A Remote Control For Your Life

摘要

Takeshi natsuno wants your wallet. Money, credit cards, driver's license, pictures of junior and sis - the works. And while he's at it, he'll take your keys, your bank passbook, and a bunch of your other valuable stuff. But Natsuno is no thief. He's the managing director for i-mode strategy at NTT DoCoMo, the biggest cell-phone company in Japan-and one of the most innovative telecommunications firms anywhere in the world. His title bears some explanation: "NTT" stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, the former state telephone firm that owns two-thirds of his company. "DoCoMo" is a labored English acronym for "Do Communications over the Mobile Network," as well as a play on the Japanese word dokomo, which means "anywhere." And "i-mode" is DoCoMo's wireless Internet service-by far the world's most successful, with some 41 million subscribers in Japan alone (compared to four million for Sprint's PCS Vision, the first popular wireless data service in the United States), not to mention licensed versions in seven European nations and Taiwan. Natsuno wants your wallet because DoCoMo plans to build on i-mode to transform the cell phone into a kind of remote control for your entire life-and a preview of tomorrow's universal computing.