Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Would you buy a phone that could alert you to swine flu outbreaks over your smartphone?

The experiment brought to light by the Japan Times in early June 2009 is a new initative thought up by the Japanese Government in conjunction with a phone carrier, possibly Softbank this coming fall.

Apparently the plan was thought
Above: ¨I got what?¨
up before the current pandemic of swine flu.

The plan is to choose a school with approximatley 1000 students and give them iphones, to track the students whereabouts and store the info on a central server.

A handful of students will be hypothetically ¨infected¨ with a virus. Then the phones track the whereabouts of all

students and see how an advisory GPS system can track down infected people, see who they have come in contact with and prevent further infections using this information.

Curenlty there are 2,033 Japanese infected with the swine flu, an infection that swelled from 3 cases from a Japanese teacher and her students from a trip to North America in May, to 1000 infections in June 2009.

With technology being able to help us in our daily lives, why not rely on mobile phones to track and detect the contamination of virus´s- even help advise those infected with a text to see the doctor?

On the other hand, privacy would be sacrificed as the system relies on having your GPS location at all times to see whose path you may have crossed.

How will the infectee be warned and treated? It opens the door to discrimination if some suspect you have been infected even before having been tested.

The pitch isn´t purely for the benefit of the community either, as Softbank has seen the market saturated with smartphones, so the benefit of having a device that can warn you of potential virus´s is a possible money spinner for Softbank.

Would you opt in to a phone with that service? Is there potential for use in the future in other densely populated countries?

ZiA

A few years back in 2002, John Arlidge from The (UK) Observer wrote about how the consumer electronic companies had the porn industry to thank for them being the first in embrace new ways of making, selling and distributing media into the privacy of users homes.

From the death of Betamax and the triumph of handycam video, the switch to VHS then DVDs in the 80´s and 90´s to the pay-per-view, digital tv popular in the last few years, technology has come a long way baby - thanks to good ol´porn.

The shift has been driven by audiences who don´t want to go out in public, say, to a dodgy movie theatre, but insead want to view porn in the privacy of their home, or on their cellphone with fast access to technology wherever and whenever they want it.

Now that there are faster smartphones available , a boom in downloading porn as short videos to Japanese cellphones for relatively cheapo prices has happened. Some say, because of the unlimited access to the net included in the cellphone plans. But that´s to be expected since Japan is ¨home to the world’s first third-generation wireless network¨, said Bloomberg Press on Monday (6th July 2009).

¨While profiting from the traffic, Tokyo-based mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. say they’ve been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the $74 billion network feels the strain.¨ Users have complained of slow access to the web and even complete freezes in services around midnight when everybody tends to log on.

Not that capacity issues haven´t been predicted, ¨it’s an issue that’s been waiting to happen.¨ according to Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research Ltd. “It wouldn’t surprise me that it happens in Japan first because they’ve had 3G for so much longer.”

Hirotaka Ishimori, head honcho of the online division of Soft on Demand, a popular Japanese porn company says he sees mobile phone downloads as a huge market since he´s been rolling in it for a while now, what with the monthly 15 million yen sales figures he´s racking up. “Fixed-rate data plans, faster Internet access and sophisticated handsets are contributing to that growth.” he says.

“Whenever there is a new distribution method for adult content, adult content will go that medium,” said Holden. “It’s gone that way since cavemen drew adult pictures in the cave.”

Nice one.
ZiA

For more details see the whole article @ Bloomberg Press

The porn industry as envelope pusher was also echoed by P.W Singer in his book launch we discussed a few blogposts ago.

Despite the generally great reputation Japanese people have for recycling, this years results for best green company by Greenpeace shows the same attitude does not extend to the country´s manufacturers of technology.


As the figure shows, Nintendo is trailing well behind all other consumer electronics companies and yet another Japanese telecommunications and electronics company Fujitsu, which has come in second last.

But on the up side, Toshiba is coming in at a tie for 5th position with Motorola.

Sony Ericsson, the Japanese/Swedish joint venture is also coming up trumps with the second position after Nokia..but does that still count as a Japanese victory if HQ is in London and research and deveopment is in a smattering of places around the world?

In Tokyo the council wards inform people of exactly how to prep and separate garbage for the 3 nights of the week they pick it up. Why are Japanese tech Co.´s slacking off like this if the infrastructure for domestic recycling in Tokyo is extremely well organized and should be a source of inspiration for other countries to adopt?

I even got severely reprimanded by my ex neighbour for not separating my garbage properly or taking off the lids or paper around my plastic bottles- even had my garbage inspected later that night by the same neighbour. Wouldn´t it be great if my ex neighbour could do that to Nintendo´s products?
ZiA

One of the guys behind Creative Commons visited Tokyo in May and stated that copyright laws need to get with the times if they want to stay relevant says The Japan Times.

Creative Commons, who Lawrence Lessig helped develop, started a system that allowed creators more choice and control over how their creations were used. Lessig says that there needs to be more room for creative expression and experimentation if copyright laws want to keep up with the 21st century.

The developer and author was in Japan doing double duty as part of the art lecture series for the Mori Art museum and plugging his latest book ¨Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

Lessig also said that while audiences, for example fans of anime, re-edit videos then reload them on Youtube for an alternative view that often offers some sociological or cultural insight, the law is against the media´s evolution from one way traffic to 2 way communication.

¨... you can't go 10 minutes without triggering the application of copyright law,¨ he said.

"The legal establishment is in denial about this, saying, 'Well, you just have to make sure the law's running efficiently,' even though it's regulating wildly beyond what anybody ever expected it would regulate. I think the key is to get people to recognize the radical change and then avoid what to many kids seems the logical consequence of this, which is to scrap copyright law."

Thoughts?

ZiA

First cell phone blogging, now cell phone novels.

A trend which started in Japan about 10 years ago called keitai shousetsu (or cell phone stories) has spread like wild fire in the Asian region thanks to ease of accessibility to technology and advanced features in multimedia phones.

Where ten years ago you actually had to grab a pen and paper, now you can just type it all up on a cell phone, post to your website and your readers can download the novel by installment.

CNN eve did a story on the phenomenon back in February this year

Yukiko Nishimura, a Linguist at Toyo Gakuen University in Japan has heralded this trend as a new genre, defending this genre as literature ,¨Some critics argue that mobile phone novels are not literature.. I think they are¨, she says.

Nishimura even held a few lectures to prove it at the 4 day conference that started June 19 on Computers and Writing backed by the University Writing Program at UC Davis.

Interesting topic but are the novels any good?

Usually they are just about teenagers falling in love¨, says Aya Tanaka, a spokesperson for Goma book publishing house who have adapted many a cell phone novel into paperback, "But it is kind of like popular comics, it is what the teenagers want to read, and for the publishers,

Above, English cell phone novel site Mobamingle

it is quite a big market and it does sell."

Sell they do, what with cell phone author Yume-Hotaru´s (pen name meaning "Dreaming Firefly" in Japanese) hit the top selling books list across the board in Tokyo bookstores with their popular cell phone novel ¨First experience¨, about two orinary Japanese teenagers coming of age story. Although it is still a billion yen industry, critics say the trend is now cooling:

¨Last year few mobile novels appeared on best-seller lists while new stories published online have lost their characteristic edginess, said Chiaki Ishihara, Literature expert and cell phone story researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Ishihara even predicts that in a few years time it will be just another trend that had its used by date.

What are your thoughts?

Check it out for yourself

Japanese cell phone novel site:

http://company.maho.jp/novel/index.html

If you want to give it a try..

http://www.mbmgl.com/services.php

Whitts

In commemoration of the great singer, dancer, performer extraordinaire that was Michael J Jackson, I decided to post these crappy techie gems.
.. MJ kicking butt as a video game character (might want to turn down the volume and scroll to 0.25 secs)

..MJ Dancing Robot for Citroen C4
..
And finally the Darth ´n´ storm trooper dance off to Thriller which has nothing to do with Japan, but I included cos it makes Whitts wince with paiiiin.. :-P

May you rest in Peace Mr Jackson.

ZiA