedom of mobile multimedia access (FOMA) – at a time when the US was undecided whether to support W-CDMA or cdma2000 1xEV-DO. One obvious benefit of this strategy was that DoCoMo would at last be able to sign up for roaming rights throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, as the first operator to launch its W-CDMA service (in October 2001), it would be able to have a major say in the way that the technology developed. Commencing in 1997, DoCoMo invested heavily in the formation of a strategic community which would support its preferred technologies (Kodama, 2002). However, this was an investment of time and effort and relied entirely on the goodwill of DoCoMo’s partners. The more difficult issue was whether to promote i-mode and W-CDMA by taking stakes in overseas operators with a view to influencing their strategies, since this would be a completely new way to proceed. In the event, DoCoMo decided to take this route via its Global Business Division. It justified this in the Annual Report 2002 (DoCoMo, 2002, p. 43) as providing “the ability to significantly influence the operating or financial policies of the investee”. It was stated that this would raise the market value both of DoCoMo and of its investees. Total investment by 31 March 2002 equalled roughly ¥1,900 billion ($15.8 billion) of which the majority (almost $10 billion) had been spent in January 2001 on a minority stake in AT&T

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Wireless. It is significant that, because it was unlisted at the time, and hence prevented from using its own shares to engage in share swaps, all of DoCoMo’s major overseas investments had to be financed with cash. The destination of that money can be seen in Table I which indicates the stakes in overseas operators as well as the dates of introduction of i-mode equivalent services, in some cases by affiliates in which DoCoMo has no financial stake. However, as of 31 March 2002, the total carrying value of the investments was only ¥997 billion. The Annual Report 2002 (DoCoMo, 2002, p. 34) explains the methodology in use for amortization. Under the rules then being applied, DoCoMo’s operating results revealed (DoCoMo, 2002, p. 35), under the heading “equity in net losses of affiliates”, a negative figure of ¥1.7 billion for the financial year 1999 (ending 31 March 2000), a negative figure of ¥17.8 billion for the financial year 2000 and a negative figure of ¥644.0 billion ($4.7 billion) for the financial year 2001. The latter constituted gross impairment charges of ¥664.5 billion attributable to the hived-off AT&T Wireless, ¥320.5 billion attributable to KPN Mobile, ¥36.5 billion attributable to KG Telecom and ¥56.4 billion attributable to Hutchison 3G UK – equivalent gross to roughly $8.4 billion – set off in total by deferred taxes of ¥453.2 billion ($3.4 billion). The net impairment therefore constituted two-thirds of the carrying value. Nevertheless, the first half of financial year 2003 proved to be no better, with DoCoMo obliged to take a further impairment charge of ¥573 billion ($4.7 billion) in November 2003.

In December 2002, faced by a potential investor revolt if it continued to pour money into its malfunctioning affiliates, DoCoMo turned down a request from KPN Mobile to participate in a debtfor-equity swap with its parent at a cost to DoCoMo of $2.4 billion, and, as a result, its stake fell to only 2.2 per cent. Despite this, in April 2003, DoCoMo agreed to provide its pro-rata share of the £1 billion refinancing of Hutchison 3G UK, amounting to $315 million. Overall, its position appears to be best expressed as “cautiously optimistic” that things will improve during 2004, and it continues to examine the possibilities for further investments. The fact that DoCoMo chose to take fairly modest minority stakes when buying overseas has struck many commentators as a foolish strategy – it was not a great success for BT either – although it has to be said in DoCoMo’s defence that it was not in a position to pay cash for the whole of AT&T Wireless, nor would Hutchison, for example, have tolerated a majority stakeholder. In addition, parent NTT would have been able to prevent anything that appeared to be too audacious. Interestingly, in relation to the AT&T Wireless stake, Lex first noted that DoCoMo needed to move out of the domestic market because 2G was maturing and that this would present an opportunity to influence overseas operators’ choices of 2.5 and 3G technology, only to backtrack almost immediately on the grounds that DoCoMo could have sold its technology, and taken royalties, without an equity stake (Lex, 2000a, Lex, 2000b). For the time being, the position re i-mode and W-CDMA remains

Table I DoCoMo overseas Country Belgium France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hong Kong Italy The Netherlands Spain Taiwan Taiwan UK USA

Company

i-mode over GPRS launched

3G (licensed) launched

Ownership % (March 31 2001)

Ownership % (March 31 2002)

KPN Mobile (base) Bouygues Telecom KPN Mobile (E-plus) CosmOTE Hutchison Telephone Hutchison 3G Wind KPN Mobile Telefonica Moviles Far EasTone KG Telecom Hutchison 3G AT&T Wireless

June 2002 November 2002 March 2002 (2004) – – November 2003 April 2002 June 2003 – June 2002 – May 2002a

(February 2001) (July 2001) (July 2000) (July 2001) – December 2003 (October 2000) (July 2000) (March 2000) (February 2002)

– 0.00 – – 19.00 n/a 0.00 15.00d 0.00 n/a 20.00 20.00 n/a

– 0.00 – – 25.37e 25.37 0.00 15.00 0.00 n/a 21.42f 20.00 16.01

b

March 2003 c

Ownership % (current) – 0.00 – 25.37 25.37 0.00 2.2 0.00 4.9g n/a 20.00 16.01

Notes: a Known as m-mode; b In December 2001, DoCoMo agreed with KG Telecom not to pursue a 3G licence in Taiwan; c In February 2002, AT&T bought TeleCorp PCS, so DoCoMo used its pre-emptive right to invest a further $382 million (¥50.6 billion) to maintain its stake at 16 per cent. Its total investment rose to ¥1,000 billion. In certain circumstances, if AT&T Wireless fails to meet specific 3G wireless technology benchmarks in the USA by 30 June 2004, DoCoMo may require the repurchase of its investment in stock and warrants at the original price plus interest. DoCoMo has agreed not to purchase additional shares for five years other than as part of a pre-emption right to keep its stake at 16 per cent; d In 2000, the stake in KPN Mobile cost ¥408 billion. Because KPN Mobile itself wrote off most of its investment in E-Plus, DoCoMo was obliged to take a pro-rata write-off;. e In May 2001, an additional ¥3.7 billion was spent to raise the stake in Hutchison Telephone; f The purchase of new shares was announced in June 2001; g KG Telecom was taken over by Far EasTone at the end of 2003, diluting DoCoMo’s stake in the larger entity. However, it now has access to a 3G licence.

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unclear. So far, the success of i-mode in Japan has not been replicated in Europe – the number of subscribers is typically only several hundred thousand in each country – although it may yet take off. It may be noted that DoCoMo is not linked (as yet) with either Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange or BT, all of which have their own portals, so its approach to i-mode in Europe has arguably been too low key. As for 3G, the exclusive use of W-CDMA in Europe was determined some time ago, so DoCoMo no longer has much to gain in pushing for its introduction. In June 2003, DoCoMo apologised sincerely for the massive write-offs – by then amounting to the vast bulk of its entire overseas investments – and for “causing shareholders to worry”. The unhappy experience has largely driven DoCoMo back into its domestic market, but with telecoms markets improving, i-mode established overseas if not exactly thriving and 3G launches on the increase, the worst is undoubtedly over and DoCoMo may

even begin to find its remaining overseas interests contributing positively to its balance sheet by the end of 2004. If so, its massive cash flow may even induce it to look overseas once again, but at Asia rather than Europe. Peter Curwen Visiting Professor of Telecommunications, Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK. E-mail [email protected]

References DoCoMo (2002), DoCoMo Annual Report, DoCoMo, Tokyo. Kodama, M. (2002), “The world’s first 3G mobile phone service: a case study of innovation”, Journal of General Management, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 43-57. Lex (2000a), “Lex DoCoMo/AT&T Wireless”, Financial Times, 23 November. Lex (2000b), “DoCoMo/AT&T”, Financial Times, 1 December.

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