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.

So now that I have a target for the project, a ‘dream’ if you will, that I need to fulfill which is : a system where I can press one button and see a list of all the “cool things” going on in my local area.

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!

Its been a while since I last posted and in that time I have been learning how valuable free time is for people working in the modern world, and in particular for people working in Tokyo. The amount of free time I have seems to be slipping away with each week that passes. The ironic thing is that when I do actually get some time to myself, time where I am free to do what ever I want to do, I can’t actually think of anything to do. Typical. Well this has been bugging me for a while and came up recently in a conversation I was having with a friend ( and colleague at my current job ). It seems I am not the only one who feels at a loose end. So I am wondering if this is a common feeling for foreigners in Japan, or perhaps it’s a general phenomenon that is felt all over the developed world.

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.

I have just spent the weekend updating the ‘pixs’ RSS reader with a new feature that I think might be even better than the reader itself - I have added a web page translator tool that will read in any website and re-format it for reading on a cell phone. Which means you don’t have to settle for only reading the cut-down version that websites tend to publish on their RSS feeds.

Sounds good but what is even better is the image re-drawing function that will shrink images in height and width and also in file size so the whole site will display on the cell phone handset.

The code is brand new so the results are a little bit raw and I have seen a lot of areas that can be improved, but I have big ideas for this project and have new features I want to add. The two major drawbacks are that the site only works for XHTML compatible handsets and currently has only a simple re-sizing algorithm for the images.

I am going to road test it for a while longer, which might turn into quite a while longer as I have a new design contract starting tomorrow, so as always if you can try it out on your handset and let me know what results you get I will be really grateful.

Today I am launching the first draft of my cell phone RSS reader service: pixs.jp, and I would be grateful for any feedback you might have if you try using it.

I have been interested in a simple way of implementing a mobile internet site with contemporary content and have found that the easiest way to do this is by formatting the vast amount of RSS feeds availably into a format readable by cell phones. It is a simple idea but so far I haven’t found a site doing it in quite the same way as me.

This project started out as a way for me to get the western content that I like reading onto my cell phone here in Japan. There are plenty of mobile sites here but few that cater for the English reading market so I decided to make my own. Since I made the service, me and my friends have found it extremely useful so I have decided to publicise it with a mind to making it into a bigger system.

The service is free and will remain free. If one day I can find a way to spin money off the top of it then I might do that, however, the content will never be affected as a result so I hope people will find it a useful day to day tool.

If you have any feeds you would like to see on the directory then please submit them, I will vet them of course as I don’t want anything unsavoury appearing on my site, not that I am suggesting that you, my dear readers, would do something like that, but hey, there are plenty of weirdos out there.

And if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, or if the system doesn’t work on your handset then please leave me a comment on this site. I will find it which ever post you choose to make the comment on so please don’t be shy, it will help to grow this into a useful service for everyone.

So what are you waiting for? Point your phone to this address : http://www.pixs.jp

If the beta is successful I will put up a .com and .co.uk mirror to speed up the accesses for you guys outside of Japan.

Thanks for your support.

Marcus.

Have you ever tried to surf the web from your cell phone? Chances are, if you have, you were probably disappointed by the experience.

At the moment a lot of carriers are still only providing access to a portal of partner sites for their subscribers. The largest and most successful data service, NTT DoCoMo, provides a ‘walled-garden’ portal of content but also allows access to the regular internet. The problem is that most regular sites are not designed for mobile access and are only suitable for the larger screens of PCs, and those that are specifically made for cell phones are hard to find.

Google is trying to break into the cell phone market by offering a mobile version of their search engine that also translates the PC version of a site into a cut-down version for viewing on your handset. The feedback I have been reading so far has been mixed, I personally have not been that impressed by what I have been able to find so far, the translated pages I have been reading just don’t ‘gell’ together well. Having said that I do think this is an excellent idea and with projects like the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative trying to standardise content so that it is readable by mobile devices as well as PCs we will soon be able to read normal content on the cell phone.

As the carriers increase the capacity and speeds of their networks and as more sites adopt common web standards the next question we have to ask is, will the content of the ‘full sized’ internet be relevant to the mobile user?

The mobile user tends to surf for information when they are out and about and when they are waiting for something, the most common time for the Japanese and Koreans to surf on their cell phone is in the train on the way to and from work. The user is usually looking for quick hits of information or entertainment and the successful sites know this and make it quick and easy to find. The user does not want to be sifting through countless layers of menus, have to click and load too many pages or have to type in or read lots of text. Granted the user will have to click through some links or type something in to find the content they are looking for but good design will mean they can get to the content with the least amount of clicks. The sites that do this are the ones that get bookmarked and being bookmarked from a mobile should be a much coveted thing as the memory space dictates ( for now at least ) that only the best sites get saved.

Getting your site featured on one of the main carriers home portals is the best way you can attract customers to your content but this is a highly competitive area and the service requirements placed on your organisation will block most small companies from access. This leads me to think that there is still space for new, high quality portals in the market and novel ways to link through to content. Maybe some form of context-based click-through portal would be good, where the dynamic links take you to information you have already expressed an interest in, either through previous searches or through filters you set when registering.

The typical user on the train looking for something to distract him or her from the journey is looking for ‘bite-sized’ packets of information, they do not want lengthy discourse on a topic - they carry books for that. So it is vital to tailor your mobile content for this audience.

Content has become more diluted with each phase of its delivery from the first printing presses through television and the internet information has become more widespread and more specialised. From a time when the only book you could read ( if you could afford it ) was the bible through to a time where you could look up the different sub-cultures of algae found in ponds, if you really wanted to.

With the new mobile media still in its infancy some argue that this model will continue, the internet as we know it will remain but with a new method of access, others argue that a totally new model will be needed one that caters for a new audience of short term users.

I personally think that both points of view are valid. The mobile internet will give the specialists even easier access to their topics of interest and at the same time a new style of site will evolve to fulfill the masses who will surf for short term distraction.

However, my money is with the short term users because of the simple fact that the small screen and keyboard really isn’t suited for serious use. I have tried to work using my phone, I have also tried to publish to this blog using my phone and the experience in both cases has been painful