Mobile content growing in Japan

Earlier this year, I wrote that some people confuse the name of their mobile operator with the mobile brand they are carrying. It is a similar issue with those companies that provide the content to the mobile phone. Here, it might be even more difficult, because they are operating in the background, or don't have the place or chance to display their logo, even so this is changing, probably forced onto the carriers by market forces.

The mobile phone content market is growing in Japan, thus opposing the trend in other parts of the world, where most users still prefer simple services.

"According to NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo portal, there are 400 million to 500 million searchable Japanese-language Web pages, compared with 60 million mobile Web pages. Including carriers' pages, the cell phone total goes up to an estimated 100 million.

The growth in mobile Web pages accelerated in late 2003, analysts say, when KDDI, the second-largest carrier in Japan, introduced a flat-rate plan for mobile data transfers." The sad piece, for some, is that portal operators are beefing up their mobile sites to capture an anticipated explosion in the mobile advertising market - which means, that mobile spam becomes more prevalent as well.

(By Asia Business Consulting)