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.

It’s just so thin!

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

In a county where the with mobile phone technology is at the leading edge, Japan has always suffered from the obese phone syndrome - the handsets are so packed with features that they burgeon out in size and weight, barely fitting into your jeans pocket. Until now that is, thanks to the nice people at Softbank.

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.

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.

ROKR update:

So it seems the first critisms of this new handset are now out into the wild, probably even before anyone has had a real chance to try the phone out in real life.

One of the biggest critisms of the ROKR cell phone concern the DRM ( digital rights management ) system it employs. The DRM is supposed to stop you from playing copywriten tracks that you haven’t paid for or don’t have permission to listen to for free.

So there is a bit of a fuss being kicked up about why the DRM on the ROKR will limit the amount of tracks you can download to the phone to 100, even if you don’t exceed the 512MB storage capacity of the handset.

This does seem very strange, and would be annoying to someone like me who has well over a 100 ‘favorite’ tracks at the moment, even if there is enough space for me to store more music, the DRM software will not allow me to.

One does have to ask ‘why?’.

Today’s breaking news does not come from Japan but instead from the United States, where Motorola have just announced the launch of their new phone which integrates the iTunes service from Apple.

This means that users on the Cingular network in the US will be able to download and listen to music directly on their cell phone.

The catch it seems is that you still need to link your phone up to your Mac or PC to transfer your tunes, you can’t download them directly over the air to the phone itself. But this is probably just a small drawback and has not got in the way, so far, of the extremely successful iPod series, which also requires you to hook up to your computer.

One thing that does amuse me though is the name : ROKR, which in my mind summons up an image of Avril Lavigne chatting to her boyfriend on her Razr phone.

Here is a direct link to the website

This is the ultra-smooth new, ‘Radiden’ handset from SonyEricsson which is set to be released today.

The cell phone features an am / fm radio which can also pick up audio signals from television stations. Unfortunately it can’t display the pictures to go with the audio.

The phone is compact at 11.7cm by 4.9 cm and is only 2cm thick. It features 7 retro style buttons for saving radio frequencies and has a nice classic look. There are also some fancy add-ons like the matching headphones and this desktop charger.

Camera enabled cell phones are popular all over the world and Japan, the supposed land of the camera fanatic, is no exception. The latest handsets hitting the market here are now packing 3.2 Mega Pixel cameras so these babies rival some of the dedicated digital cameras out there. Its little wonder then that Japan has a feast of accessories that you can buy to spice up your cell phone picture taking.

The biggest problem with cell phone cameras is that they never have good zoom functions, the physical zooms are limited and the digital zoom that takes over once you reach the max distance of the physical zoom is terrible and distorts the picture beyond all recognition.

So to come to the aid of the needy camera man a few enterprising companies have been producing cheap add-on lenses which you can hold in front of the camera lens or stick over it. These have tended to be toy-like and are easily lost or broken and also the zoom quality you can expect from these cheap bits of plastic is not very good to say the least.

Queue these :

These stylish new lenses look the business and attach to the front of compatible phones using a magnetic rim, they cost 2480 Yen and are currently only available for the AU W21CA and the FOMA F900iT.

They come in three strengths of telephoto for zoom ( 1/2x , 3/4x ) and macro for close up ( 4x ). Apparently they give good results, I have yet to test one myself, but I have heard that there are problems when using the 3/4x telephoto on the W21CA as it shows a black shadow around the rim of the photo.

Of course, anyone who is serious about their photography would probably be better off using a dedicated digital camera with proper lenses, but for those of us with an active lifestyle and a taste for photography these handy accessories would be great to slip into your pocket just in case you find that perfect photo opportunity on your travels.

If you want to see some very nice concept cell phones that are on the cards from Vodafone then you need to see this nice flash driven site.

http://www.vodafone.jp/designfile/

It is a classy site and the phones look great, my personal favorite is the ‘wallet’, which I think blends the normally hard, high-tech mobile phone into an elegant style accessory.

The flash is a bit hard to navigate but is definitely worth a look.

Hint: If the music annoys you then do switch it off on the first screen before launching the flash.