Goodbye, Galakei feature phones: according to Tokyo-based market research firm BCN (published in The Nikkei today), smartphones accounted for 49.8% of the total number of handsets sold between December 13 and 19 in Japan.

Sure, this is just a snapshot, but there is a clear tendency to be observed here, and the smartphone segment in Japan grows much faster than many people expected. By way of comparison: in January the ratio of smartphones to total handset sales stood at around 10%.

In November, 35.5% of all handsets sold in Japan were smartphones, with almost all domestic makers saying they will boost their smartphone production (and globalization efforts) in the near future that month. The most prominent examples are Sharp and Panasonic, with big P expecting smartphones to account for 75% of total sales by 2015.

In a separately published outlook, Nomura Research Institute today said that in 2015, handset sales in Japan will grow 43% to 45.7 million between 2010 and 2015. Nomura sees smartphones accounting for 70% of the total in five years.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Trend by Serkan Toto
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Although Xbox360 is not so popular here in Japan, some Japanese seem to love and hack Kinect. After the first interesting one to connect Kinect with virtual 3D figure dance authoring free tool Miku Miku Dance, which was originally developed by fans of Vocaloid, human voice singing synthesizer software represented by pretty popular virtual diva Hatsune Miku, to promote Vocaloid singers over the web.

On this movie, Hatsune Miku moves after the guy, Higuchuu, who input his move via Kinect device.

Then, another guy, Nao_u, went further by adding a head-mount-display to his system [J].

Firstly he (whose move shown at the top-left) set up real-time motion capture with Kinect.

Then, VR920, a head-mount-display(HMD) by Vuzix is bound its location on his face.

By geomagnetic sensor, you can get which direction the HMD faces, so it is doable to render appropriate direction in the virtual world by following the user's head.

Nao_u is seeing his left leg, but for his viewpoint, it is Hatsune Miku is looking down her left leg in the virtual world.

Punching a virtual ball. His virtual world is using Bullet Physics Engine and collision is supported so you may hit the ball.

He wrote that he has only 1 square meter free space in front of his PC desk so he could move not so actively. He said that it will be more enjoyable with bigger space. He finished his post, "Great age comes that you can make things like this only by marketed products at your home."

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The World Sound Mix By 43d is "a web based sound mixing engine that generates a location based Ambient sound from varied sounds from all over the world" (from their website).

The sounds are colored by categories - green for nature, blue for city/town, yellow for voice/song and red for instrument.

Sounds from different part of the earth are played. For example, A train arriving sound at Perth station with Chinese song sang in Shanghai, seller's talk in Rotterdam's flea market mixes in it.

Leaving the web page for minutes made me feel as if I am able to listen all those human beings activities in widely separated locations.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Quality Commander [J] from Japan novel Corporation [J] is a gadget test automation robot which combines an industrial robot with camera and software.

A blog S-max reported [J] their demo at Embedded Technology 2010 conference at Yokohama.

The robot touches the device's screen, by program and/or repeating a human's first operation. The software will capture an image on the screen and compare with the designed result.

The robot with several different attachments for touching can even emulate flicking and double-tapping.

As how much scroll touch would make is different each time, capture system can detect the desirable output on the different part of the screen, dialog/pop-up as well.

How it is working is on YouTube (a bit noisy),

The basic system costs 4.55 million yen for standard cellphones. With touch-panel options, the price begins with 5.9 million yen (US$70,500).

The company says on the product page that by the Quality Commander, device vendors and cellphone OS/application vendors will be able to run a load test like repeating the same operation for 100, or 1,000 times and find a bug only happened when the device is used after long hours.

via @kaorun

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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Nanapi [J], a web service to share hacks posted by users, had acquired 3.8 million US dollars from Globis Capital Partners in Tokyo.

Nanapi is a service to share life hacks, called as life recipes in this service, posted by users. Users can post their own hacks easily via Nanapi works [J], and can earn points worth 100 to 10,000 Japanese yen.

It's hard to find a similar service in U.S. but has  a similar concept hunch.com has; Making a guide for living by using the power of internet users.

Nanapi is currently getting 4.5 million pageviews via PC and 5 million pageviews via mobile per month. Nanapi is aiming to gather 100 million pageviews/month by the end of 2011.

Tags: Company, Japan by Hiroumi Mitani
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