Japan: Google's Real-Life Lab

Cutting-edge phones, discerning consumers, and speedy connections make for rich feedback

by Kenji Hall

Japan's mobile-phone users are accustomed to broadband-speed data Laif/Redux

It was 10:51 p.m. in Tokyo, and suddenly Google (GOOG) was hit with a two- minute spike in searches from Japanese mobile phones. "We were wondering: Was it spam? Was it a system error?'" says Ken Tokusei, Google's mobile chief in Japan. A quick call to carrier KDDI revealed that it was neither. Instead, millions of cell-phone users had pulled up Google's search box after a broadcaster offered free ringtone downloads of the theme song from The Man Who Couldn't Marry, a popular TV show, but had only briefly flashed the Web address where the tune was available.

The surge in traffic came as a big surprise to Tokusei and his team. They had assumed that a person's location was the key element of most mobile Internet searches, figuring that users were primarily interested in maps of the part of town they happened to be in, timetables for the train home, or the address of the closest yakitori restaurant. The data from KDDI indicated that many Japanese were just as likely to use Google's mobile searches from the couch as from a Ginza street corner.

TOUGH CUSTOMERS

Japan's handset-toting masses, it seems, have a lot to teach the Net giant. The country has become a vast lab for Google as it tries to refine mobile search technology. That's because Japan's 100 million cell-phone users represent the most diverse—and discriminating—pool of mobile subscribers on the planet. While Google also does plenty of testing elsewhere, the Japanese are often more critical because they are as likely to tap into the Net with a high-tech phone as a PC and can do so at speeds rivaling fixed-line broadband. And because Japanese carriers have offered such services for years, plenty of Web sites are formatted for cell phones.

A relative newcomer to Japan's mobile market, Google is in the unfamiliar position of being the underdog in everything from maps to videos to blogs. But not for long. Google is working with the two top Japanese wireless operators, which have a combined 82 million subscribers. In January the Net giant announced a partnership in mobile ads, search, e-mail, photos, and YouTube videos with NTT DoCoMo (DCM), the No. 1 carrier. And since 2006, Google and No. 2 KDDI have cooperated on text ads and on developing a better mobile search engine. "Our fundamental strategy is to take ideas from Japan and apply them to other markets," says Emmanuel Sauquet, who oversees Google's relations with mobile carriers in Asia.

That's why users of Google's Gmail service will soon be able to include "emoji" in their messages. These small, animated cartoons and emoticons are a big part of how Japanese communicate in text messages and mobile e-mails. On Jan. 28, Google announced on its Japanese blog that users of mobile Gmail will be able to choose from 600 of them, first in Japan and later in other countries.

The job of overseeing Google's mobile lab in Japan falls to Tokusei. Born and raised in Tokyo, he moved to Boston in the mid-1980s while still in high school because he felt he "had no future in Japan." After undergraduate studies at Cornell, Tokusei got a master's in computer science from Stanford, then worked at several Silicon Valley tech startups. Five years ago, he landed a job with Google. The 39-year-old speaks at a machine-gun pace, switching effortlessly between Japanese and English, and shuttles between Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and Asia about 20 times a year.

To figure out what mobile Web surfers like, the company relies on user experience groups, or UX in Google-ese. Dozens of participants are given phones with Net access and asked to complete simple tasks, either in a company lab or out on the streets of Tokyo. "We'll tell them: Find me a restaurant for tonight in Shibuya,' and we just watch," says Sauquet. At other times, Google conducts what it calls 1% tests, in which a small portion of users see different layouts, fonts, and other features on Google pages.

The aim is to determine what changes make the service easier to use.