Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  Mari Matsunaga, at forty-two, had been working for the Japanese company Recruit for twenty years. Her specialty was launching magazines. Enoki proposed that Matsunaga’s Internet illiteracy would be an advantage, because the market DoCoMo sought for their new service consisted of people who didn’t use the Internet. NTT would provide the engineering expertise. Matsunaga would furnish the marketing genius. Enoki overcame her doubts and convinced Matsunaga to take up the challenge.

  Matsunaga needed to hire someone who knew the Internet culture better than she did. She recalled a capable and style-conscious young man who had worked part-time as an assistant editor for one of the Recruit magazines. Takeshi Natsuno later graduated from one of Japan’s top universities, and while earning his MBA at the Wharton School in the early 1990s, experienced the Internet culture as it spread among its earliest enthusiasts, American college students. Since his return to Japan, Natsuno had founded a Japanese e-business that was the first to use the Internet as a means of advertising and joined an Internet-focused venture company. “His experience at a venture company,” Matsunaga recognized, “had taught him the limitations of businesses that targeted PC users exclusively. The number of users always stalled around the 300,000 mark. But if it was mobile phones instead, there could be millions of potential users.”21

  Natsuno wrote a business plan for Matsunaga that recognized the unique opportunity of marrying mobile telephony with Internet information: “The weakness of mobile phones, and all voice communication tools,” Natsuno wrote, “is that they’re useless unless you know the right telephone number. The distribution of data via phones, however, would make it possible for users to search for a restaurant or make a dinner reservation. They could also reserve a train or airplane ticket. . . . Ads for companies would no longer be unnecessary information, but essential information that users could be charged for accessing.” Natsuno acknowledged Matsunaga’s former employer as the inspiration for his i-mode business model: “Consumers are prepared to pay for Recruit magazines, which are essentially a collection of ads. However, in the case of mobile phones, users don’t use them for the purpose of acquiring specific information. If we could get the information onto mobile phones, people would start looking at it as a natural extension of using the phone.”22

  Matsunaga insisted that the telephone weigh less than 100 grams and that the basic service should cost less than 300 yen (less than three U.S. dollars) per month. Knowing that “something only comes to life when it’s given a name,” she came up with the name “i-mode.”23 She remembered that Enoki had said that they weren’t designing a service for NTT executives, but for their children. “I got the first positive sign from my family,” Enoki recalled. “At that time, the pager was at the peak of its popularity. My daughter used the number pad as a form of data communications. My son could play a new computer game without reading the instructions. Their ability to adapt to new information and use it with ease left a strong impression on me. I was convinced that young people would accept a new data service that would give them the same kind of enjoyment.”24

  The DoCoMo staff in their twenties who had joined the i-mode team convinced the rest of the team of the importance of text communication between mobile telephone users—an abbreviated form of instant email for the small keitai screens. “The young staff members were constantly coming up with new ideas,” Matsunaga acknowledged. “One new idea was the addition of symbolic characters. It emerged as an answer to the problem of how to condense meaning and convey feelings in a short email. There had previously been a pager that had sold particularly well. Upon examining the reason for its success, it was discovered that only this particular model offered the symbol of a heart. Just the addition of a heart made a tremendous difference in sales.”25

  Eventually, one of the receptionists directed me to enter another elevator, where I joined those chosen to ascend to chambers on the thirty-third floor. There were crystal decanters and glasses, more views of Tokyo, and a whiteboard at the end of the table. Natsuno entered the room with an energy that didn’t flag for the hour and a half we—mostly he—talked. He wore a tailored suit and perfectly dimpled tie. At thirty-six, Natsuno is the youngest of all NTT’s top management. His English is perfect, and he makes it clear that he believes what he’s selling. He grins often and seems to be authentically happy. Why shouldn’t he be? It took AOL more than a decade to acquire 30 million subscribers, but i-mode reached that level in a little more than two years.

  As soon as I mentioned in my opening remarks that the NTT video depiction of the future recently shown to me by a PR man was the same one I had seen ten years ago, Natsuno blurted, with surprising glee, “Engineers don’t understand the value chain!” He jumped up and drew a diagram on the whiteboard. “I love to use the whiteboard,” he exclaimed.26 Half an hour later, he had taken off his jacket and was still emoting. Nobody who meets him can doubt that Natsuno is an energetic salesman, unafraid of making big claims:

  My role is to coordinate a value chain larger than the world of networks, servers, and handsets NTT is used to. I knew that no single company could provide the entire value chain, so I set out to create alliances and support among third-party developers. I knew how America Online had succeeded. AOL became the number one Internet service where so many others failed because they provided an easy to use interface, useful content developed by others, and ways for users to communicate with each other.27

  Like AOL, Natsuno offered i-mode users a carefully selected menu of content that would make the new service attractive to mobile telephone customers who weren’t Internet-savvy but did want lifestyle-related information: banking services, tickets for events and hotel reservations, weather forecasts and stock market quotes, restaurant guides, transport schedules, games, ringtones, and even fortune-telling services. Natsuno pushed Do-CoMo to provide incentives for developers to create successful sites. This reversed the traditional policy that telephone service operators had used worldwide. Instead of making third-party services advantageous to the operating company at the expense of the entrepreneurs, i-mode made sure that successful i-mode sites would pay off for those who created and maintained them. “This is the Internet way of thinking, not the telecom way of thinking,” Natsuno said with a grin.

  The ringtone downloads so popular in Harajuku, Natsuno noted, were not just revenue streams; they had initiated millions of users in the process of downloading content. 3G would make it possible to download games, movies, and television news in real time. Millions of people are already on the upgrade path to multimedia capabilities. Who knows what other attractions the tens of thousands of i-mode developers will come up with to make use of that bandwidth?

  Three weeks after I visited Natsuno, NTT launched their “i-motion” location- based services that give 3G users and third-party services access to accurate global positioning information.28 Now, users can employ their telephones to find information relevant to the neighborhood or building they are in at the time. As soon as I heard about i-motion, I recalled a conversation I had with Kenny Hirschhorn, chief strategist for European telecommunication giant Orange. (The sign on Hirschhorn’s London office door says “future boy.”) Hirschhorn had cautioned me against thinking of the telephone as a device to talk into, urging me instead to think of the mobile telephone as evolving into a “remote control for your life.” Hirschhorn’s comment made it easier to recognize what Natsuno intends for the future of i-mode.29

  Before we left the thirty-third floor, Natsuno showed me how to order from the office soft drink machine with my 3G phone. Although I could download cartoons while I sipped my beverage and didn’t have to fish in my pocket for change, the menus and buttons seemed too clunky to entice the un-nerdy masses who want a soft drink, not a sequence of screen menus. Nevertheless, Coca-Cola is exactly the kind of “third-party developer” NTT would need to break out of telephony and take the lead in the much-forecasted but yet-to-be-demonstrated “m-commerce” market.

  Using your telephone
to purchase something from a vending machine or to ask a street sign for directions are examples of how a mobile Internet could be as different from the landlocked Net as telephony was from telegraphy.

  The mental models of the smart mob future that I started to form in Tokyo were reinforced in some ways, and had to be revised in other ways, when I spent more time in the other epicenter of mobile and pervasive technology—the Nordic countries.

  Virtual Helsinki and the Botfighters of Stockholm

  Risto Linturi carried his mobile phone in his hand when he entered the room. Before he sat down, he put the device on the table. At times, Linturi picked up his telephone and gestured with it. Whereas keitai in Shibuya are often tucked away in special pockets or clipped onto belts, they seem to be an extension of the hand in Finland. Indeed, känny, the word Finns use to describe their mobile devices, is a diminutive form of “hand.”30 If Tokyo and DoCoMo are the first capitals of the wireless Internet industry, Helsinki and Nokia have been the wellsprings of mobile telephony. Finland leads the world in both Internet connections and mobile phones per capita.31 Even before the launch of i-mode, Finnish adolescent courtship rituals and the social norms of Finnish business managers had been transformed by the use of short messages known as “SMS.”

  Helsinki is the color of granite, not neon, and giant televisions don’t dominate street crossings, but Finnish citizens have lived the longest with the effects of mobile telephone usage. A few Finnish visionaries, Risto Linturi foremost among them, have been thinking about mobile and pervasive information technologies for some time. Like my Tokyo friends, Linturi is a member of the transnational tribe that lives in the future. As a teenager, he was one of Finland’s first PC enthusiasts. Since then, he’s been director of technology for Helsinki Telephone and “helped Nokia see the mobile telephone as a general purpose remote control device.”32 Slim, soft-spoken, and deliberate in his choice of words, Linturi is an enthusiast for the technologies he envisions. Like Natsuno and Hirschhorn, he is convinced that mobile telephones are evolving into control devices for the physical world.

  Linturi set up a network of sensors in his home outside Helsinki. He monitors the temperature and lighting, locks and unlocks doors, and controls the kitchen appliances and the VCR from wherever he happens to be, using his mobile telephone as a remote control. “People who ring my door- bell when I am away from home can talk to me through my mobile.”33 Linturi’s blend of personal enthusiasm and professional optimism reminded me of Mr. Irukuyama, the DoCoMo engineering manager who made his official NTT “vision” presentation with formal aplomb and then proudly showed me how his 3G phone connects to his infant son’s webcam.

  Linturi, the father of teenage daughters, was one of the first observers of the way young people use text messaging to coordinate their actions: “There are endless calls. ‘No, no, it’s changed—we’re not going to this place, we’re going over here. Hurry!’ It’s like a school of fish.”34 By the time Linturi and I met in May 2001, the term “swarming” was frequently used by the people I met in Helsinki to describe the cybernegotiated public flocking behavior of texting adolescents. In our conversation, Linturi also emphasized that the mobile phones had an effect on older adults: “Managers in Finnish companies always keep their phones on. Customers expect fast reactions. In Finland, if you can’t reach a superior, you make many decisions yourself. Managers who want to influence decisions of subordinates must keep their phones open.”35

  Linturi was a principal architect of a project named Helsinki Arena 2000, an experiment connecting mobile telephones to informational “beacons” stationed around the city, providing access to an up-to-the-minute database of the city’s geographic information systems.36 Geographic information systems are the focus of a rich discipline that predates the mobile Internet; using maps as user interfaces to databases makes useful but abstract information easily available and comprehensible.37 Using location-sensing technologies, mobile devices gave people access to locally relevant portions of a simulation of Helsinki’s infrastructure, similar to the “Mirror Worlds” predicted in 1992 by David Gelernter.38 For the experiment, they modeled twenty-five square kilometers of the city of Helsinki. Cities wired to tell your mobile device where you are and how to get to your destination is Linturi’s forecast for a “killer app” of tomorrow’s digital cities.

  On a previous visit to Helsinki. I had visited a friend whose office was located in a section of town known as Arabianranta (“Arabian Shore”), named after the Arabia brand porcelain factory that had dominated this light industrial area of Helsinki earlier in the century. Like similar urban neighborhoods such as New York’s Soho and San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch, Arabianranta’s large spaces and cheap rents attracted geeks, designers, artists, students, and entrepreneurs. Restaurants and theaters popped up. Without anyone planning it, a wired ecology of subcultures started aggregating in the same geographic neighborhood. In 1999, IBM, Finland’s telecommunications operator Sonera, and the Symbian Alliance—a joint venture including Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Matsushita, and Psion—agreed to invest $1 billion to build Helsinki Virtual Village (HVV) in Arabianranta.39 Since I was already in the neighborhood visiting a friend, I dropped in on Ilkka Inna-maa at Digia, a company that was helping design HVV. By 2010, Innamaa claimed, HVV will link 12,000 residents, 700 enterprises with 8,000 employees, via fiber optic cables in their homes and 3G location-sensitive mobile devices.40 If HVV succeeds, its sponsors plan to roll it out to neighborhoods and suburbs of other cities around the world. All there was to see of it in 2000, however, was a demo video.

  “It’s too top-down,” was Linturi’s opinion of HVV. “Open standards should enable people to link devices and services almost automatically.” If citizens have the freedom to set up ad hoc wireless networks or to network their houses the way he had, Linturi thinks they will create digital pathways on their own, the way people automatically create pathways between buildings. One school of community design suggests looking for ways to enable people to use resources at hand to create different pathways, instead of trying to predesign their paths through the community.41 Virtual villages, in this view, create themselves. In Chapter 4 I look more closely at “digital cities” pervaded by sensors, beacons, computers, and communicators. Arena 2000 and HVV might be the earliest representatives of two opposite schools of virtual urban planning: the “grassroots, open system, emergent use” school and the “centrally planned, proprietary system, planned use” school.

  Finnish innovators have made significant contributions to Internet technology. Internet Relay Chat, the online social channel connecting countless real-time tribes, was invented in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen, a computer science student. The open source software movement’s Linus Torvalds started Linux, the community-developed software operating system that is challenging Microsoft, on a server at the University of Helsinki.42

  Finland’s Nokia Oy started as a paper mill on the Nokia River in 1865. 43 By 1999, with $15.7 billion in sales, Nokia had become the world’s leading vendor of mobile telephone handsets and infrastructure.44 Nokia’s CEO bet on what was still a distant future technology in 1987, when European technocrats agreed on a mobile telephony technical standard known as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). In 1991, Finland’s Radiolinja launched the world’s first GSM network; within a few years, the penetration of mobile telephones, most of them made by Nokia, had reached 60 percent of the Finnish population.45

  Built into the GSM standard was the capability of instantly sending short text messages of 160 characters from one telephone to another, using the telephone keyboard to input messages and the small display screen to read them—the Short Message Service (SMS). The first text message was sent in December 1992 in the United Kingdom.46 By mid-2001, tens of billions of messages were being exchanged worldwide each month.47 By 2002, 100 billion text messages were being sent on the world’s GSM networks each month.48 Considering that the telephone operators collect a few cents on each message, tha
t’s a tidy windfall for what was almost an afterthought in the GSM standard.

  The unexpected success of texting was also a sign that people were once again appropriating a communication technology for social purposes, as they had done with voice telephony and with the Minitel in France, where the chat tool was literally stolen from operators by the users, and with email, where it was the driving force behind the growth of the landlocked Internet.49

  A technical and economic advantage of text messaging is that it is “packet-switched” rather than “circuit-switched.” This technical distinction divides the telegraph-telephone era analog network from the Internet and mobile era digital network. Circuit-switched telephone connections require a series of physical switches to link a continuous wired circuit between both parties—think of early twentieth-century films of operators who closed those circuits by plugging jacks into a switchboard. Like data on the Internet, text messages are sent in electronic bursts of data, “packets,” that find their own way through the network via “routers” that read the addresses on the packets and forward them. Packets are tiny and are reassembled at the destination, so they can fit in between other messages instead of preempting them the way analog circuits do. This means that far more information can be sent economically from any point on the network to any other because the transport medium efficiently allocates network resources on a bottom-up basis (the packets find their way like autos) rather than an inefficient, centrally planned basis where each conversation requires a devoted circuit (like railroads). This technical advantage makes it less expensive to support massive text-messaging traffic than to support circuit-switched voice traffic. The source of the power of this new medium is the combination of the economic advantages of texting with the way tex- ting supports and is propagated by social networks. The economic leverage that comes from interleaving digital information in this way will come into play again when I look at new wireless Internet technologies that challenge the way the electromagnetic spectrum is regulated.