One of the senior managers reaches for a phone, punches in the orders, the makeup of their party and the position each has in the company. A Web site to which the phone is connected automatically breaks down the bill based on gender and standing in the company. Web sites Natsuno points out, though, that his job is just to collect Web sites onto the i-mode service, not create them. When DoCoMo started i-mode in February last year, the company had 67 Web site providers. Now it boasts more than one thousand.
Subscribers can also access corporate intranets.
Half of DoCoMo's 33 million cellular phone customers in Japan are i-mode users after only 21 months. Revenue from data transmissions surged twentyfold the past year. On average, i-mode users are spending twice as much as last year. Almost 60 percent of i-mode traffic goes to DoCoMo's official sites for entertainment purposes. Because DoCoMo's i-mode sites are designed using Hypertext Markup Language, existing Web content is easily modified to fit DoCoMo handsets.