Ushering In An Era

摘要

Akio Shiibashi has little in common with the flashy Takeshi Natsuno, Japan's mobile telecoms guru known for his loud suits and penchant for shaking up the staid business culture at the country's dominant telco, NTT DoCoMo. Shiibashi, on the other hand, is quiet and mild-mannered. He smiles often and is not given to offending bureaucratic sensibilities where he works, as the head of automated fare collection at what by most estimates is the world's largest passenger rail company, East Japan Railway. Shiibashi built the world's biggest automated fare-collection system with Suica in Tokyo. And he planted the seed for what has grown into a base of nearly 30 million wallet phones carried by Japanese. He intends to use that base to make Suica a part of the social infrastructure of Japan. This was before the railway had even launched the service on cards, however, and for nearly a year, Shiibashi tried in vain to convince executives at DoCoMo to buy into the idea. Then he requested a meeting with Natsuno, who was already famous as architect of DoCoMo's mobile Internet service, i-mode. With Natsuno's backing, DoCoMo introduced the first contactless or wallet phones, in 2004. To date, the telco and its competitors have sold nearly 30 million handsets with the contactless chip inside. Subscribers can tap them at tens of thousands of acceptance points - to make retail purchases, pay train fares, even check in with their airlines. Following Japan's lead, telcos, banks and other service providers around the world are testing similar devices, with the first rollouts expected next year.