Category: private

Live Stream by iPhone Alone

When I was participating Tech Crunch 50 in San Francisco last month, I found a cute Chinese-American girl at an exhibitor’s booth.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a shot with her then, but she explained qik, an innovative cellphone stream-casting service.

She said “So far you may not use qik application unless your iPhone jail broken. But may I have your business card for future notice?”

That’s why I dropped her my card.

This week I got a custom-made qik iPhone app from them (I think it would be only for TechCrunch 50 attendees), which can be installed onto jail-unbroken iPhone, actually I did. And I ran it on my way to home.

It realizes about 250kbps uplink throughput at average, in the bus travelling as fast as 50 kilometers an hour.

Its motion comes up smoothly. You may bring a live streaming with an iPhone device alone. Both visual and audio quality are not so bad.

Because qik may cause overload to cellphone network and cellphone carriers claimed it to Apple, qik application is not available at iPhone AppStore. Then I found an interview of Mr. Miyakawa, Softbank Mobile’s CTO.

http://www.toyokeizai.net/business/interview/detail/AC/41ae5c76a7018abe6289b53e0351a417/

Softbank Mobile will start discount sales of Planex WiFi routers in order to reduce the traffic of the company’s cellphone 3G network, but I think they had better distribute FON routers for free instead. And if they distribute it together with Yahoo BB’s ISP contract, they earn the money in an entire company group, although cellphone carrier and ISP are different Softbank’s subsidiaries.

Let me say it again, qik is a completely good work. When we watch TV live programs covering F1 car race championships, we see live pictures by “on-board camera” which is embedded in running cars. Similarly, how about marathon runner’s neck-hanging iPhone with qik application? It enables livecasting at the level of athlete’s sights as TV watchers would be running together with, and it gains a sense of really being there.

If a number of runners use qik with iPhone at huge events like Tokyo Marathon and Oume Marathon, for instance, it would be very interesting as social movements, but Softbank Mobile will give up to keep the service availability.

I wonder if IBM’s WiFi handover technologies would be spread over more in the near future to solve the problem.

Meeting Two Andrews

I visited Cerego Japan’s office in Shibuya, and Mr. Andrew Shuttleworth, co-organizer of a Tokyo-based monthly event “tokyo2point0”, introduced me to Mr. Andrew Smith Lewis, founder of the company.

When Cerego Japan released an application called “BrainSpeed” around the beginning of this year,  I covered a story about their language learning site “iKnow!” in my serial column of Fuji Sankei Business-i Newspaper.   But this time, I got so impressed with a new style of learning languages one another by the contents created by the users themselves, and the new type of advertising based business model that I’ve never heard of.


(Right) Andrew Smith Lewis, Founder of Cerego Japan
(Left)  Andrew Shuttleworth, Organizer of tokyo2point0

Cerego Japan won an award called “DEMOgods” at a tech conference “DEMO”, which was held in the 2nd week of last month, I could not witness it because I was in San Francisco to attend Tech Crunch 50.

I’m looking forward to iKnow’s new features coming soon.

http://www.iknow.co.jp

CNET Japan covers iKnow! and Cerego Japan in detail.
http://japan.cnet.com/special/media/story/0,2000056936,20367453,00.htm

Debut on Asiajin

I posted my first article to Asiajin, an English blog bringing web-related news from Japan to the overseas.

http://asiajin.com/blog/2008/10/03/golf-digest-online-suspended-its-service-due-to-malicious-attacks/

With my poor skill of writing in English, I’d like to keep contributing if I have time.

I just have to finish up my story for IT Leaders magazine, but I did one for Asiajin without thinking the order.

Now, I do my best to finish up the story for IT Leaders.

Monja Party in Mid-fall

It could be under the harvest moon in mid-fall.

Bad weather forced us to give up enjoying the moon viewing, but my friends and I had a party on a cruising boat on the Tokyo Bay, and ate “monja” or half-fried thin flour dough.

I felt cold in San Francisco, it seemed I just skipped fall to winter, but in Tokyo, it’s still humid and hot as typical summer evenings in Monsoon area.

People says average Tokyoites prefer “Monja” and Osakans prefer “Okonomiyaki” or Japanese-style hot-plate pizza, but I love both despite I’m from Osaka.

I hope this rainy days pass very soon and fall atomosphere come down here in the city.

 

My iPhone Works Not Well

It’s been almost a week since I purchased iPhone 3G. As getting more apps and more podcasting programs installed, my iPhone got to hang up so repeatedly.

CNET’s podcast reported, 82% of all subscribers had experienced technical difficulties that iPhone cannot grab 3G signals…

Again, iPhone turned off in accident, in the middle of listening to that podcast.

[youtube qF_gQF18sPQ]

Expecting for next firmware update.