Sky Web (スカイウェブ)

» see j-phone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Sky Web started in December 1998 and what it did was put the weather on a mobile phone. News as well. The part worth stopping on is the method, because there was no browser on the handset and no data session for a browser to run inside. You wrote a short message and sent it to a server number, 1590, which belonged to something called the Sky Web Service Center. The center looked up what you had asked for and sent the answer back as another short message. Tokyo Digital Phone had built that messaging system a year earlier to carry text between two handsets, and this was the second use they found for it.

The menu it answered from is a good picture of what people wanted from a phone before phones could do anything. Today's weather with the chance of rain and the week ahead. News headlines by category. Gypsy horoscopes. A daily Kansai-dialect gag. Ski resort conditions, lottery results going back a year, the nearest emergency medical desk, and the last train home. You could register keyword shortcuts the way you would register a speed dial, so that sending the words for last train, Ueno and Joban came back with the next five departures.

It was billed by the piece. Ten yen per item of information at first, then from February 2000 two yen to ask and two yen to answer. On a handset with on-screen menus every tap through every submenu was its own round trip and its own four yen, and an error message cost the same as a reply. Walk out of coverage halfway down a menu and you had still paid for the walk.

Later the menu-capable handsets picked up a second service called Internet Access, which did deserve the word web in a narrow sense. You typed a URL and the same service center fetched the page, cut it into chunks of about three hundred and eighty-four bytes, then painted them one at a time with next and previous links to stitch them together. HTML only, Shift_JIS only, no images and no sound. A nine-hundred-byte page cost twelve yen to read.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what one pipe was made to do ~

The messaging system under all of this had an unusual amount asked of it. Sky Walker, from November 1997, was the first Japanese short message service that could send and receive ordinary internet email, which it managed inside sixty-four full-width characters. Sky Web pointed that same channel at the carrier instead of at another subscriber. In October 2000 the company shipped what it called a developed version of Sky Web under the name Station, which let you register the subjects you cared about in advance and pushed matching information at you without being asked, varying it by where you happened to be standing.

Station is the one that lasted. It ran until 31 March 2010, when SoftBank switched off the second-generation network at two o'clock in the morning, taking Sky Mail and Sky Melody with it. The push version outlived the service it had been developed out of by eight years.

~ 1999.12.10 ~

On 10 December 1999 the J-Phone companies launched J-Sky across three regions of Japan. The usual line on J-Sky is that it was the answer to i-mode, arriving ten months late and going on to carry the first camera phones. The carrier's own history tells it differently. It says J-Sky was made by integrating Sky Walker and Sky Web, the messaging half and the information half, into one portal with one name.

Reporting from those months makes the lineage plainer still. Before it had a launch name, the thing that became J-Sky was being written about as the Sky Web New Service, provisional title. It raised the payload per fetch from roughly three hundred and eighty-four half-width characters to about six thousand, and it needed a handset with a real markup browser in it. Two products went in. A famous one came out.

~ four million handsets ~

Being an ingredient did not stop Sky Web from going on being a product, and the reason it kept running is a number. At the end of March 2001 J-Phone had passed ten million subscribers. J-Sky-capable handsets among them came to 6,156,400, a little over six in ten. Close to four million phones in Japanese pockets could not reach the portal that had been built partly out of the service they were using, and for those people Sky Web was not a legacy option. It was the only thing there was.

J-Phone gave notice on 18 February 2002 that the text information service would end on 27 March, thirty-eight days later, and said why in one sentence: with the spread of J-Sky, to migrate Sky Web users over to J-Sky and unify the services into one. The browsing half lasted until 29 August, announced separately that June. The second notice is the blunter document, because it tells the stranded what to do about it, and the answer is to buy a new phone. Fifteen handset models are named, from Sharp and Toshiba and Pioneer and the rest, with a line directing their owners to the nearest J-Phone shop. The people affected were told by a slip in their July and August bills.

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