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.

Docomo Coin is a new promotion scheme that lets you earn ‘coins’ when you visit participating i-mode sites and campaigns on your cell phone. These coins are worth 1 yen each and can be saved up and then used to pay your phone bill.

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.

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.

DoCoMo has come up with an interesting an novel way to let its customers pay for everyday items using their cell phone.

A new service in Thailand will allow customers to pay for their online shopping, pay their gas bills, buy drinks at vending machines and more. It doesn’t use anything fancy like the chips in FOMA phones but instead works by issuing the user with a dedicated phone number which the user can call and, via an automated voice system, authorise payments.

The service is provided as a joint venture between DoCoMo, AIS Thailand and mPAY, the online mobile payments system that provides this phone number interface.

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.

Digging a bit further into this idea I was pointed in the direction of an article on engadget discussing a similar application available from Nokia which connects people over Bluetooth on their cell phones.

The users can setup a home page with some descriptive text and a photo and then let their phone poll other users, displaying their home pages. When the user finds someone interesting they can then send them a message.

The Bluetooth connectivity is limited to a radius of about 30m so it is really only good for localized usage.

Nokia are marketing this as a fun system for clubbing and dating but with the right application of the technology perhaps this could be the first steps towards the all-pervasive system I am envisaging.

I was just reading an interesting article from this blog about an SMS promotion run by Virgin in the UK. It was an interesting concept were people at a festival were sent a word via SMS and had to find someone else at the festival who had received the same word. If two people managed to find each other they could present themselves to Virgin and win a flight each.

Sounds like a great application of social networking through the cell phone, I’m now wondering how this could fit in with real peer-to-peer connectivity. I guess the simple answer would be to provide a similar challenge but on a much larger scale you would be able to win a substantial prize if you found another user, online with the same word or code as you and managed to meet up with that person.

By keeping you online and keeping you looking to find the other user this promotion would be a great way to launch a peer-to-peer networking service or give coverage to other advertising.

It seems that there is a growing trend in the corporate world to get into peer-to-peer technology. Take ‘Skype’ for example, created by the founders of the file sharing program ‘Kazaa’, this software allows you to make long distance phone calls over the internet for next to no cost.

How do you apply the peer-to-peer mentality to cell phone applications ? I’ve been thinking about this and am getting quite excited by the possibilities of peer-to-peer apps on phones. If you merge in Geo-position information then and you could create a useful service that alerts people when someone interesting is in their vicinity.

By creating a profile, users would be able to advertise who they are to the world and receive alerts when someone else who matches their search criteria is in the nearby area. This could lead to interesting networking opportunities for salesmen for instance, or for people who share obscure interests. On a more practical level you could advertise that you are looking for a builder to patch up your roof - the service would alert you when someone with the right qualifications passes you.

The idea of online-directories for finding services is not new, but take it to the next level with real-time, real-world integration and you have the beginnings of a datamap which you can overlay on your everyday life.