live earth

» see au.com/mobile/service/list/end/live-earth/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

KDDI announced it at a press conference in Tokyo on 3 June 2005, and the EZweb site opened on the 30th. The downloadable application, written for BREW, arrived some time over the following summer; no source records the day. Two handsets shipped with it preloaded, the G'zOne TYPE-R and the A5512CA, and buyers of those two got the paid half free for three months.

What it put on the screen was the Earth, rendered in three dimensions and free to spin and resize with the keypad. The line between day and night moved as the hours did and shifted with the season. There was a world clock across twenty-six cities, and a flat map mode for anyone who preferred the globe unrolled, though not every handset could do it. The interface ran in Japanese or English, and on most phones you could leave the globe sitting there as your standby screen.

The part that cost money was the weather. Four times a day the app could pull down a complete picture of the planet's cloud cover, stitched from geostationary satellite data gathered 36,000 kilometers up and supplied by the Japan Weather Association. Everything else in the app was free. The cloud images were 105 yen a month, tax included, and you got one of them free before you had to sign up for anything.

It was the eleventh project of a Japanese nonprofit called Think the Earth, which put environmental messages inside things people actually bought, and the producing company was Spaceport, run by Soichi Ueda. KDDI provided it and Okinawa Cellular carried it too. By July 2006 the number of people paying the 105 yen had gone past ten thousand.

~ the case file ~

~ the donation built into the phone bill ~

The line on the au page was that your download turned into a donation, and unusually for that genre of claim it came with an accounting. From the 2006 financial year a portion of every information fee was routed to disaster relief, and from 2007 that portion accrued month by month into a standing emergency fund, so there was money sitting ready before a disaster rather than an appeal launched after one. When something happened, it went out to NGOs working on it.

The individual payments were small and they were published. One hundred thousand yen went to AMDA after the Central Java earthquake in May 2006. Four hundred thousand followed the Bangladesh cyclone in November 2007, bringing the running total to 1.2 million yen by that December. By the time the service ended the cumulative figure given by the project was more than eighteen million yen, all of it a slice off a 105-yen monthly fee paid by people who wanted to know where the clouds were.

~ stopped charging, then stopped ~

KDDI's own tombstone page says two things and you need both of them. The banner across the top says the service ended on 31 October 2013. The important-notice box underneath is more precise: what ended that day was the paid service, and from early November operation moved to the Think the Earth Project, which would continue to offer it free. On its face that is a handover rather than a death, and a handover is usually where a story like this one stops.

The transferee closes the loop itself. Think the Earth's page for the project is still online, and it dates the whole thing 2005 to 2013 and marks it finished. The free tail did not survive the year it started in. Neither party ever said why. No KDDI press release exists for the ending and no coverage of it has been found, and the date turns up exactly once across the whole au register of dead services, so it was not swept up in a platform retirement.

Nothing like this reached a Turkish handset, and the reason sits in the plumbing rather than in local taste. It was a BREW application distributed through one carrier's menu, billed as an information fee on that carrier's own invoice, and charity routing built into a phone bill is a thing a national carrier can do and a software company cannot. The globe worked anywhere. The 105 yen only worked in one place.

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