Goin' Mobile Japan

Trendwatch: The youth market in the mobile industry can no longer be ignored.

As you can see in the article on April 4 entitled "DoCoMo to Launch ‘DCMX' Mobile Credit Services”, DoCoMo will be offering a new service to users from age 12, thus including the teenage demographic in their new service offering. According to a survey conducted by NTT Resonant and Mitsubishi Research Institute on March 24, 49.6% of children have their own mobile phones and 94.2% of high-school students have their own mobile phones in Japan. As this study shows, some content providers try to reach this big chunk of the mobile market.

Here are a couple of mobile sites geared toward teens. 

1. Bandai Networks, VIBE and Tokyu Agency jointly started "GAMOW” site for high school students. This site has no membership fees and allows students to play games, download ring tones and more. The business model is based upon generating advertising revenue.

http://gamow.jp/ (Japanese site, mobile phone access only)

2. "Forest Site”, which has popular blog and bulletin board features, gets about 1.5 billion page views per month. This site has been on the market since July 2003 and 90% of users are teenage girls of which 70% access the site via mobile phones. The site now contains over 960,000 individual web pages. 

http://id.fm-p.jp/ (Japanese site)

When targeting teenage mobile phone users, there are always safety issues that must be taken into consideration. To encourage proper mobile phone usage by teenagers, DoCoMo has begun offering "Keitai Safety Classes” for students in middle and high school. These classes teach teen mobile phone users how to avoid trouble, proper manners of using phones while in public, and emergency phone usage in situations such as natural disasters. DoCoMo is offering these classes free of charge to 1,000 schools in 2006.

You may think this type of movement will eventually occur in the U.S. because Japan's 3G mobile phone market is growing faster than that of the U.S. The technology that is emerging in Japan is a good indicator of what will happen in the U.S. in the future.