THE YOUNG ASIAN IN JEANS is longingly reading a text message on the screen of his mobile phone. He cradles the handset in his palm as he ponders his choices. Two women have contacted him with descriptions of themselves in response to the personal ad he sent to the phone operator. Should he go on a date with a blonde office worker or a sports enthusiast who shares his love for karaoke singing? The phone demands a response. Press one for the office worker, or two for karaoke. Of course, he could choose both.
Asian consumers could be forgiven for regarding mobile phones as dating rather than data services. In Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul, people switch on their wireless gadgets to be turned on (and not just because they've set their phones to vibrate). Lonely heart or serial heartbreaker, mobile telephony offers them opportunities that most American consumers never knew existed -- let alone have access to. Asia is far ahead of America when it comes to using mobile phones for romance, and, indeed, for viewing their phones as media tools. While cell phones have now been adopted into mainstream American culture, they are used almost entirely as an appliance; even those cellular options Americans consider to be creative, cutting-edge applications -- like checking e-mail and stock quotes -- are, at heart, pragmatic. Part of the issue is cost: You'll quickly get tired of flirting by phone at American cellular prices. But government regulation also plays a part: The FCC's decisions on carving up slices of airwave pie have placed what amounts to a rubber ceiling on high-bandwidth viability. "There's very little consumer interest in data on the phone, because people aren't educated to see their phones this way," said Patrick Callinan, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Since consumers won't demand it, until they know what they're missing, a phone over here is a voice device, a PC is a data device, and never the twain will meet."
GEORGE LO, THE MAN LOOKING for a date, is standing on a street corner in Hong Kong, a city where half of the six million inhabitants have mobile phones. Lo subscribes to Sunday (www.sunday.com), one of Asia's most innovative phone operators, and, as a Sunday customer, he has access to the Cupid mobile dating service. In deliberately gormless patois, the phone operator declares: "Mobile Cupid is here to help subscribers make new friends. Just call *22 and answer a few simple questions. Sunday will do the analysis work and match you with the right ones. When your perfect partner is located, the phone will be alerted."
Customers enter their personal details via a multiple-choice questionnaire or text messages ("press one if you are looking for a man or two if you are looking for a woman ..."). Subsequently, they are paired off by age, hobbies, and profession. Like most cell-phone dating services, Sunday's is location sensitive, using readily available information about which base station picked up the mobile signal. When, say, Sunday's operating system notices that two Cupid customers are in the same area, their phones will sound an alert. They can arrange an instant date in the vicinity.
Whatever the quality of the dating data "analysis," the service couldn't be cheaper: The database search for the "perfect partner" is charged at normal airtime rates. Since its launch, in October 1998, Cupid has unleashed a most unlikely romantic buzz in the former British colony. On Valentine's Day alone, customers used the service for a total of twenty thousand minutes. The company says that average daily usage is several thousand minutes. In addition to voice delivery, Cupid uses Short Messaging System (SMS) technology, allowing phone users to send messages of up to 160 characters to the phone operator or other users.
Sunday customers also have access to various additional services intended to help the aspiring Romeo and Juliet. Dial *33 for an MP3 jukebox that will send love songs to another phone. The music is piped over the airwaves together with a voice dedication from the sender. The *33 Mobile Jukebox also offers access to new music from the PolyGram label ahead of the songs' release. When in a rush, Sunday customers can dial *66 Mobile Assist for tips on nearby romantic restaurants or flower shops.
WHY DON'T THE SAME SERVICES exist in the United States? The simple answer from the phone companies is that America's airwaves are too crowded. According to Kenneth Woo, of AT&T, "Asia is on the cutting edge because regulators there have allocated the necessary space. The FCC needs to extend bandwidth to improve the transport of wireless data in the U.S." But that is only a partial explanation. SMS is a highly efficient way of transferring data: Text messages often take up less space than a voice call. Only when phone makers start offering mobile internet access to the masses will overcrowding become a real problem.
Much more important than the gadgets themselves, it seems, is the mentality of the people who use them. With their unabashed enthusiasm for mobile phones, Asian consumers have created enough demand for extravagant services that -- helped by Adam Smith's invisible hand -- phone operators followed their lead. Consumer mentality makes all the difference, according to Forrester's Callinan, who said, "North American consumers are still stuck in the 'voice age' of wireless telephony, whereas Asian and European markets have been doing data on the phone for years." A recent Forrester study of one hundred thousand North American consumers found that sixty-five percent of people with digital cell phones were not at all interested in receiving data.
While Americans arrange dates on the phone using their vocal cords (and suffer through those awkward pauses when it becomes painfully clear that the expensive dinner didn't go quite as well as they had thought), Asians send data messages on mobile phones and use other intermediaries. In Korea, for example, the Duo Matching Service, a dating agency, and Lucky Goldstar, the Seoul-based phone maker, are cooperating to exploit the trend towards mobile dating (www.duoinfo.co.kr). Boldly, they declare on their Web site: "If Romeo and Juliet had used mobile phones, then Shakespeare's story would not be a tragedy. Mobiles have become the tool to talk about love." They offer a free handset to anyone who "got angry with his or her mobile and broke it because they are still single," as well as anyone who "used a mobile phone as a hammer or lethal weapon until now."
This Korean service cleverly uses the phone as a bond between strangers, an icebreaker, and a safety guarantee. Clients equipped with the free phone may pretend that they have done nothing as embarrassing as joining a dating agency; they merely obtained a mobile phone that happens to give them access to new dating opportunities. And once the clients meet, they actually have something to talk about -- their phones. (And when they want to stop dating someone, they only have to block the other person's number.)
The dating industry has exploded in Korea since the introduction of mobile telephony. Total revenues grew from five million to fifty million dollars during the nineties. Last year alone, the number of customers for dating services doubled. Traditionally, Koreans relied on friends and relatives to arrange marriages. But, with the emergence of more liberal attitudes in the eighties, many Koreans started looking for spouses on their own -- often with disappointing results, as there were few opportunities to meet strangers in their sheltered society. The arrival of both dating agencies and mobile phones seemed to bridge that gap, reintroducing a certain privacy while, once and for all, breaking the reliance on introductions by friends and family.
In Japan, too, mobile telephony has revolutionized dating. Love-hungry Tokyo teenagers are handing out mobile phone numbers made from chocolate. The nine-digit confectionery, known as "Cho-call," costs eleven dollars. Customers pick out individual numbers in a shop and then arrange them in pink and purple gift boxes. Mobile dating really came into its own in Japan last year, when the private Marriage Information Center introduced "Nozze-Navi" -- a video mobile phone dating service. Clients download matching candidates' data, including their photographs, place in the family hierarchy and marriage records. Then they can watch a slow-moving live video of the prospective partner's face as they talk. The beauty of the service, users say, is that they can end a date by simply hanging up.
Yoshiko Saguchi, a twenty-four-year-old client, is looking for someone "with a good income." She said, ''I'm now waiting for replies from five men to whom I recently proposed a chat. I expect to find Mr. Right in about a year. You get the information you want before you talk to people, so it gives you confidence. When you meet a man socially you can't ask him what he earns, can you?'' The service is certainly self-selecting. At $700 for the video phone and $7,000 to join the agency, few paupers will find their way onto Saguchi's screen.
THE ASIAN OBSESSION WITH MOBILE PHONES has, of course, also spawned services for those who are married or happily single. In Hong Kong, HSBC bank offers on-line banking on mobile phones. Account holders can check their balance, transfer funds and trade stocks on the small screen. The local Jockey Club takes bets on horse races delivered by SMS. Roger Staton, an independent telecom specialist, believes that "soon we'll not only have wireless betting, but, using a mobile video phone, you can watch the actual race."
From the other side of the Pacific Ocean, one may be tempted to lob unflattering observations. Do we really need to flaunt wealth to find romance? And isn't mobile-phone dating a poor second to meeting someone on a deserted beach? But the reality is that America, the cherished technology mecca, is left to feel surprisingly unsophisticated. It's a paradox: Americans fumble with outdated wireless handsets in the middle of what some call a rerun of the industrial revolution, right at the time when we congratulate each other on how the internet is changing our lives. E-commerce? The new, new buzz term is M-commerce -- banking, shopping, betting, and, of course, dating agencies.
Mobility used to be the watchword for sociologists describing postwar America. Mobility was America's Coke formula. And yet, when it comes to finding a blind date today, America's mobile millions are still no better off then when internet billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Steve Case couldn't afford to take their girlfriends out for a nice dinner.
Oliver August is the China correspondent for the Times of London.
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