Greetings!,
Eki-tan (Eki = rail station, tan = search) started in April 1997 - 14 years ago - as a spin-out from Toshiba Corporation, with a service that enabled people to plan train trips between 140 rail stations in central Tokyo using their mobile phones and PCs. In December 1997 the service was expanded to cover 1500 stations.
Today Eki-tan covers all of Japan, and includes all forms of transport, weather forecasts and includes airplanes, hotel reservations and many other services. Latency is so excellent, that with a little practice its possible to use Eki-tan on a mobile phone to decide on whether to board a particular train or not within a few seconds at an open subway door.
About 850,000 subscribers currently pay on average YEN 238 (US$ 2.90) / month for this convenience, and Eki-tan achieves an operating income margin of over 20%.
Tokyo Stock Exchange announces that Eki-Tan is planning an IPO for March this year.
Looking at the long and deep pipeline of mobile services in Japan, its quite likely that we will see many more IPOs in Japan in the near future both for mobile phone based services, and in particular for location based mobile services - read our mobile LBS report for more details.
Eki-tan started long before today's smart-phone app-stores, and provides an on-going continuous high-quality service for which subscribers pay monthly subscription fees (a business model introduced by Natsuno, Matsunaga and Enoki with i-Mode).
Thats a different business model than the classic "app store", where customers pay a single purchase fee at the time of downloading an app. We can see difficulties to provide sustained high-quality services over long periods of time against payment of a relatively small one-time fee. It will be interesting to see, whether at least some section of today's app-stores will move to the i-Mode-type subscription fee model.
 
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