Japanese A-lister Masaki Ishitani [J] took an interesting video of an installation ad at Hermes Tokyo branch at the most decent shopping area Ginza (location on Google Street View).
This is Tokujin Yoshioka’s work and she is an actress Tae Kimura.
In association with Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, NEC and Tokyu Agency(ad agency), Tokyu Corporation, which operates major railway lines including Shibuya-Yokohama, started today the trial of an augmented reality service “Pin@clip[J]” (pronounced “Pina-Kuri”, and named after pins and clips) using iPhone for commuters and shoppers in the Shibuya area, which allows you to tag information with every corner of the town by overlapping it on the real landscape images when you’re there, and to share accumulated knowledge with the other people in the area.
You can post news and information about the spot where you visit with its geographical attribute which is measured by the iPhone’s GPS feature. Shops participating in the service can provide their bargain news to the app when the users come nearby.
As a part of this trial aiming at promoting local business in the area, they also broadcast a special program for TV-enabled cellphone handset users at a Shibuya station-front meeting point (Hachiko-mae). The same service is now planned to be provided at popular sight-seeing cities which a number of foreign tourists visit, like Dogo-hot spring in Matsuyama and Fukuoka’s area full of street-stall diners.
The dominant portal/search Yahoo! Japan is testing a customized portal for office workers.
On Yahoo! Japan’s top page, which is the most viewed page in Japan by the way, a new button “Office Version” is showed up at the best position on the top banner menu.
Once you clicked it, your Yahoo top page is switched to the office version, which has sombre colour and simpler design.
The regular version looks like this,
Many “Not good for work” menus are removed. Removed links are Shopping, Auction, Leisure Trip, Sports and Entertainment news, TV, Movie and Gyao!(online movie), Job search 
, Real estate, Automotive, Forum, Blog, Apparel, Dating, Game, Fortune telling, Kids. Movie and Product search are also removed from search tabs.
So this is the portal having only things which employers want to show their employees in Japan, at least Yahoo! Japan thinks so. As both the regular and office version have the same URL, seems switched by browser cookies, and each user can easily switch between them by pressing button, companies cannot filter the regular version usage.
But in some offices your boss may peek which version of Yahoo! you are using over your shoulder in future.
About office portal, Cyber Agent and Cybozu’s joint venture Cybozu.net [J] runs “only business” portal. Although it does not exclude contents for fun so strictly as Yahoo!’s office version, the portal seems to be acknowledged and encouraged in some companies.
This office version will be out of beta in next spring in Yahoo! Japan’s plan.
[disclosure] Akky is hired by Cybozu’s subsidiary as a tech blogger.
Like Google US offers free WiFi in 47 airports, Google Japan announced 30 minutes free WiFi gift everyday for mobile users, at three chainshops, Tully’s Coffee, Pronto coffee/bar and Lotteria hamburger in populated areas [J] from November 30th to February 28th.
On this campaign [J] to promote Google services (you need to register with your mail, and click a banner ads by Google about Google Japan themselves), Google cooperates with NTT-Broadband Platform(NTT-BP)’s paid WiFi network Wifine [J]. Wifine also provides free access which limits town-guide websites, but for this one, you can enjoy all the internet for 30 minutes. If you have two mobile gadget, 30 minutes for each.
HongKong-, Tokyo-, London- and Silicon Valley-based tech start-up MotherApp has kindly developed the iPhone/iPod reader app for us. Click on the link below for it. Absolutely free.