An essay on success factors of smartcard business: cases of Felica (技術と社会・倫理)

概要

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2007 is the year of e-Money in Japan. There are two existing large services of e-Money- Edy of bit Wallet and Suica of East JR both built on the infrastructure of Felica system provided by Sony. The competitions between the two parties are called "Edy-Suica War." To make it more complicated, the "War" is not the battle only between the two parties. NTT DoCoMo had entered in the competition by establishing their "iD/DCMX" services, and QUICPay of JCB and AEON came as well; both of which use the same Felica smartcard embedded in the mobile phones. In 2007, Seven & i Holdings Co., Ltd. enters into the competition. The numbers of smartcard issued is expected as many as 10 million, one of the largest scales. The technology they are going to deploy was announced Felica as well. In all, 2007 may be marked as the year of "ubiquitous" Felica. There is no other country where Felica is used so commonly than Japan. How would this peculiar monopoly have been attained? This paper provides an analysis about how and why Felica became the standard of smartcard in Japan, and considers how the true ubiquitous business in Japan is carried out. There was a failure of getting international standard as smartcard from ISO/IEC for Felica in the first instance. But years later, another category as Near Field Communication (NFC) by ISO/IEC was established, and now it is perfectly working. This is a paper to investigate the reasons about this.
2007-12-04