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This month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event (held on March 24th near Hibiya park in central Tokyo) was actually an awards show. The so-called “MoMo Tokyo Peer Awards” event featured a total of 12 companies aiming to go to Malaysia in May to represent Japan in the Mobile Monday Global Summit.

Speaking time was limited to three minutes - the awards show was based on an “elevator pitch” approach.

Bluntly put, I am not sure if all of the contestants were aware what kind of opportunity the event on Monday represented to them. Most of the presentations simply didn’t seem to be well-prepared (slides, flow, language, organization). Some were even just awful, I am sorry to say. Given that approximately 200 industry insiders were present and Mobile Monday events generally attract a lot of attention in the media, this is beyond my understanding.

Contestants and winners

Competing companies were divided into three groups:
1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program
2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing
3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

The winners are marked with “*”.

1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program

Mobile Krishna* (information service for tourists in India with no website)
BCmoney MobileTV (recommendation and monetization service)

2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing

Stargame’s* (translation service)
Choten.tv (3G videocall system)
Starling Software (mobile web technology)
UTUTU (social counter system “Kaztool”)

3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

J-Magic* (face recognition system)
GMAP (location-based map service “Find Tokyo”)
Mobile Healthcare (management system for various diseases “Lifewatcher”)
Naviblog (speech-to-mobile blog service)
Next Ninja (mobile video service)
Rockbird (mobile CMS)

My personal favorites services of the show were Rockbird (marketed as “Dreamweaver” for mobile applications), Next Ninja’s video technology and Lifewatcher-which I liked the most. More on the winners can be found here.

Opinion

From the 12 companies listed above, English web pages are offered by only six contestants. The same goes for the services pitched themselves. From the three winners, two companies offer Japanese-only web pages and services. Mobile Krishna is not online at all-go figure.

At least, J-Magic’s CEO Takuya told me English translations are being prepared. Overall though, it is commendable that eight representatives of Japanese companies went onstage and made a presentation in English to such a large audience!

I liked this month’s Mobile Monday event much better than the one in February. The venue itself (20F of Shinsei Bank’s HQ) was cool and suitable for an event of this size. The show was followed by a networking session during which attendees could get more information on the competing companies at their exhibition stands.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community by serkantoto
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Ishinokoe (means “voice of stone”) K.K. announced their newly designed tombstone series “Kuyou no mado” (”commemoration windows”), which has QR Code (Japanese 2D bar code) inside.

This QR Code, enhanced version “Design QR Code”, developed and trademarked by IT Design, can have small extra images in the code, which does not prevent proper code scanning. In this case, the QR Code has the word “Kuyou no mado” at the center.

Visitors of the graveyard will be able to take a picture of the QR Code by cellphone, to access to the deceased person’s memorable photos and profiles.

The site is also planned to have a log feature that records who visits when, then families and relatives can share the history in future, as they said. They are also developing a plan to provide virtual grave visiting by celler phone for young generation’s convenience.

I am sure that this release hits also Japanese media, as this concept is weird even for Japanese people, however, this product also shows that how QR Code are commoditized in Japan. They are now flooding over typical usage on train ads, business cards and coupon flyers.

via Impress K-tai Watch

See Also:

Mobile barcodes:Huge success in Japan so far. | Asiajin

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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In April last year, Japan’s first so-called Cyber University opened its virtual doors.

The university is private and headquartered in Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyuushu. It is run by a nonlisted stock company called Japan Cyber Education Institute which is mainly controlled by Japanese Internet telecom giant SoftBank.

As of now, approximately 1,900 students are enrolled who can graduate with a Bachelor degree in IT and business or world heritage. All correspondence-type courses can be accessed via the Internet.

While this is a cool idea especially for homemakers, ambitious people with stressing day jobs and retirees, it’s not really new. There are many universities offering academic material online and Japan’s Cyber University is not even the first fully online academic institution in the world.

Courses via the mobile phone

In November last year however, the Cyber University took its concept one step further by expanding it to -you guessed it- mobile phones! The first cell phone course is entitled “Mysteries of the Pyramids”.

The mobile version of the PC site is naturally stripped down concerning contents and appearance and can be partially viewed here. What’s missing is the actual course which is available as a combination of streaming video of a power point presentation and the professor’s audio. It can be accessed using SoftBank 3G phones only (via their “S-Appli” function). Interestingly, no tuition fee is charged for this particular mobile course and users do not have to be enrolled in the university.

Opportunities and dangers

The concept has pitfalls some of which are obvious. Offering courses online only means that interaction among students and professors is restricted to emails, electronic forums or social networking platforms. It is also impossible to ask questions to improve one’s personal understanding and actually change the way classes are held.

Moreover, the Japanese Ministry for Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology issued a serious warning to the Cyber University over possible cheats just in January this year. The ministry criticized the university’s handling of student identification and said it must improve measures to prevent the use of ringers.

Overall, this is really a cool and innovative concept even though the class on pyramids is still considered a test by the university. The cell phone is the ubiqitous platform for Japanese people when it comes to accessing the web so it is no wonder that the first step was made in this country.

We can surely expect to see the concept taken over in other countries in the future.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by serkantoto
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The Asiajin Meeting #1 took place this Tuesday in Akasaka/Tokyo. Courtesy of Cybozu Labs, the event was free of charge.

About 30 people participated while the number of people viewing the live broadcasting (done by Andrew Shuttleworth) peaked at 25. We will see to it that we announce the livecast earlier next time, especially for our readers from outside Japan. Also we apologize we had to turn down a lot of Asiajin readers interested in joining due to limited capacity.

A total of seven entrepreneurs, journalists and engineers held presentations. One person cancelled because of illness. All of the Japanese presenters spoke in English sharing the meeting’s underlying concept of intercultural communication.

We at Asiajin think they all did amazingly well so we can say the Asiajin Meeting #1 was a great success!

Part one of this report focuses on the first three presentations:

Presentation No. 1
(”Who will be the target consumers in the Japanese mobile content market?”)

The presenter would like to stay anonymous. She spoke about mobile content services in Japan, user demographics and how consumers in this country prefer the mobile phone over the PC. The presentation was very interesting but is unfortunately off-the-record.

Presentation No. 2
(”Natalie - English version”)

Masahiko Tachizono, director at Natasha,Inc., attended to introduce his company’s Natalie service. Essentially, “Natalie” is a J-Pop news service. Masahiko said between 20 to 30 fresh articles from the J-Pop world are put online everyday.

Readers are able to customize the service so that they view news items suitable to their tastes.

Natalie also connects with Twitter (which is very popular in Japan). When a user twitters a comment on a Natalie news article, the service retrieves the message and adds it as a comment on the web site if it includes the corresponding URL. Natalie offers a similar solution with the Japanese social bookmarking platform Hatena. I think this is a very clever idea!

There is also a mobile version available. Moreover, Natalie offers a widget for bloggers. A Facebook application and even an optimized version for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are also planned.

After his presentation, Masahiko told me the English version of Natalie for J-Pop fans outside Japan will be available soon.

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Presentation No. 3
(”Project 1,000 speakers”)

amachang, a well respected JavaScript specialist working for Cybozu Labs spoke about a private project of his, named 1,000 speakers (Ustream channel). I agree with his statement that a lot of (not all) Japanese IT professionals are too shy and modest to present themselves to other people if they can’t remain anonymous.

This observation was amachang’s main motivation to hold a monthly conference which he labelled “1,000 speakers”. His aim is to have 1,000 people present their work and discuss openly until the project is finished. This is a really great idea!

amachang said speaking publicly helps young developers in particular to raise awareness of their work and improve their visibility in Japan’s huge IT community.

Please read the second part of the Asiajin Meeting #1 report for coverage of the remaining presentations and a conclusion.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Japan by serkantoto
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Japan’s largest social network Mixi announced that a total of three mobile phones made by Sony Ericsson and Softbank/Nokia have integrated direct access to its mobile version. These are the Cybershot SO905iCS, the Cybershot W61s and the Nokia N95. The Nokia model is delivered in Japan as the SoftBank X02NK.

It was announced that users can upload pictures taken with the Cybershot models directly to their Mixi blogs from the camera menu screen.

The “Share Online” function of the SoftBank/Nokia phone makes it possible to automatically resize pictures to fit into Mixi blogs. They can be then directly sent to the service as well. Moreover, owners of the SoftBank/Nokia model can access Mixi Mobile directly from the standby screen with just one click.

[Via CNET Japan]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Service by serkantoto
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