Asiajin

Even hardcore geeks might have never dreamt of something like this: An umbrella which is connected to the Internet!

This gadget was developed by researchers at Tokyo-based Keio University. The “Pileus” umbrella looks ordinary from the outside but actually is a quite clever piece of hardware.

The umbrella is able to display web sites on the canopy’s underside while walking around. In addition to a mobile projector the Pileus is equipped with a camera, Wi-Fi, GPS and a digital compass.

When you make pictures, the gadget lets you upload them to Flickr within minutes. Tagging is also possible.

(pictures courtesy of Pileus LLC)

Besides Flickr, the Pileus is also meant to work well with Google Earth. If you are lost somewhere, the umbrella’s GPS function and compass come into play. The Pileus can then display your surroundings in 3D via Google Earth and help you find back the way.

The hardware is now in its 3rd generation. What began as an art project turned into serious business. The makers of the Pileus founded an LLC of the same name aiming at commercializing the product as soon as possible.

Tags: Japan, Technology by Serkan Toto
2 Comments »

Fastladder, an English localized version of the Japan’s most popular web-based RSS Reader “livedoor Reader” becomes Open Source today.

Codes written in Ruby on Rails/Javascript are available on Google Code. The lincense is an MIT license.

The installable binary package is also downloadable from fastladder.org. For Windows/Mac/Unix. It is still the same web-based (and “fast”, as they claim in the product name) application, but you may use it with non-internet web-based system/feeds in your company. livedoor recommends you to use their original free-hosted version if you do not need to access those intranet RSS feeds.

As a web based RSS reader, livedoor Reader leads off to Google Reader (localized in Japanese) and Bloglines by user-share.

Tags: Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
1 Comment »

Niconico douga, the 2007 biggest hit in Japanese web, is a video sharing community service with enhanced overlay comments feature.

Although it is popular among Japanese users, there are not many non-Japanese videos and comments, mainly because it requires user registration and it does not offer English menu. If you want to try it by yourself, Our writer Serkan Toto explained how to use Niconico-douga at Tokyotronic.

In December, Gihyo, a tech-oriented publisher (like O’Reilly in US) held a web technology meeting WEB+DB PRESS Tech Meeting, and Niconico-douga company Niwango, offered to host the meeting videos available WITHOUT Niconico MEMBERSHIP. At this point, these 6 embedded videos (with viewers’ comments, of course) are the only opened videos you can see how movied on Niconico-douga.

Although these tech talk videos are not mainstream type on Niconico-douga, you may be able to see how they are same as, and how different from other YouTube like video-sharing services. Number of comments are not so high, and font size and colors have not much variety when you compare with popular (usually Anime and/or parody) videos on Niconico-douga popular video ranking, though. I am sure that services like YouTube and Ustream.tv can take the flavour in.

You can also see what kind of tech presentations are made in Japan in Japanese. All speakers are top-notch web application/service engineers, including Hatena CTO Naoya Ito, and ex-livedoor CTO, A-list tech blogger Dan Kogai.

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

The market capitalization of Yahoo! Japan stands at $28 billion (as of Feb. 2008). Telecommunications conglomerate Softbank is the largest shareholder, holding 41% of the company’s shares. Yahoo! owns 33.4% of Yahoo! Japan’s shares. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! is $44.6 billion while Yahoo!’s share of Yahoo! Japan is worth $9.3 billion.

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
2 Comments »