Do you have the 'Internet time'?

By Almar Latour and Edward Harris
The Wall Street Journal Online


Is Ericsson ticking right?
The Swedish telecom-equipment maker recently sent out party invitations to celebrate the launch of a new mobile phone simultaneously in Stockholm, Helsinki, London and Moscow. But while the party Tuesday was taking place in four different time zones, Ericsson only indicated one starting time: @480.
For your information, that's not 4:80 a.m. or p.m. but 480 Internet Time, equaling 11:32 Swedish time, 10:32 London time or 12:32 Finnish time. No, we're not trying to clean your clock.
Internet Time was developed by Switzerland's Swatch AG (Internet time converter), a unit of Swatch Group, in response to what its leader, Nick Hayek Jr., saw as an Internet foible: Twenty-four time zones made it difficult to say something takes place at one instant. His solution? Take the current 24-hour day, divide it into 1,000 "beats", or one minute and 26.4 seconds per beat. Then move the reference point for the beginning of a day from Greenwich, England -- time's home since 1884 -- to Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. This way, at @480 Internet Time Tuesday, anyone who cared could tune into Ericsson's handset launch without confusion. But will it help sell phones?
Ericsson, for one, hopes the times are a-changin'. It put Internet Time as a feature on its new phone, the T20, unveiled Tuesday, and hopes it will appeal to trendy youngsters around the globe. Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, the world's No. 3 mobile-handset maker, is struggling to compete with rival Nokia Corp. (nok), the world's No. 1 mobile-handset maker, known for its stylish phones and plentiful accessories.
"Internet Time makes it easier to keep track of appointments with people in different time zones," says Peter Bodor, press spokesman for Ericsson. "It's fun for young people who have friends all over the world."
Ericsson isn't the only company featuring Internet Time as its hourglass: CNN.com has sported Internet Time on its Web page; Apple's Web site offers a software download that will translate between Internet Time and regular Greenwich Mean Time, the de facto standard. Sega uses the system to coordinate online games and chats through its Dreamcast system. And comely killer Lara Croft, virtual star of the popular Eidos Interactive video game "Tomb Raider," helped Hayek launch Internet Time in October 1998. Swatch, which has a trademark for Internet Time, has since sold over one million of its 17 different watch models featuring it, the company said.
While Internet Time has enjoyed some success, Ericsson and others' endorsements don't mean that the world is going to adopt the standard anytime soon. Internet Time is essentially Central European Time, where Biel is located, broken up with a mathematical formula -- all the minutes in a regular day divided by 1,000. What's more, there is at least one competing new-time standard. On Jan. 1, 2000, Tony Blair launched Greenwich Electronic Time, or GeT, a collaboration between the U.K. government and an e-retailing industry group. It is a network of servers around the world calibrated to nuclear clocks based in London that constantly keep computers, whose clocks are notoriously inaccurate, ticking together.
Is figuring out time zones really that difficult? Calculating time-zone differences is easier than adding up the minutes in a day and dividing by one thousand, says John Laverty, of the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory, the custodians of Greenwich Mean Time.
Laverty doesn't think Internet Time has a chance of wiping GMT off the books. "Internet time is largely a marketing ploy," he says. "If there really is a need for people to have time be ambiguous, then maybe Internet Time has a chance. But the multiplication is not intuitive and you need a watch to do it for you. Greenwich Mean Time is so heavily embedded in what we do: laws of countries and international communications standards, I can't see anything coming along that's going to change this."
Nonetheless, the idea of Greenwich Mean Time itself was constructed by the French, the British and the English in 1884. As intercontinental shipping thrived, a time zone that everyone recognized as "home" was needed to coordinate shipping times. After a hot debate, Greenwich, England, was finally chosen as the default. The decision was made not because of Greenwich's thriving port but because of its shipping charts. Greenwich had for years been producing popular charts which used its hometown as the time default. And since the charts had become almost ubiquitous on European ships, the countries grudgingly accepted Greenwich when they realized it would take years to replace the charts with new ones bearing a new standard.
The Internet has further shrunk the globe, and Swatch hopes its new definition of time can get Web users on the same foot like GMT did years ago. So, on Oct. 28, 1998, Hayek unveiled the first Swatch Internet Time products with a flourish. He appeared in a virtual form on the Web with the lovely and deadly Lara Croft. In Biel, the company emblazoned a lurid red stripe, representing the central meridian for Internet Time, on its headquarters. In the following two years, Swatch has sold over one million watches with Internet Time. A converter between Internet and regular time has been downloaded four million times from its Web site, with over 500 other sites offering downloads also, Hayek said.
And while Hayek denies that Internet Time is a marketing, rather than time-telling, device, he admits the publicity is useful. The company hasn't spent one cent on advertising for the Internet Time products, but has let them sell themselves by word of Web.
The success of Internet Time will of course depend on consumers. In Stockholm, where Ericsson launched its T20, a handful of youngsters are already using Internet Time to set up meetings. Michell Stachowicz, a 21-year-old acting and biology student, recently got a Swatch watch featuring Internet Time from her boyfriend, who travels often to Singapore. While she still prefers to wear her shiny silver-colored Tissot watch on public occasions, she carries the military green Swatch watch in her pocket when her boyfriend is away. Two weeks ago, she and her beau, who was in London, decided to call each other @600. "It was so difficult to count all the time changes and the different time zones in the past," she says. "I didn't have to figure out what time it was for him. It worked well."
Sven Janson, an Internet analyst in Stockholm, has been carrying Internet Time around his wrist for more than a year, using it both as a fashion statement and a conversation starter at parties. "All the Internet people wear a suit with sneakers here," he says. "I have a strict business suit with an Internet watch. It's cool."
No matter how cool the new time, Janson's friends weren't nearly as receptive to Internet Time. So far only one friend has downloaded Internet Time onto his palmtop. "Other people are simply running behind the time," says Janson.
Janson's enthusiasm for Internet Time started waning recently, however, when he discovered that his watch is running three beats behind the official Swatch Internet Time, a mistake he attributes to bad watch batteries. "I guess even Internet Time watches can be inaccurate," he sighs. "Sometimes a watch is just a watch."