Hasta La Gadget!

Our friends over at CyberMedia have written up a great post on Nintendo’s new Wii-no-Ma service, which looks like it has a pretty good chance of revolutionizing content delivery in Japan.

As it is right now, most Japanese are basically watching the same handful of terrestrial stations, but the proliferation of Wii consoles in Japanese homes combined with its intuitive family-friendliness make them ripe as platform for selling traditional media content other than games.

Each family member (up to 8, which is a lot) can create their own avatar in the system, which also allows the service to better target individual users for ads and development issues. Wii-no-Ma was created along with advertising giant Dentsu which is surely looking for a new way to reach folks who are in front of their screens but not watching television.

‘Wii no ma’ is free-of-charge but has an implemented advertisement system. In order not to bother watchers with colorful, blinking pop-up ads like on PC or mobile sites Nintendo created a new form of advertisement. No advertisement is shown on the screen unless the user actively chooses so. After watching video programs on ‘Wii-no-Ma’, users are guided to ‘会社の間’ (’Kaisha no Ma’ – ‘The Companies’ Room’) an advertising platform from sponsor companies. There are twelve screens in ‘Kaisha no ma’, Each of them can be utilized by companies to communicate with the customers in ways like casting videos, asking questionnaires, giving out vouchers or delivering free samples to the household.

For the whole skinny on Wii-no-Ma and what Nintendo’s up to, check out the full post at Cybermedia.

The last time I went on Spark, the CBC Radio show on “technology and culture”, we explored the world of QR Codes. This time, host Nora Young and I talk a bit about TASPO, RFID, and the contactless future of retail.

Unfortunately, Spark decided to edit out my anti-government comments in regards to registration of smokers, but you can’t expect much out of public radio in this regard. For the record, my opposition to government regulation in smoking life has been well documented.

You can listen live today (June 10th) at 10:30 am Toronto time, subscribe to the Spark podcast, or get the mp3 of this episode by visiting their blog. I come in around the 14min mark.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending Bar Camp Tokyo with 94 of my geek and aspiring geek brethren. Perhaps I’ll go into this more in a further blog post, but suffice to say it was a great experience with people who were open to all sorts of conversation about the present and future of our digital world.

With Nob Seki of Six Apart via dshack

One of the more interesting presentations was made by Fumi Yamazaki. Fumi talked about Japanese geek culture, something we’re clearly fond of around here, and introduced some of the more creative examples to the attendees. You can see her presentation here.

Fumi’s presentation also had something that completely slipped by my radar, despite my being a regular at NicoNico Douga, Japan’s top streaming video site. We wrote about NicoNico here a bit, and Serkan Toto of Techcrunch does a nice job summing it up here.

The video below is an example from Fumi’s speech and puts together three of the most interesting user generated animations I’ve ever seen. Not being so great at Excel myself it’s hard for me to understand how it’s done, but all three clips are created purely within Excel spreadsheets and then animated frame by frame(you can see the counter in the corner going like crazy). The attention to detail is absolutely amazing, and I’m simply in awe. This is exactly the kind of creativity that makes me love Japan.

Just for comparison, the original opener for Maria Holic (the first clip) is HERE. There are 3 clips in the video below, and the third one is especially amazing.

UPDATE: Somehow Media Factory submitted a copyright claim on these videos, which they clearly had no part in making to begin with. Thanks, Media Factory, for stopping the free spread of other people’s creative activity online.

Originals can be found here, here, and here

Interestingly, I uploaded this video two years ago simultaneously on YouTube and NicoNico. The first went on to get over 4.5 million views (and counting!), while the NicoNico video has lingered at 1,500. Clearly it’s a different kind of community.

While at BarCamp I also got to have a nice chat with Mitch Altman (inventor of TV-B-Gone, made famous by Gizmodo) and played around with his soon-to-be-released Trip Glasses. Hard to explain, but here’s a video of me at Bar Camp reliving my college days through LED lights timed to my brainwaves. You can meet him as well this weekend at the Make Tokyo Meeting.

Via dshack

Check out some more pics from Barcamp Tokyo at Flickr with iMorpheus and jimgris

This is a sample piece from our online Trendpool Database. In addition to the currently running Mobile Trendpool, we have white label solutions and other custom topics running as well for companies interesting in great ideas to help them grow.

Created by NTT IT as an interactive art piece, Tenori Pop has evolved into an interesting marketing tool to connect physically with consumers using digital projections.

Overhead projectors combined with digital cameras can detect an outstretched hand and instantly beam an image onto the hand. As the hand moves, the image follows with it, and can be combined with other images to create something new. For example, bringing a “sun” image and a “rain” image together can create a combination “flower” image onto the joined hands in the space where they meet. In addition, it can be used as a group so people can enjoy it together, passing images to each other and playing games. Most importantly, it makes people stop and pay attention!

Trend potential
While digital art projects are often fun for users, they’re often impractical for real-world marketing situations. Tenori Pop engages users in a fun way, and goes so far as to physically join brands and consumers, even if only for a brief digital moment.

Geisha Tokyo, the company behind the innovative Augmented Reality character Cyber Figure ARis is now going to be releasing a guide book with publisher Kodansha that goes into detail on how to best use the software. For the uninitiated, augmented reality uses software to mix digital enhancements with real-world images as seen through a camera. For example, Sekai Camera for the iPhone can recognize items and overlay supplementary information on top. ARis works the same way by reading codes printed on cubes and on special tools.

The new guide book explores the ARis software in depth to enhance the user experience.

The book includes the secret story behind how ARis became a maid, tips for making ARis do special motions, how to change her into 10 different outfits, how to keep ARis happy, an interview with the voice of the character, and the story as to how the system was developed. In fact, we were surprised at how deep the software actually goes, considering that we’ve used it ourselves on many occasions.

Included with the book is also a diorama, though we aren’t completely clear on how it’s integrated. What it seems to be is a coded paper construction that becomes a room for ARis to live in and explore, including a closet, a place for cooking, and even a shower.

While we’ve seen Augmented Reality technology used elsewhere in the world, from magazine ads to trading cards, ARis has shown just how it can be used in a practical, hands-on way as a consumer good. Indeed, it has great potential for marketing when used properly as well, a topic we get into in the Mobile Trendpool.

For those who want the software/kit, ARis is available at JapanTrendShop.