Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.
Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.
There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
Adobe Experimenting With Semantic Autogeneration of 3D Worlds – ReadWriteWeb – Adobe has come up with a great application that goes way further than Microsoft Photosynth “Infinite Images is that it can assemble a world out of any collection of photos, logically connecting them based on the semantics of their descriptive tags. So, for instance, you could take a diverse group of street scenes and stitch them into something resembling Google’s Street View, except that you might start navigating down a street in London and find your self standing on a street in New Delhi.” Very cool and Adobe is the creative defacto standard so this makes sense. – I was thinking about how multimedia used to be assigned to an ‘author’. The idea of language (be it tags or prose) being used to do semantic autogeneration offers the opportunity to tear down the wall between adaptations and a story’s author.
Design
A New Look for McDonald’s – McDonald’s is rolling out new designs for its food packaging to “create unique personalities for our menu items by telling a story about each one.” Storytelling through packaging design
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role – washingtonpost.com – “The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.”
Artificial DNA Could Become Savior Of Technology | PSFK – Trends, Ideas & Inspiration – PSFK isn’t normally the place I would go for futurism but their take on artificial DNA is interesting. Artificial DNA offers opportunity as a storage medium that could be much more compact than today’s flash storage or hard drives. Artificial DNA also offers opportunities in new classes of medicinal treatments that might be personalised.
Lost In Translation: Japanese Market Not Sold On iPhone Cool Factor – In Japan, like elsewhere, gadget fans lined up to be some of the first to buy the new iPhone last week. However, after the initial rush, it appears that consumers there aren’t completely sold on the device. Part of this is down to the high quality level of services that they have been used to on their flip phones with added carrier based services and even a social network called Mixi. The iPhone will need to provide a better experience optimised for Japanese consumers
Rob Enderle does not know the meaning of surrender. Or disclosure. – MacUser – industry analyst gets called out on astroturfing. Rod Enderle is old school Silicon Valley, he worked in finance, and IT business analysis roles at Rolm. Rolm sold military specification computers to the US armed services and for other applications like oil exploration and various telecoms products. Rod Enderle would have worked with partners like IBM and Data General – in their time big enterprise technology firms. (Data General would be later bought out by EMC, now part of Dell). These connections probably helped Rob Enderle throughout his analyst career. He started as an analyst in the mid 1990s, which was a golden time. Rob Enderle was meeting large corporates rolling out ERP and CRM software, his opinions and research at Dataquest and Giga helped sway multi-million dollar deals around the world.
WordPress for iPhone – this is going to get a lot of hype, whats wrong with using the update by email option? I think this is brand over requirement. You are not a credible digerati brand unless you support the iPhone platform.