On a warm and sunny Sunday morning I lined up with 30,000 other crazy guys and girls waiting for the starting pistol to set us off running at the second official Tokyo marathon. The event was to say the least, excruciating and I still have not, four days later, fully recovered. However, I did manage to complete the race, with an exceptionally bad time of 5:51:00 which was totally down to my knee injuring we forced my to speed-walk the last 17 Km with an embarrassing ‘limping-shuffle’ motion. Anyways, beside my terrible performance I got another couple of surprises during the day-long run.

Firstly, was the amount of participants in the race who were taking photographs, filming video and chatting on their cellphones, whilst running. Now I know this is Japan but it was ridiculous, here we are in a semi-serious long distance race and everyone is busy texting their friends and taking snaps. I was half expecting a pile-up as one guy dressed up as a novelty salary-man, wearing a full suit, shirt and tie and unbearably - shiny work shoes, ran past, holding his briefcase ( a very realistic prop ) in one hand and his phone in the other.
This sort of behavior continued right up towards the end of the race where I over heard one young lady on the phone, probably to her significant other, saying that she was just coming up to the finishing line and that she was sorry but she was probably going to be late for dinner. Like yeh, ‘duh’, your only running a freaking marathon.
Maybe they just don’t take it as seriously here. Wait, who am I kidding, according to the Nikkei newspaper over 97% of the entrants completed the race. That, for those of you who don’t know, is pretty damn high.

After I stumbled across the finishing line and smiled for the cameras, who were kind enough to stay on and film the rest of us long after the pros had packed up and gone home. And after I had got changed and slowly made my way out to the friends and family meeting area, I found out why everyone was so busy with their phones during the race. It turned out that the Yomiuri Shinbun, a national paper, was running ( no pun intended ) a campaign encouraging participants in the race to submit photographs and their current GPS location information. These were then relayed onto the web to give a live view of the race with people’s positions and snaps.

Along with this there was other keitai-related goodness set up to enhance the race.

For instance, how was my wife managing to keep up with me and get to a good spot just in time to cheer a big “Ganbatte!” as I ran past? Well, at regular intervals around the course I ran over big red mats which picked up the signal from the IC chip strapped to the laces of my shoes this told the organizers where I was at any one moment in time. And, as it turned out, they were then relaying this information live to their official website. The also had a mobile version http://r.tokyo42195.org where you can input the entrant’s bib-number and then get a view of how far into the race they have completed. You can check out how badly I did here on the web version of the site http://tokyo42195.org by entering my number – 36513. If your Japanese is up to it you will notice the link to the next keitai service I found.

After the race was finished I checked the keitai site and found a streaming video ( QCIF format – which on my handset opens in the same player as regular 1Seg broadcasts ) which showed me limping across the finishing line in my bright yellow jersey. I have to say the web version of the video was a lot clearer, as it is streaming flash video, but it was nice to be able to access this content on-the-go as well and share it with friends and relatives across Japan.

Well it is now almost a week later and I am still sore, however, it was a fantastic event and I have a permanent record of every painful step of the way which will hopefully be enough to bore my grandkids in the future.

I now need to think up a way to actually realize this. The first issue will be “how do I get the list of cool stuff into the system?” . That is definitely going to be the key to how this system will work, my options are : trawling existing sites to grab contents, asking users to input contents or writing my own contents.

The first idea, creating some sort of spider to find the information for me would be pretty straight forward technically speaking, but has a few drawbacks. Firstly I need the location information for the “cool stuff”, ie: I will need the longitude and latitude co-ordinates for each item I collect. I don’t think it would be possible to get this from a web page ( unless I do some reverse geocoding GPS lookup on the address details ). Secondly, I have no way of knowing if the “stuff” the crawler finds is really “cool stuff” or just “mediocre stuff”, as I have already stated I only want “cool stuff” on this site.

That reminds me, I have decided that this service is definitely going to be provided as a “site” for now. I have played with Brew and more recently with Android and that has given me some insight into what would be required to release this as an appli. It will be far simpler and will reach a much larger audience if I go with a regular web based system built with PHP or J2EE.

Back to the mechanics of finding the “cool stuff”. The second idea, using user generated content, even if it is a web2.0 cliché seems to be the best way to achieve what I want to do. I can get people ( hopefully ) to register the places they visit with the system and other people to rate them. This way I can find the stuff that is going on and also determine if its “cool” or not.

The third idea – providing the content myself will probably be required in the early stages regardless as I doubt I will be able to build a user base very quickly. However, I do not want to just create another “blog” with a GPS interface as I have enough difficulty keeping this one up-to-date.

So there we have it, my new project is going to be a “user recommendation system for location-based information”. Perfect!

I have also been toying around testing out the GPS functions on my cellphone and trying to build maps from scratch using vector data provided by the Japanese land ministry. I’ve tried using mapserver, mapnik and some great php scripts called provided by a guy called Mike Diplock ( but I have lost the reference to his site! ) and whilst I’ve learned a lot of interesting things about the vast world of GIS and information processing, I have to admit failure. Map rendering requires just too much horsepower ( and brain power ) and at the moment I do not have the facilities to put even the most basic of solutions together.

Yes I know that I could have bypassed all the pain and gone straight for a google maps or yahoo maps solution but that wasn’t the point. My problem is I like to tinker and solve ambitious challenges.

Anyway, I have given up trying to re-invent the wheel, there is no way I could provide maps with the performance or clarity of those rendered daily by google maps. Instead I have started thinking about how I can use this newly discovered world of GIS data with the GPS function of my phone to provide a useful service for my own pleasure and perhaps even for other people.

I am happy to say that today the idea finally came together. However, it is not entirely ground breaking or very ‘web 2.0’. It is still a good idea though ( or so I think ).

So what is this new project going to be then? Well I have come up with a way to help solve my “what to do with myself at the weekend” problem using the GPS function of my phone. Its really easy, really neat and goes something like this : If I ever find myself at a loose end, I pull out my phone, access my “insert_name_of_new_site_here” and press the big ‘send location’ button. Then I sit back and wait while the system gathers up a list of all the cool things that are going on near my current location. I can then browse through this selection and if I feel like it I can then pop over to the actual place where all the cool stuff is going on and check it out for myself.

Simple!

Well, that’s the theory anyway and I am willing to give it a shot. If only to give myself a pet-project to work on in the free time that I don’t have.

So tell me what you think by posting a comment - I have to moderate them at the moment because I’ve been receiving a huge amount of comments spam.

Softbank, who have recently taken over the Vodafone business in Japan, are unofficially branding themselves as the ‘thin’ cell phone provider.

After chucking out the tired, red, ‘in your face mum!’ image of Vodafone, Softbank have announced the line up of their new ‘sleek’ collection of handsets and I managed to get my hands on one before they hit the shops.

Check out these pictures of the 705P from Panasonic, a phone that is merely 14.8mm thick, a marvel in a country where, from my own official numbers ( sourced from a quick measure of the two other test phones on my desk ) the average phone thickness is more like 25mm. This is truly a step forward!

So to all the Americans and Europeans out there, enjoy this moment, for you now know that with the Razr and Slvr you finally have one up on the Japanese… but, not for much longer.

In their ever continuing effort to re-educate the world about the wholesome nutritional value of their produce, McDonalds have taken a step forward in Japan and applied a clever bit of technology to bring the nutritional label into the 21st century.

They clearly have nothing to hide here and will gladly tell you the nutritional information of the cheeseburger you are eating as long as you have your cell phone to hand. Luckily since this is Japan, everyone has their phone to hand, and with a quick scan of the burger wrapping they can connect via the handset and read the online information about the food they are eating.

Each burger now comes equipped with its own QR Code printed on the wrapper, a barcode-like symbol which when scanned with the camera of your cell phone, navigates you to an online site where you can see the amount of calories and fat you are consuming.

This is a good way to utilize a technology which has become almost common place in Japan and it provides a great means for the McDonalds corporation to keep their information up to date without having to do costly printing runs. It is also a nice little marketing tool bringing consumers online to re-enforce their brand image and to promote the ‘healthy’ aspects of their produce.

The next big thing, according to the speaker - Greg Tarr, CEO of SecureMobile, is going to be the expansion of the mobile gaming market to bring in cross platform multi-player games – being able to join in the massive multiplayer online games that are so popular on the PC using the phone handset.

Also, the push-to-talk service seems to be very much in the hype at the moment outside of Japan and the attendees at the presentation hope that it will also be big in Japan. Push-to-talk was released on the recent 902i Docomo handsets ( D902i, F902i, N902i ) last week and allows you to connect directly in real-time to a group of friends and chat, it is a similar idea to msn and other messenger services but over voice. There was a debate about whether or not this would prove popular in Japan because the technology is quite ‘intrusive’ – also the Japanese are not as fond of ‘voice’ services as they are of say text based email systems. The scenario described concerned users on the subway – they would probably not want to be talking into their handset as it is frowned upon in the rail system.

The main points that were made regarding security were to do with future worries - hacking handsets and viruses, the biggest problem they foresee is with viruses and worms on the handset that would target other online services in DOS ( denial of service ) attacks. The audience did seem a bit skeptical about the possibilities put forward by the speaker and we learned that at the moment the biggest player in the phone handset antivirus market – McAffee has decided there is not a large enough market to make the products viable. Other drawbacks include the limited memory capacity on the handsets – virus databases would be hard to store, the phone would have to scan itself on a regular basis – battery life would be a problem here. I think, however, that the main problem is the consumer does not believe that handset viruses are a big enough worry to pay for the service just yet. Perhaps in a few years but not now.

The interesting thing worth mentioning is that, according to Mr. Tarr, there is a growing number of ‘professional hackers’ coming out of the old east-block countries ( ex-soviet states ) who are specifically targeting mobile services in Asia because of the lack of security measures taken by most providers and the percieved potential for monetary gains. I cannot be sure how much of what he said was hype or paranoia, but it is a message that should reinforce our commitment to making products as secure as possible.

Overall it was an interesting, yet short, look at the mobile phone market and trends from a more international perspective. The downsides was there was not enough concrete discussion about the security issues and the event seemed more geared up for networking.

Felica phones can now be used to pay for air travel.

The Japanese air carrier ‘ANA’ now allows you to pay for and collect your flight vouchers using your Felica equipped cell phone. You can book your flight through the i-mode enabled ticket service and then on the day of travel, pick up your ticket from the airport by swiping your handset over a Felica reader.

Docomo has just announced a new handset which is set to compete with the easy to use ‘Kantan keitai’ from tu-ka.
This is a no-frills, simple to use handset which features a clock. Yep, that’s all folks. Its dead easy to use and will appeal to the growing number of ‘old people’ in Japan.

The user registers with the service, creating a ’savings account’, and then when visiting participating sites, coins are automatically added to this account without any further action. The user can then have the equivalent amount of money deducted from their next phone bill.

The service is just a simple reward scheme, however, because it is being run by the network operator – Docomo – the points system can be applied by many different sites and so a whole host of companies can take advantage of the incentive for their marketing.

This is a standardised scheme, with a real, tangible reward and will provide benefit for the network – generating more traffic; benefit for the partner companies – incentive to visit their content and fill in questionnaires; and benefit for the user by giving them money off their cell phone bill.

At the same time, this is not going to wipe out the more traditional promotions, which tend to offer more interesting gifts, and it won’t put off more innovative campaigns which, by there nature, assuming they are successful, entice the user in more interesting and novel ways.