モバプリパ

» see m-pri.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Lay out the hardware this needed and the geography explains itself. You needed a Japanese carrier contract and a handset with a working infrared port, and then you needed a Seiko Epson Colorio inkjet standing in the same room as the handset. Every piece of that was sold inside Japan and nowhere else, and the combination never had any reason to travel.

It started on Thursday 5 July 2007 under the shorter name モバプリ, reachable only from au's official site menu. You browsed a catalog on the phone and paid for a file. Then you held the phone up to the printer and sent the file across by infrared, and when the printer finished receiving it, it printed. No cable and no memory card came into it anywhere.

On Wednesday 12 November 2008 it was relaunched as モバプリパ and the walls came down. Buying now worked from an ordinary computer, and also from nearly every docomo FOMA handset and nearly every SoftBank 3G handset, the Disney Mobile ones included. The infrared trick stayed an au exclusive, though, because it depended on the IrDA port in the CDMA 1X WIN line, and the exclusion list in the documentation names specific models that had Bluetooth and nothing else. Everybody on the other two networks printed through a PC like a normal person.

It ran for another year and ended on Monday 30 November 2009. No reason was published with the closure, which for a service carrying Seiko Epson's name is its own small statement.

~ the case file ~

~ infrared to a printer ~

The interesting engineering is in the logging. Every infrared handoff between a phone and a printer was recorded, and the phone carried that log back to a server, so the operator knew which account had downloaded which file and printed it at what time. The stated purpose was copyright protection, and the logic holds: a rights holder licensing a photograph for printing wants to know how many sheets exist.

What that produced is a digital rights system whose enforcement point is a consumer inkjet. What the documentation describes is an audit trail rather than a lock: the printer is the thing being counted, and the count travels back over the phone network. Reading it now, in a decade where every paid file is a stream with a license check, an audit trail that walks home through an infrared window feels like a road not taken rather than a dead end.

~ what you could print ~

Nothing dates this faster than the catalog. There were recipes and coloring pages for children, which is the obvious use. There were also bromide portraits and gravure photo sets, reproductions of old newspapers, character art, puzzles and film tie-ins. The whole thing is a newsstand and a craft shop at once, delivered to a phone screen two inches across and then printed at A4 on somebody's desk.

Sammy Networks was the content side of that, which is worth noticing. Sammy made pachinko and pachislot machines, and its network arm sold mobile content off the back of those licenses, so a part of this catalog came from the same place as the machines in every parlor in the country.

~ three rooms in tokyo ~

If you did not own a Colorio, there was a way to try it anyway. モバプリステーション put a compatible printer in three buildings and let anyone print a capped number of free sheets. Two of them were showrooms, the KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku and Epson Square Tokyo in Shinjuku. The third was Sammy Networks' own head office in Aoyama. One room per partner.

m-pri.com answers today with a 51-byte server error. The ezweb subdomain that carried the phone version is gone entirely, along with the menu entry on au's official site that was the only front door it had for its first sixteen months.

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