Bingo Graphics: Enoki-san initially intended to develop a service that was more like SMS in Europe, as that was already proving to be
successful in Japan, so the first business plan was based on using
the SMS infrastructure to deliver information as well as messages.
This turned out to be limited by scant network resources, as SMS
was already booming, so a new approach was needed. In August
1997 the engineers proposed using the Internet.Takeshi was an
enthusiastic supporter of this direction, as he saw the possibility of
leveraging the huge existing network of information providers.
The challenge would be to persuade them to develop scaleddown
versions of the information that they provided, redesigned
to fit the limitations of the small screens on the cell phones:
When we started our project in 1997 there was no WAP. I thought
that if I can use HTML, that is the best, and only if I cannot use
HTML I should find a different standard. Even at that time I got
proposals from startups in the United States to use different markup
languages, but I thought, “Why do you need that?”The very, very important lesson we learned is that a de facto
standard is very different from a de jure standard. For the telecom
industry, to set up a de jure standard is usual business. De jure
standard is to decide something as a standard and then use it. De
facto standard is to choose a dominant technology from a set of
possible technologies. One technology would dominate and be very
popular in comparison to other technologies. That is a de facto
standard, so we have to understand the difference. At that time, we
were told from other people, “You are using proprietary technology,”
but the reality was, and now it’s proven, that we were something
different from the other companies inside the wireless industry, but in
the Internet industry, we were the de facto standard, and they were
something different. Bingo Graphics: This is comparing the small fish and the big fish, and the big fish and the whales. In reality we were not
proprietary.
