Cmode

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

~ the obit ~

The first Cmode vending machine had an eight inch color screen and a thermal receipt printer. It was hooked to NTT docomo's DoPa packet network, and when nobody was buying anything it played Georgia coffee commercials to the street, with sound. Coca-Cola Japan put the first ones out for trial on 3 September 2001 in Shibuya and Odaiba, with docomo supplying the network and Itochu the trading arm behind it, and took the arrangement nationwide in April 2002.

You paid it with a picture. Club Cmode was a membership site you reached over i-mode, and choosing a drink there produced a QR code on your phone screen, which the service called a ticket. You held the screen up to a reader on the machine and the can dropped. Money went in the other direction through the same machine: feed it cash, anything from a ten yen coin to a thousand yen note, and the amount landed in a prepaid balance called Cmode Money. It would not give change, so whatever you fed it went in whole, up to a ceiling of five thousand yen.

docomo launched Osaifu-Keitai in July 2004 and Cmode took the chip on 24 September that year, which is the date most registers now record as the service's birth. It was not. A second machine, Cmo 2, came with a FeliCa reader and without the keypad or the printer, and from October 2006 the machines also took iD, which meant you could buy a drink without ever joining Club Cmode. By 6 August 2007 more than twenty thousand of the machines stood in Japan, and on 13 September the membership passed a million.

None of this could travel. It assumed a handset sold in Japan and a Coca-Cola machine on a Japanese street, with a carrier account holding the two together, and all three had to be within arm's reach at once. Until April 2007 it assumed docomo specifically. The whole product was a thing you walked up to.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the machine that printed things ~

The first generation Cmo was built by Panasonic and it had a receipt printer facing the customer, which is the strangest thing about the whole project. Carrier content billing did not exist yet, so Coca-Cola built its own: you could spend your drink balance on ringtones and small i-appli games, and the vending machine would print out the QR code you needed to fetch them, or, in the case of a street map, the map itself.

The launch partners for the trial were Index, Pia Digital Communications, Tsutaya Online and Sega. Index supplied a Shibuya-themed personality quiz whose results were characters like Hachiko Breeder and Center-Gai Sniper, and you could make the vending machine print yours. Pia supplied restaurant coupons with access maps on them and a Shibuya street map, and talked publicly about issuing concert tickets from the same printer to save itself the postage. Digital content sales were scrapped by 2003. The printer went away with the second machine.

~ the money that stopped mattering ~

Cmode Money was invented because in 2002 there was nothing else to use. By 2010 the same machines accepted iD, Edy, Suica, PiTaPa, ICOCA, SUGOCA, nimoca, Hayakaken, Kitaca, TOICA, manaca, PASMO, WAON and nanaco. Coca-Cola had built the rails and then watched fourteen other people's money run on them, and its own prepaid balance became the one you had to register for.

The points program went first, abolished on 31 December 2008 with a year's grace to spend what you had. That grace had a hole in it. Points could only be spent by QR code, and the machine Coca-Cola had been installing since May 2008, the new Cmo Junior, had no QR reader at all. People were given twelve months to spend points on hardware that was actively being removed from the streets.

~ paid back by registered mail ~

In April 2010 the three companies announced that Cmode Money would stop on 31 December. Then they moved it to 31 March 2011, having already closed topping up on 30 September 2010. For the last three months you could trade your remaining balance for Coca-Cola gift vouchers, with a premium added on top as an apology.

Anyone still holding a balance on 1 April 2011 fell under the Payment Services Act, which obliged Coca-Cola to give the money back in cash. It did this by 現金書留, registered cash mail, through the Japanese postal system, between April and the end of May, and only to people who filled in a form asking for it. A product that began by teaching a drinks machine to talk to a phone ended by putting coins in an envelope. Eleven and a half years later, in November 2022, Coca-Cola Japan came back to the same idea with Coke ON Wallet.

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