Motion Portrait, a tech spin-out of Sony Computer Science Laboratories(CSL) and now a subsidiary of So-Net Entertainment, introduced an iPhone app that allows you to animate your favorite picture and let it blink and speak anything you want, Photo Speak today.   Now it’s available at AppStore for JPY350.

The app uses the company’s state-of-the-art technology to create a portrait animation with an emotional motion from a still image, and it enables lip-sync with recorded voice.

In order to get the animation, you just need to shoot a picture with an iPhone-embed camera or to choose a picture taken.  After the app complete uploading it to the company’s server, it will get a processed animation in several seconds.

The company is planning to enhance the app by adding features that allow you to add a hat or a pair of glasses on the animated result and to share it with your friends.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Software by Masaru IKEDA
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Tokyo-based start-up Anydoor started a translation service using Twitter on Tuesday. It’s named 140 Trans. When you post a tweet having attributes of an original language and a target language of your translation request, the service’s participating translators will give you back a translation result on Twitter.

The service can handle 140 character long messages, which is the maximum limit of every tweet defined by Twitter, and now you may post up to three translation requests in a day and choose “translation direction” from/to a variety of 47 languages as of this writing. You can use the service for free, but you may give away reward points to the translator for appreciating his/her work, and he/she will be able to convert the points earned into cash via PayPal.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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