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.

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.

If you need to keep a track of your loved ones, your children, or even I suppose, your spouse, you can now do that with a well established service from EZweb.

The EZnavi service, as mentioned before with the in-car navigation system, comes in a new flavor, this one designed to send out a beacon with your location. Designed for use by worried parents, the system allows the child to broadcast their current position and then displays it on a map on the parent’s cell phone.

This is a perfect usage of a technology that is so popular with children and allows for unobtrusive monitoring of the child’s well being much more discreet than a phone call in front of friends.

Continuing on the theme from the last article about location based services in Japan, I came across a really nice looking service from AU today which allows you to navigate, sat-nav style, on your phone, whilst driving your car.

The service runs on your cell phone and takes your position using the GPS chip in your handset and gives on screen directions and maps to help you navigate yourself around whilst driving.

Well, actually the service is not meant to be used by the driver but by a passenger; the Japanese quite rightly, as in Europe, do not allow you to drive whilst using your mobile.

The system is available as a one off, free, download and costs a monthly fee of 315 yen ( $2.80 )for heavy users and 157 yen ( $1.4 ) for light users ( excluding packet charges ).

It is really easy to use, you just enter in your desired destination and either follow the on-screen map or the directions presented to you, very similar to the in-car navigation systems. The phone does well with its small screen, but really it is not something you can use by yourself - you would definitely need someone riding in the passenger seat shouting instructions.

This image shown above is typical of the types of local search systems available at the moment, on both the 2G / 2.5G and 3G networks in Japan.

The level of detail has been enough to guide the user to the store or attraction of their desire so far, but now things are taking a massive leap now that the bandwidth of 3G is really being taken advantage of.

Check these images:

They show what is now available from your cell phone - real, street level satellite photographs of your surrounding area. Its amazing, this technology has just pounced onto the online world, with Google maps bringing the technology to the mainstream attention a whole host of smaller players are now investing in the feeds available and producing applications for the mobile world.

The services differ in the way they can pinpoint your location, from the simple cell triangulation that works with any phone, up to full GPS location depending on the capabilities of the handset. Surprisingly it was the 2.5G cell phones, the CDMA technology phones, which have the most handsets with GPS chipsets, the 3G phones are only now starting to arrive with the necessary chips.

So from now, with the high bandwidth from 3G paired with the accuracy of GPS positioning and the ready availability of satellite imagery, we are really going to see some action in the market. And with companies like Google and Yahoo rolling out their location based services the established players, like ‘goo navi’ , are going to have to fight hard to hold onto their market share.

There is a popular role playing strategy game that has been around for ten years in Japan called ‘Front Mission 2089′. Versions of the game have already been ported over to the west by Squaresoft and have proven popular. But the game is really at its prime in Japan and now users here can play the game on their cell phone and battle other users whilst on the move.

The ‘Front mission mobile’ game for Docomo 900i handsets has just been released and lets you build your online, customisable, robot character and then battle them with other players, live and online, using your cell phone. It is a ‘turns’ based game with each opponent having a number of turns to play out their strategies, attacking, defending and retreating as needed and the winner is the one with the most life force left after a battle.



The game costs 525yen ( about $5 ) per month plus packet charges to play which could prove quite expensie for the real heavy user. Every day at 8.00am scores and statistics from the previous day’s battles are shown and at the end of each month the top ten ranking players are announced.

This real-time interaction has proven popular in game play on the big screens, with Xbox live and PC games like the Starwars Galaxies series enjoying massive numbers of subscribers so it will be interesting to see how this works with the new hook up and join in anywhere, anytime freedom that the cell phone gives and whether or not the small screen and limited interface puts players off.

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.

I have always been intrigued by the potential for e-learning on the cell phone, it just seems to be a perfect medium for taking bite-sized lessons when you have nothing better to do, and I can easily see the day when salary men are swatting up for their MBA whilst taking the train to work or students are cramming for their physics finals on the bus to school.

Well that day is getting closer now, for the Japanese anyhow, as AU have launched a new service on their ezweb portal for delivering lessons directly to the cell phone.

The service is called ‘manabi’ and so far has four lesson packs available which mainly focus on learning English which is a national passtime of the Japanese at the moment.

The packs contain short lessons and quizes to test your knowledge and feature a fair splattering of colorful characters and cuteness.

With a monthly revenue stream for subscriptions this may prove to be a lucrative gap in the market. Watch this space for more details.