au one Lab

» see lab.auone.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

KDDI opened the shelf on 31 October 2006 at two in the afternoon and named it DIONLab, after the internet provider brand it was selling at the time. Six tools went up that day, all out of KDDI R&D Laboratories: a movie recommender, a search across blog communities, a digest view that squeezed a web page down onto a phone screen, a toy that hid a third picture between two others, an English proficiency check, and a generator that turned any English passage into fill-in-the-blank questions by itself.

A corporate research division publishes papers. This was a way for one to publish software instead, where ordinary customers would use it wrong and leave behind the kind of data no lab bench produces. Nothing about it was built to travel. The tools were in Japanese, the shelf sat inside a Japanese carrier's portal, and the people who were ever going to touch it were already paying that carrier every month.

It picked up its final name during the au one portal consolidation of September 2007, and KDDI's December 2007 release spells out the lineage, writing it as au one Lab, formerly DIONLab. The exact day of that rename is an inference rather than a fact, because KDDI never published one. The ending is better documented. Closure was announced on 6 June 2011, new registrations stopped a week later on 13 June, and the shelf went dark on 28 July. The brand it had been renamed into outlived it: au one Mail was still running on 30 September 2013.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rules of the lab ~

There was a page of house rules, and it did not read like a terms-of-service document. It explained what a laboratory is for, asked you not to expect anything finished, and then said the part most companies bury three screens down: that KDDI might end any of this one-sidedly, at its own convenience.

Every online service reserves that right somewhere. This one printed it on the page that explained what the place was for, next to the invitation. In July 2011 seven services ended on the same day.

~ the tenant from Toshiba ~

For its first fourteen months everything on the shelf came out of KDDI's own institute. That changed on 18 December 2007, when a word-of-mouth reputation research tool from Toshiba Solutions appeared, and KDDI's release made a point of flagging it as the first service here from outside the company.

It is a small thing that says what the place had turned into. The lab had stopped being a window onto one research division and had become a venue.

~ the two that got out ~

Across the whole run, two things graduated. A voice service called Koe Nau was commercialized on 10 November 2010. A handset assistant that had been running as Keitai Partner in beta became au one Chara Time on 14 April 2011, and the beta was switched off thirteen days after that.

Two out of everything that ever sat on the shelf is the honest yield of a public laboratory, and it is not a bad one. Most of what a research division makes is not meant to survive contact with customers.

~ the page that listed the endings ~

The lab kept its own record of the dead, a dated list at lab.auone.jp of everything it had switched off, with a destination beside each name where there was one. Four of those rows pointed back at kddilabs.jp, the research institute's own address, which no longer resolves.

The record outlived the lab for a while and then did not. A capture from 2012 still shows the list intact. By 5 March 2013 the names were gone and the page had been cut down to a three second meta refresh aimed at the portal.

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