The growth of the Web on mobile phones in Japan
Published November 6th, 2007 1:43 PM EST By Daniel GoldmanThe other day I read an AP article about how the PC’s role in Japanese homes is diminishing. According to the AP, more and more people are connecting to the Web using mobile phones, gadgets, and gaming consoles. (Incidentally, I first read this article on my Opera Mini browser).
“More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.”
“The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.”
With more sophisticated browsers being available on mobile phones and other gadgets, it’s no surprise we’re seeing this trend.
Bringing the Web everywhere, not just on PCs with big screens, is part of Opera’s core principals. Users shouldn’t be limited or turned away from browsing any websites when they’re not using a PC.
This is why we’re such big proponents of and fight for common Web standards. For the Web to work on all platforms and devices there needs to be a common way to interpret HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. In other words, when developers build a website to work on the “Web”, it should work on the “Web”, wherever the “Web” is – on PCs, mobile phones, game consoles, gadgets, etc.
The people in Japan are just one example of the Web proliferating on mobile phones and other devices. In many 3rd world and developing countries, the mobile Web is just about the only option, as PCs aren’t something everyone could afford, in addition to scarcity of internet connectivity.
The mobile Web is certainly alive. Our Opera Mini servers are processing more than 1 billion webpages per-month. And according the recent stats by NetApplications, Opera Mini has a 0.41% of the entire browser market share, including that of desktop browsers – an amazing feat for a mobile browser.
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and what is the share of mobile web Opera took in Japan?
How does opera compare to other players?
what are these players?
etc.
Asian markets are much different than european ones, southern korean market is taken in 99% by IE, while it is the country with highest percentage of BROADband connections per capita.
Point is - i’d like to know how opera is exploiting japanese market, or is it just sitting around issuing statements and waiting for miracle to happen. Japanese mentality is so different than european ones, that you need locals to manage marketing etc. etc.
just curious
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whatever2, our marketing team in Japan is very active in those markets.
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whatever2, ever considered informing yourself before talking your usual nonsense?
Opera has offices in Japan!
Oh, and hint for you is to check out the jobs pages, where Opera is looking for sales/marketing people in Japan.
Again, you could have figured this out for yourself, but you seem to be happier to just make baseless assumptions
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[quote]More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.[/quote]
Opera Link is the first step of integration between different devices with Opera installed. Somebody is asking also for preferences, passwords, ..
M2 is left behind; i know it’s impossibile sharing thousands of email between a pc and a mobile phone, but M2 should at least have some way to understand that a mail received (for example) through the bcc header from one address of mine has to be considered as sent instead of received.
Other mail clients haven’t big problems about this because they work only through folder, but M2 doesn’t.
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and what is the share of mobile web Opera took in Japan?
How does opera compare to other players?
what are these players?
etc.
I think those are good points? Anyone have a statistic?
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[quote]M2 is left behind; i know it’s impossibile sharing thousands of email between a pc and a mobile phone, but M2 should at least have some way to understand that a mail received (for example) through the bcc header from one address of mine has to be considered as sent instead of received.
Other mail clients haven’t big problems about this because they work only through folder, but M2 doesn’t.[/quote]
no! that is no problem!
for example. I’m proud to use a HTC Hermes (Tytn/T-Mob ile Mda 2; Vodafone VPA Compact 3/ O2 XDA Trion/…)…
I uses the Windows Mobile 6 and has a good (not an perfect) sync with a data-link to the pc and Outlook (it is really bad that is only with outlook, there should ms open to other applications)!
Why not having the mail-acc-user datas on the server, look for new mails and if there are new, the mobile could download a copy of them and get untouched the original mail for the pc?!?
I hope you understand the clue is behind the idea
mfg
mabdul
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@Daniel, @Nelson
that were the ’statements’ i was talking about - it is just you making noise. being ‘active’ could as well mean playing lots of golf.
i asked for facts, have you got any?
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Gongo: Use IMAP.
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“… what are these players?… ”
NetFront browser, built by ACCESS, owned partly by NTT DoCoMo, the leading Japanese carrier… http://www.access-company.com/products/netfrontmobile/index.html