Japanese teenagers use their mobile phones for accessing communities, blogs, search sites, auction sites, to pay for subway tickets, read bar codes and more. For today’s young people both in Japan and other countries it is particularly important to keep updated on what is going on within their personal network – including when on the move. Products such as Google Talk and Yahoo! Mobile already exist on the market and several operators – such as 3, Vodafone and Orange – have started launching internet services.
 

“Things have really begun to change recently,” says Mikael Eriksson Björling, expert on consumer behavior at Ericsson ConsumerLab. “Compared to two years ago, consumers are now more mature and open to using internet services for integrated communication on their mobile phones.”
  

In a survey conducted by Ericsson, reactions are positive among participants when asked about different services as parts of the company’s Multimedia Communication Suite, MCS. The interviewees find concepts such as the ability to send files, access an address book on a network, chat via the mobile, using personal portals and PC/web, and mobile convergence very interesting and believe that they would actually use them.
  

Another finding from the survey is that the differences that exist in mobile usage of advanced services in Japan, India, the US, UK, Sweden and Germany are mainly a result of how people adapt their mobile phone behavior to the structural situation in their respective country (computer access and industry structures), rather than as a result of cultural differences.
 

Although teenagers that have grown up with the internet can be considered early adopters who are driving the market, the services offered are broad enough to attract other target groups: young adults and adults with family and an ongoing career also have a need to interact and stay in contact with their personal network in their daily life.
 

To succeed when offering internet communication services on the mobile it is crucial that the user finds them useful and that they actually work. Other critical factors are the volume of enabled devices on the market, coverage, speed and price. “It’s important to place the user in focus and not the technology,” Eriksson Björling says. “If you go to a shop and buy a mobile phone and then unpack it you should be able to start using the services right away.”