Sunday, August 30, 2009

Japanese election

LDL lost big time! I wonder if Japan is gonna change

Monday, June 8, 2009

presentaion for geeks on a plane event

I'll make a brief speech at Geeks on a Place event in Tokyo tomorrow.
The below is the presentation file.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Now in Silicon Valley

I did a presentation in front of a small group of Sillicon Vally venture capitalists today. I enjoyed the conversation with them very much. It was a lot of fun. I want to do it again. The below is the presentation file I used.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Mobile Industry in China

Yusuke Tanaka is one of a few Japanese who know what it is like to do mobile business in China. A member of board of executive of Fractalist, a mobile solution and mobile marketing company in Japan, Tanaka has been tackling with the rapidly changing Chinese mobile market. Fractalist established itself in Japan in 2000, and Fractalist China in China in 2003. Fractalist China's business model is rather simple, according to Tanaka, "we aim to learn from successful contents, services, technology businesses in the Japan's mobile industry and localize the business models so that they would work in China," says he. Japan is arguably the most advanced mobile market, and China is the biggest mobile market in the world and seems certain to become the center of the world mobile Internet industry in the near future. Tanaka's job is to bridge the two markets and create the world's leading mobile market within the region.

According to iResearch inc., there are 605 million mobile phone accounts in China. Around 2000, there were only 20 million accounts but since then the number is growing steadily. Last year alone, 50 million new mobile accounts were newly created. Total population of China is vast 1 billion 300 million; only half the population own mobile phones. That means there are still plenty more room for the mobile market to grow.
"Some people say that the Chinese mobile market is close to saturation because the recent market growth is propelled by purchasing of second and third phones by wealthy people. it is true to some degree. I see some rich people own two phones; one regular cell phone and one smart phone. But, considering the huge total population of China, I still think there are more room to grow." says Tanaka.


Reorganization of China's mobile market


The Chinese mobile market used to be ruled by a 800 pound gorilla called China Mobile, the world largest mobile operator. However, in order to spur more competition and innovation, the Chinese government shuffled the key telecom players into three main operators. "Perhaps decreasing number of land line phone users in China made the government realize the urgent needs of fostering a healthy mobile phone industry in China," says Tanaka.
China Mobile merged China Tietong, formally called China Railcom, the third largest fixed-line operator in China. According to Wikipedia, China Tietong's main areas of business are providing ADSL and dial-up Internet services and selling back haul on their nationwide backbone network.
China Unicom has been the number 2 mobile operator in China. The company had two mobile networks base on two different mobile technologies; one is called GSM and the other is CDMA. According to its annual report, as of Jun 30, 2008, China Unicom had 127.60 million GSM subscribers and 43.17 million CDMA subscribers.
China Unicom sold the CDMA business to China Telecom, the nation's number one fixed line operator, and instead merged with China Netcom who has fixed-line networks in northern China.
China Telecom, which was formally a state-owned monopoly but transferred its assets in China's 10 northern provinces to China Netcom in 2002, now has a fixed line business in 21 southern provinces and the CDMA businesses transferred from China Unicom.
China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom; now they all have both fixed line and mobile operations.


new China Mobile = China Mobile(mobile operator) + China Railcom(land line operator)
new China Telecom = China Telecom(land line operator in southern China) + China Unicom's CDMA business(mobile)
new China Unicom = old China Unicom(CDMA + GSM) - CDMA business + China Netcom(land line + satellite)




In January 2009, the Chinese government formally awarded 3rd generation mobile operators licences. "As a matter of fact, I haven't met a single person who has a 3rd generation mobile phone in China yet, except a few governmental workers whose jobs are related to 3rd generation phones," said Tanaka. As of today, most Chinese mobile market is still based on 2nd generation technologies.
However it will be a matter of time before the Chinese mobile phone market will be dominated by 3rd generation mobile phones. In 2008 Chinese government had China mobile start a trial service of home grown 3rd generation technology called TD-SCDMA to be showcased in Beijing Olympics which took place the same year. After the Olympics, China Mobile was formally awarded the licence and continued to deploy TD-SCDMA services in eight cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Qinhuangdao and Xiamen. Some observers thought the Chinese government was hoping to make TD-SCDMA as the world's de facto standard of 3rd generation mobile technology. With China's more than 6 hundred million mobile users which is still growing steadily, making TD-SCDMA as the world standard is not such a far-fetched dream. Still in January 2009, China decided to licence competing 3G technologies to remaining key mobile operators; China Unicom got licenced to operate a 3G network with a technology called W-CDMA in 252 places in the nation from May, and China Telecom got awarded a licence to operate with another technology called CDMA2000 in Beijing and other places.
The reason why the Chines government didn't to mandate all the mobile operators to use the home grown TD-SCDMA is unknown. Perhaps, the government may not be confident enough of this newly developed technology's maturity and stability. "How prevalent TD-SCDMA will be in the world market depends on how much the Chinese government push the technology. It still remains to be seen," said Tanaka.

According to Research data Mr. Tanaka has seen, China Mobile has a market share of about 60 to 70 percent. China Telecom has a 10% share which is the CDMA business it has just purchased from China Unicom. China Unicom in turn has a remaining GSM business which accounts for about 20% of the market. With new 3G services starting, these market shares might change drastically. Especially China Telecom which just entered the mobile market, is very aggressive about its new data services, said Mr. Tanaka.

With its large mobile user base, the mobile paid-contents market in China is sizable also. Paid contents such as ring tones, pictures, ring back tones consists of 100 billion Chinese yuan market. Especially ring back tones are very popular in China. According to some research, in 2008 160 million people are said to be using ring back tones.

Fractalist establish a local subsidiary called Fractalist China in 2003.
It was one of many Japanese mobile contents/services companies who tried to enter the Chinese market which already seemed very promising. They were the companies which enjoyed pretty profitable successes in Japan's the i-mode Internet service. Most of the companies thought they can simply duplicate in Chinese market what they did successfully in Japan.
"It was a little too early," said Tanaka. The i-mode is a closed network, but it looks like the PC web; information was transmitted not via email but through browsers. Chines paid-contents market was consisted mostly of sales using SMS. Users order ring tones and images on web site using personal computers, and receive them as mobile phone's short message attachment. Browser based network like the i-mode was available at that time, but the network technology was still very slow 2nd generation. Rich contents which Japanese companies made might have been sold well in Japan, but were too big in data size for the slow connection in China. Japanese companies, therefore, resorted to create smaller size contents with a limited creative expression. As a result, there weren't any notable difference between Japanese and Chinese contents.
"The difference in the levels of contents were not big enough for Chinese users to chose Japanese contents over Chinese contents," analysed Tanaka.
"Almost all Japanese contents makers closed shop in China around 2005."
Fractalist at first wanted to operate a contents aggregation site; a site which showcase array of Japanese creators' contents. Realizing the difficulty of recreate Japan's success in mobile contents business in China, however, Fractalist decided to concentrate on mobile marketing business. Around 2001 and 2002, a new type of mobile marketing using QR codes sprung up in Japan. QR codes are two dimensional bar codes. For it is two dimensional, QR codes are able to contain bigger data than traditional bar codes you find on consumer products. Many mobile phones with camera capability in Japan are equipped with QR code readers. When you activate the camera on your mobile phone, usually you can select QR code reader capability in the menu selection. Then you hold the phone close enough to a QR code printed on paper, so that the camera lens can capture a clear image of a QR code. After the camera capability of the phone adjust the focus automatically, QR code reader capability decodes the QR code into an alphanumeric data, which usually is an URL of a web site. When you click the URL, then, the browser of the phone gets booted up and shows the web site on mobile phone's screen.
In Japan, you can find QR codes on posters, magazine advertisement page, and business cards. QR codes on business cards usually lead you to the company web sites.
The type of mobile campaign using QR codes which started around 2002 is cold "must buy campaign," or "serial closed campaign" among marketers. One of the early practitioner of this type of mobile campaign was a Japanese soft drink maker, Kirin Beverage. The soft drink maker printed QR codes on coffee cans and urged consumers to access the company web site to apply for an campaign. The campaign turned out to be a great success, and many other consumer product manufacturers follow suit and tried similar QR code campaign.
Borrowing a page from the book, Fractalist approached Chinese companies with similar marketing plan utilising QR codes, and Chinese soft drink makers and other companies decide to try out the approach in China.
"Usually a consumer products company tries out this type of campaign hoping to increase customer loyalty and its brand power," says Tanaka. "Interestingly, however, we found out there are additional merits in this type of campaigns when you execute them in China."
It is said that copy cats and pirates products are a big problem in China. Microsoft says

QR code campaigns can counter attack piracy problems says Tanaka. By including a product serial number in QR code's data. consumer who purchased genuine products can only apply for the campaign. Usually serial numbers are allocated based on some inside rules. Outsiders and piracy manufacturers have no way of knowing the inside rules. Applicants with serial numbers which dd not follow the inside rules and already used numbers would be disqualified from the campaign.

Additionally, QR code campaigns could give manufactures some valuable marketing data. In China, sales channels can be very complex and manufacturers do not always have clear understanding of when, where, and how many of which products are being sold. During QR code campaigns, however, people apply for the campaign usually right after they purchased the products. From the past experience, Fractalist knows for a fact that a certain percentage of people who purchased a certain type of products apply for QR code campaign. With this knowledge, a manufacturer could tell about how many products are being sold this right minutes in which part of China.

Even though SMS was one of the main reasons why Chinese users would use mobile data services at that time, eventually users would start accessing mobile sites more, thought Tanaka. So Fractalist approached a company which operates China's number one mobile portal site; China Mobile. Fractalist has become the media representative of China Mobile. "People ask me why a start-up like Fractalist got to have become the China's number one mobile portal's only one media rep," Tanaka smiled, "I guess China Mobile got interested in our ability of creating tremendous amount of data traffic through off line campaigns."

Today, as the media rep of China Mobile, Fractalist negotiate with ad agencies and large advertisers and sell all the ad spaces in China Mobile's portal site. Fractalist also advise China Mobile on promotional campaigns and provide ad server and other ad related technological support. Fractalist and China Mobile co-develop media sites also, Tanaka says.
"As a rule, we sell China Mobile site's ad spaces through ad agencies. Sometimes though, we talk directly to large advertisers, because some advertisers still do not know how effective mobile ads are, and it is better we explain to them directly instead of talking through ad agencies," Tanaka says.
Today, in addition to China Mobile's portal, Fractalist has become one of the two media representatives of China Unicom's portal site and the portal site of Nokia, which has the top share in China's mobile handset market.
Tanaka proudly declare "through Fractalist you can reach a large mobile population in China."
But what about other sites? What happens to sites other than portals, one may wonder.
Traditionally, sites other than portal couldn't receive meaningful amount of page views with out large portals help in the mobile web, because there haven't been good enough mobile search technology availabe.


Google's famed Page Rank technology basically rates the importance and relevance of a web page based on how many other important pages link to that page. The technology works only when there were a large number of pages linking to each other. The freely linking culture was established on the PC web in the relatively early days of the Internet, but on the mobile web links were usually limited within the same sites. It is because, in mobile space, the sender of information and the receiver of information have been two different groups and the two rarely have merged.
Until recently even in Japan, a country arguably is most advanced in terms of mobile applications, most mobile users activities are limited to exchanging emails and reading web sites. Blogs and SNSs have been popular on the mobile web for some time now, yet most mobile phones don't have the HTML authoring ability. Even today mobile blogs usually consist of text and pictures; no links.
Without the mutually linking culture you witness on the PC web, the mobile search tools don't work as well. Search result pages often filled with a list of irrelevant pages, so that users prefer portal site's directories over search tools.
Since many people have been relying on mobile portal's directory listings, portals have been literally the "portal" to the mobile we. At one point, portals have become very powerful over contents providers because portals can decide the orders of contents providers listings within certain categories. Portals literally can decide which contents providers to live, and which to die.
However, with a gradual advancement of mobile search technology and a sheer power of word of mouth, sites which are not even listed on portal sites began to be popular among mobile users. Those sites which have not received portal's approvals or blessings are called off-deck sites; in China they are called "free WAP site."
Fractalist provide ads to those off-deck site through systems called ad networks.

Types of advertisers

According to Tanaka, the largest mobile advertisers in China is the automotive industry. Tanaka says, "It is probably because that people who own mobile phones are wealthier than people who don't own mobile phones, therefore the mobile users are deemed more prone to purchase cars."
Next to the automobile industry which consist of about 20% of the Chinese mobile market, financial industry, such as online bank, and online stock, are big ad spenders with about 15% of market share, followed by cosmetics, digital products, and drinks.

cautions before entering the market

Although there is no doubt Chinese mobile market has a potential to be a lucrative market. There are risks that oversee players need to consider before entering the market, Tanaka cautions. For example, in order to be a Internet contents provider in China, a foreign company needs to acquire a licence called Internet Contents Provider licence from the Chinese government. After joining WTO, Chinese government gives foreign companies equal opportunities to receive the licence, yet it is not a simple task for foreign companies which are not familiar with the process. On top of that, if a company wants to charge for their contents, it needs to apply for a online charging licence which is not easy licence to acquire even for local Chinese companies since one of the requirement for the licence is companies need to have a capital of 10 million yuan or larger. Even if a company acquire these two licences from the government, it still need to negotiate with mobile portals in order to be listed in one of their content categories.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Is Asia the center of mobile universe?

I wonder if Asia is the center of the world's mobile industry. Many mobile industry people I talk to tend to think that way, but is it really so? When it comes to handset makers, Japan indeed has more than its share of manufacturers. We have many internationally know consumer electronics brands, such as Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp, just to name a few. Yet the biggest mobile handset manufacture in the world right now is Finland's Nokia. According to IDC, the US research company, Nokia has a lion's share of 39.1% of the world's mobile handset market in the fourth quarter of 2008. Korea's Samson is the distant second with 18.3% share. Also Korea's LG Electronics came in third with mere 8.9%. Japanese consumer electronics big names, as a matter of fact, are grouped together as "the rest"; they don't have a meaningful presence in the world's mobile handset market.
All right, forget about handsets. Let's look at mobile operating systems.
Personal computers have operating systems such as Windows, Apple's OS X, and Linux. Just like PCs, mobile phones have the operating systems also. Traditionally, handset manufacturers have their own home grown operating systems, but in order to cut cost, the industry has been desiring the common operating system so that they would not have to develop the whole software from the scratch. If the basic functionalities, such as making phone calls or sending emails, are handled by the operating system, the manufacturers can concentrate their resources to develop other functionalities to differentiate from competitors. Indeed, some manufactures get together to form industry wide consortiums to develop an operating systems as a common platform. LiMo is one of those endeavours that the industry players working on. Symbian is another operating system, developed by Nokia; but Nokia made the operating system as open source so that anyone in the industry can use the software.
On November 5, 2007, Google, the US Internet giant, sent a shock wave across the mobile industry, announcing that they were going to develop an open source mobile operating system and would make it free of charge for any mobile handset makers to install on their handsets.
Again, no Asian companies playing major roles in the mobile operating systems space.
So why some Asian mobile players still think that Asia is the center of the mobile industry.
There are two reasons I think: sheer numbers and advanced functionalities.
In developing counties, it is said more people access the Internet via mobile phones rather than personal computers. Owning a PC for occasional information gatherings may not be very cost effective for not so wealthy people in redeveloping countries. Compared to PCs, mobile phones are affordable and offer great utility even for people who are not technologically savvy. Anyone who purchases a mobile phone can talk with land line phones users from day one. Therefore it make more sense for a person with not much disposable income to own a phone rather than a PC. Even voice communication is what prompts people to purchase a mobile phone, today's most mobile phones are equipped to access the Internet. Though the person at first may not realise the significance of the Internet functionalities, eventually he or she would find out that the mobile phone is something that is able to open up the window to the world way beyond the every day life .
Richard Robinson who attended the Infinity Ventures Summit 2008 Fall in Miyazaki, Japan, and spoke in a panel discussion titled "Asia is the center of mobile universe" knows the potential of Asia's mobile market. He has been working in the Internet, mobile industry in China more than twelve years, travelling constantly from a city to a city in Asian countries. Kooky Panda, his company, develops Flash based contents for mobile web sites almost all countries in Asia. Still the company doesn't have a foothold in either Korea or Japan. "Korea and Japan are two markets that are extremely advanced and attractive but I don't think that many companies are able to crack the markets. So we didn't even attempt to enter Korea or Japan, " said Richard. "The rest of the Asia Pacific, if you look at the sheer numbers, is quite attractive. Almost half of global population is in Asia. Almost half of the world Internet population is also in Asia. So you can't ignore it," says Richard. According to Robinson, Indonesia is a country with the third largest mobile market in Asia besides China and India. As the world's fourth-most populous nation with some 238 million total population, of which about 150 millions are mobile users. In comparison, there are only 25 million PC Internet users. "5 to 1 ratio," said Robinson. "And there are very limited domestic development, not a lot of fore players in the market. We enter the market last year, this year we are number one player in the market. "
Bin Liu, CEO of Yicha Online, China's number one mobile search engine company thinks that number is power. Liu, who spoke in the same panel of Infinity Venture Summit as Robinson, says that Asia is leading mobile Internet space with its big user base. According to Liu, mobile viruses are infecting many mobile phones in China. "Perhaps, mobile viruses are something unheard of in the US or Europe," he said. Because of the large user base, problems such as viruses emerges first in China. Yet then in turn, solutions for problems also emerge first in China: There is a mobile security company in China now. The name of the company is NetQin Tech. Co., Ltd. "NetQin is a biggest mobile security company in the world," said Liu .

On top of sheer number, Asia, especially Japan, has advanced technologies also. In fact, Japan has been introducing many new mobile applications to the world. NTT docomo, Japan's largest mobile operator, has started the "i-mode" service in 200 . It has become the world's first successful mobile Internet service. Camera phone was first deployed by J-phone, another mobile operator in Japan. J-phone was purchased by Softbank, Japan's Internet conglomerate, and now has become Softbank Mobile.
Today, Japan has the largest user base of 3G phones in the world. Average phones in Japan have camera, TV, bar code reader, and Internet browser capabilities, and many advanced phones have GPS and electric money functions.
It is true that Apple's i-Phone and Google's Android based phones are technologically very advanced. Yet, basic technologies in those phones have been well into use by Japanese phones some years ago. i-Phone 3G sale was reported with such a fanfare by the Japanese press, yet it hasn't necessarily swept the Japanese market.

"Asia is cell phone centric," said Bin Liu, of Yicha, "neither iPhone or Android has made any big progress." "Japan and China are largest mobile Internet countries in the world," said Liu.



This article is a part of the draft for a book I am writing in English right now. Please let me know if there is any misspelling or factual errors.

Monday, February 2, 2009

SoundCode: URL as a sound

"I drive my wife to the train station everyday. While driving, we listen to the radio. Sometimes the radio says, 'for more information, please access the following URL,' and starts spelling out the entire URL starting with 'www. ' What are they thinking? It's impossible to jog down the entire URL while driving!," says Taka Tsukuma of Fieldsystems, a Japanese mobile content company.
"I wanted to develop something like QR code with sound. I wanted a sound version of QR code," says Tsukuma.
QR code is a two dimensional bar code, that is widely used in Japan. Usually less than a square inch, QR codes can be printed on various surfaces. Advertising pages in magazines, and posters on subway wall sometimes have QR codes printed also. Some business people print QR codes on their business cards prompting people to access their company's' web sites.
Most mobile phones in Japan have cameras equipped, and the cameras double as QR codes readers. You activate the camera and hold the cell phone over a QR code. If the camera successfully recognizes the QR code, the cell phone convert the code into a URL. Then using the cell phone's web browser, you can access the URL's web page. With QR codes you don't have to type in a long URL while typing a long URL can be quite a hassle using cell phone's only ten keys.
Since with QR codes the camera of the cell phone has become an inputting device for the cell phone's web browses, could not the microphone of the cell phone be also an inputting device? All the cell phones are equipped with microphones any way. If a sound has become a convertible code, accessing web can be a much easier task using cell phones, Tsukuma thought to himself.
His company, Fieldsystems is one of the successful cell phone web creators in Japan. Specializing on FLASH technology, the company is well known for user-friendly cell phone web pages. It runs 10 successful cell phone specific web sites under Japan's three major cell phone operators.
After putting some time and effort, Tsukuma and his company developed a technology that converts a text into a sound. They name the technology SoundCode. According to Tsukuma the technology can convert a text message that can be up to 2048 alphabet letters long into a sound. When converted into a sound, a message of 2048 letters is about seven tenths of a second long. Considering most URLs are less than 40 letters long, typical SoundCode can be about one hundreds of a second.
SoundCode itself is audible to human ears. However SoundCode can be hidden between other sounds such as human voices and music. In order to recognize a SoundCode, a special software needed to be installed onto cell phones This special software can recognize a SoundCode as small as minus 30 decibels of surrounding sounds. In other words, you can input a SoundCodes as a very small sound in-between regular conversational voices, and the software can still recognize the small sound as a SoundCode and convert it into a URL.
Although SoundCode is a analog sound, it has many digital sound characteristics, according to Tsukuma. For instance, it is as easy to find the beginning of the SoundCode as an digital sound. SoundCode also has an ability to revise itself just like a digital sound can. Even the cell phone can recognize only broken parts of a SoundCode, by repeating the SoundCode several times the cell phone collects unbroken parts of the SoundCode and combine them into a whole code.
In order to broadcast SoundCode, the broadcast station needs a special encoder software installed onto a personal computer. The process of generating SoundCode is very simple. You type in a URL into the PC, then the software generates a SoundCode. The software also is capable of mapping the SoundCode to hide in between the broadcast sound, so that the listeners don't realize the existence of the SoundCode.
It may be a good idea to announce the airing of the SoundCode, in order to prompt the listeners to activate the software on their cell phones in time.
"I want every cell phone to have a capability of SoundCode someday. For that goal, first I want to develop the decoder software download-able by any cell phones. But in the end, I want SoundCode technology to be embedded onto the cell phone IC chip, " says Tsukuma. "I look forward to the day that every cell phone has a SoundCode hardware button. With one push of the button, the SoundCode decoder and microphone are activated and pick up a SoundCode in the air, and convert it into a URL," says Tsukuma.
There are many possible applications of SoundCode. Broadcasting SoundCode, something that made Tsukuma to develop the technology in the first place, is just one of those possible applications.
You can broadcast SoundCode at shopping malls between background music, said Tsukuma. You can program speakers at a different location within a mall to air a different SoundCode, so that the shopper can download the near-by shops sales information over the cell phone.
SoundCode can be almost inaudible therefore you can broadcast it in quiet places such as museums. Museum goers can access to web pages which explain the near-by displays.
SoundCode can be embedded in TV dramas. If a viewer happen to like what an actress is wearing, by activating the cell phone microphone and receiving a SoundCode, the viewer may access the shopping site that sells that particular dress.
As a matter of the fact, with SoundCode you can send a URL to consumers in any type of environments where there is a speaker.
SoundCode has won a I*deal competition, a mobile business model idea contest sponsored by Mitsui Ventures on January 20, 2009.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Google doesn't intend to monopolise the mobile OS Market with Android

Mr. Takeshi Natsuno, one of the key persons who created i-mode, Japan's NTT Docomo's famed mobile Internet service, said something very interesting at Japan's Broadband Association's panel discussion the other day.
The following is his comment.

Most Japanese people misunderstand what Google is trying to do. If Google wants to monopolise the mobile OS market with Android, why is it that Google supplies their web services such as gmail and Google maps to iPhone and other competing platforms.
Google's intention is simple, I think. They just want to advance the mobile Internet to the level of PC Internet.
Nokia has a wonderful share in the world cell phone market. Yet average Nokia phones' Internet ability is nothing Japanese users regard as an acceptable level. Except for the high end handsets which has the functionalities similar to Japanese handsets, the majority of Nokia phones are not easy to use for Japanese users.
It is because Nokia is a hand set maker. Selling hand sets is their business goal. Whether or not the user access the Internet with the phone has little to do with their bottom-line. Europe's mobile Internet usage in terms of the average user's total data packets usage is very low compared to that of Japan.
I think many people misunderstand Google. Google developed Android because of frustration. Google is frustrated by the status of today's mobile Internet. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, once said that he wished what is happening in the Japanese mobile Internet space would happen world wide also. Google looked around to see where the bottle neck of the mobile Internet, what is wrong with mobile Internet system. And they found out the mobile operating system is what hinders the mobile Internet from advancing itself. So they decided to develop the operating system themselves and give it to anybody for free.
If monopolising the mobile OS market is their goal, they would have charged for the OS licencing, I think.
They give out the OS free, and they supply their services for the competing platforms as long as there are strong user bases in order to advance the mobile Internet environment. They do so because advancing mobile Internet environment is also good for Google's advertising businesses. In order to fight back the threat from Android, Symbian decided to give out their own version of Symbian OS for free. But, that is also good for Google, because the more users access the Internet, the more people probably use Google's search and other services, that in turn would benefit the Google's advertising businesses.