ME is at the Heroes Of The Small Screen event in London today, for a day of speeches, debates and networking. First up is Kei Shimada from Infinita, who's talking about what's happening in Japan in the mobile sector. He starts by promising 85 slides in 20 minutes. Zoinks!

Why look for answers in Japan anyway? Nine in ten mobile users use data services, and almost all of them are on 3G – with 40% of mobile data users on flat-rate data tariffs. He describes the operators as “benevolent dictators” sitting in the middle of the ecosystem, speccing out handset features, and then talking to content providers about upcoming handsets to ensure they can be developing content for when the handsets launch.

He says there's no device fragmentation due to the firm hand of the carriers setting specs, and that they run “unwalled gardens” - so if you make content for one operator, it's available to customers of al the others. And – this is well-known by envious Western content developers – the operators have always taken a mere 10% revenue share on content sales in Japan.

And now Shimada talks about the popularity of mobile email in Japan, and the simplicity of data tariffs. “We're at 37% for 3G flat rate users, but by 2011, that's going to exceed 60%,” he says. Total revenues for the telecoms market are $85 billion – and 239 billion page views a month on mobile, with 60% of those coming from off-portal sites.

Survey on 16-24 year-olds. More than 90% use mobile web at least daily, and 61% use it for more than an hour a day. 24% use it more than three hours. “It's a very important medium for the younger age,” he says. “What they use is not really different from your market – news, weather, realtones...”

Advertisement

The mobile content marke t in Japan was close to $5 billion in 2008, and Shimada talks about some services: Mobile GREE is a social gaming service that creates 30 billion page views on mobile a month alone.

Mobile commerce – Japan is worth a little over $10 billion in revenues right now. 29% of mobile internet users are active users – fashion, books, CDs, magazines, cosmetics. They're shopping from their phones. He cites Girlswalker as one example.

“They've taken the idea of mobile shopping and put it into a runway show where they have the cutest models running the catwalk – you have 15-25,000 girls paying $40 just to get in, and whenever a model passes in front of you, you're notified by email what that person is wearing, and you can buy it on the spot.”

Another service: Spotcasting. Local-area TV broadcasting, that allows brands to promote their products via broadcasting in specific areas of Tokyo where people are shopping. Meanwhile, Otetsudai Networks is a jobhunting service with alerts built in.

Breakneck pace, sorry for fractured notes. Mobile advertising was worth $913 million in 2008, and is expected to be just under $1.3 billion in 2011. Mobile search is enabled on 100% of phones, with 44% usage. 55% of phones have GPS, and usage is 23%. 73% have NFC chips, and usage of that is 18%. McDonald's has four million active NFC users in Japan, redeeming coupons on their handsets to get free grub, for example.

“The carriers want to tie in mobile from the minute you get up to the minute you go to sleep,” says Shimada.

Some lessons: Vision pays off. Standardisation – don't reinvent the wheel. Micro-steps of advancement - “Rome wasn't built in a day”. And listen first – what do your customers want and expect on mobile.