Paid-for LBS mobile concierge service nets $20m/yr

It seems NTT Docomo, Japan's largest mobile phone operator, has cracked the nut of successful money-making mobile location-based services. Their recent location-based mobile concierge service "iconcier" has garnered in excess of 1.8m paying subscribers since its introduction last autumn, each paying a minimum of 105yen (ie. $1) a month. A simple calculation gives us $1.8m*12=$20m/yr with the current installed base alone. Does this signal a resurgence of interest in location-based services?

Although many imagine Japan as the natural birthplace of location-based mobile services (along with South Korea), we must remember that the dominant local-search-cum-public-transport-search application in Japan, Navitime, has been around for 9 years now and only just hit the 4m paid subscribers mark 2 weeks ago. Adjusting Navitime's subscribers for the importance of NTT Docomo in the Japanese mobile handset market (50%), the iConcier Docomo-only service is set to cruise past the efforts of 9 long years within the next month or two.

Is it the passive nature of the flash screensaver that streams local data based on where you are which is the killer feature? Introduced in 2005, Docomo's underlying iChannel infrastructure, using Adobe's FlashCast platform, allows feeds to be streamed into the flash screensaver from predefined external sources or from Docomo's news databanks. The iConcier takes things a step further by building on the open Japanese location APIs that allow any mobile phone to find its location from the network, and feed+location+flash=localised realtime feeds. The application is easy-to-customise, and can draw in basic info like traffic jams, subway delays, to local supermarket sales, local weather warnings and various coupons. Everything is buy-in, so potential spam becomes personalisation. I don't know how regular the updates are, but it's a slowly rolling text update, not a page of spam ads.

I guess this shows the rise of what I call "non-map LBS". There doesn't need to be a map there to convey location-based information. In some cases it's helpful, in others, I don't want to have to search a map, I want the information to come to me in the form of a simple buy-in streamed feed or in the form of a simple text sms. Wonder who will try to do this outside Japan, if indeed it was noticed at all...