Hasta La Gadget!

With the six month mark of the disasters in Japan coming up there is some renewed talk about the situation here. Mostly things are back to normal, with energy saving measures over for now, earthquakes a lot less frequent and people’s conversations no longer centered on the “problems”. We did stumble across this short film, “Blind”, which was produced through Kickstarter funding.

It’s a fantastically well made piece that is a poignant reminder how problems don’t just go away by turning a blind eye to them. I particularly like the attention to detail with the costumes that sees school girls having bejeweled and customized their gas masks as only a Tokyo school girl would do.

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Japanese company Eureka have developed a great free app perfect for those who like to catch a few more minutes sleep in the morning and hit the snooze button once too often. Okite, meaning “wake up” in Japanese, is an alarm clock app that links directly to your twitter account and posts embarrassing messages each time you hit snooze and don’t get up!

Once downloaded users register whether male or female and can set the alarm in the same way that the iPhone alarm is set. Once the alarm goes off in the morning and you decide you need that extra two minutes of shut eye, hitting the snooze button automatically then sends out embarrassing tweets to all your followers with the hashtag #okite. Tweets such as “dressed as a sailor now”, or “not enough talented people like me in the world” are sent out at random each time. The humour is distinctly Japanese but I certainly like the idea of deterring sleepers from missing trains in the morning through fear of embarrassment.

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A new web service has sprung up in Japan that describes itself not as a search engine but a “recommend engine”. A new Japanese startup, Media Jump, is behind the service that was launched last week called “Kita Kore” meaning “just what I wanted” in Japanese slang. The site can be described as a social media events hub that recommends different events to registered members based on preferences. What is interesting is that the more users use the site the more it learns about them and the better the recommendations can be.

After entering simple information on your preferences upon registering, the site then learns from the history of which events you either attend or “Kita Kore”, similar to the Facebook like button. It can then begin to recommend different events automatically to you that may appeal based on the preferences and the users history. Once registered you can also link it up to various different social media accounts including the main players; Twitter, Facebook and Mixi. Users then have the option of instantly sharing the events they have been recommended or stumbled upon to their network. This works both as a nice piece of marketing for the site but also possibly gaining interest in various events that some wouldn’t normally have an interest in.

Currently events are updated daily and listed throughout Japan with users being able search by region. A nice touch is that the site is also linked automatically to your Google Calendar and there is a stand alone calendar customizable on the site also. The site also features a nice explanatory video, telling the story of a bored office girl and the “Kita Kore” grandfather character who ends ups becoming her personalized events planner.

The team behind Media Junk actually originally started out at the Japanese advertising giant Hakuhodo, so it is no surprise that the site is also fairly full of different targeted ads. Users also get recommended events that may not necessarily fit with their preferences but are “featured” by the site. As long as they don’t become to obtrusive it actually could work as an interesting business model, especially being able to target more personalized ads s it learns more about its users. The idea of a social networking events site, such as this, is pretty cool and it will be interesting to see how well it gets adopted and just how well it can match up events to fit the users profiles as time passes. One thing that does let it down slightly at present is the lack of a mobile version of the website, but this will no doubt come in time.

Smart Girls Choose Smartphones

A lot has been made of the popularity of smartphones among local female consumers but what’s the reality?

According to data quoted by INterRIDE and drawn from multiple sources, smartphones are actually preferred by gadget-loving men, not women. Some 26.3% of men have a smartphone as of August 2011, against 18.3% of women. The regular Japanese feature phone is still the device of choice for 67.2% of women, compared to for 51.9% of men.

A much-discussed local trend has seen consumers using both a regular Japanese keitai and a fashionable new smartphone, allowing them to maintain their familiar phone lifestyle while also playing with the latest popular toy. 10.4% of Japanese women are dual-users like this, but actually it’s even higher for men, 17.1%.

Though a lot of the marketing clamor has been targeted at girls, it’s the boys then who for the most part are the reigning smartphonistas. However, compared to figures six months ago, the proportion of women with smartphones (single device or dual usage) is now just under 30%, which is actually a three-fold increase, indicating the ladies might just catch up with the lads before long.

Demographically, as things stand, female smartphones users are mostly in their twenties (22.4%), followed by women in their thirties (16.9%). Interesting, male users are also mostly in the same two age groups, though it’s a much tighter split: twenties (35.2%) vs. thirties (35.1%).

What are they actually using these smartphones to do, though? According to NHN Japan data from April, there is almost no significant change between male and female users here in both their twenties or thirties, though curiously girls are playing games quite a lot more it seems, contradicting apparent stereotypes.

User Backlash?

After being seduced by blanket ad campaigns and mountains of hype, people can often feel a bit disappointed by their shiny new purchases once the novelty goes away. In a survey of 500 female smartphone users aged 20 to 39, people were thus asked to rank their biggest complaints with the devices.

Drawing a joint “winning” place were gripes about the reception being bad and that you cannot use infrared transmission (a common function among local phone users to exchange telephone numbers and email addresses), both with 35%. These were ahead of the next complaints by quite a margin: glitches (21%) and the inability to view Flash sites (19%).

This summer we have seen new smartphone releases for specific female users. These include phones like Sharp’s 007SH J, with a customized keypad interface to make it easier to operate for women with long nails, along with a bundle of models in girl-friendly pinks and reds. Panasonic have even created a special “My First Smart Phone” [sic] site to help educate females about the new lifestyle they can enjoy with the devices.

The question to be answered in the next quarter is whether all this effort by marketers et al leads to strong sales.

Smartphones and E-Commerce

The extent to which the introduction of smartphones may change the e-commerce market in Japan is something we are watching.

In a June survey of 446 iPhone users and 423 Android users, it was asked whether they used their phones for performing practical functions like shopping. 59% of iPhone users had participated in e-commerce (i.e. online shopping for books, clothes, DVDs, tickets etc — not apps) with their device, against 44% for Android. Regular shoppers percentages (10 times or over) are much lower, though — just 16.8% for the iPhone and only 5.4% for Android.

Though users really enjoy browsing the internet with their smartphones, it seems that their usage centers on mostly “surface”-level actions, such as interacting via social media, as opposed to shopping, working and so on. In terms of SNS, at least, Twitter is the clear leader of the pack, claiming 54.5% of users (the service now has 12.5 million members). Mixi is second with only 46.4%, hinting that Twitter’s success here has been greatly boosted by the mass release of smartphones.

This is the latest in a series of blogs based on newsletters provided by our local research partner, INterRIDE Inc.

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We recently attended the Disaster Relief Charity Talk Session held at Mori Art Museum titled, “Designing Japan for Tomorrow”. Amongst the panel who shared their visions on how they see Japan can rebuild itself out of the disaster were some of Japan’s most noticeable architectural names.

In the wake of the disaster in Tohoku a number of architects and designers have come together to form a group called the “Kishin no Kai”. On the panel from the group at the event were such names as Ito Toyo, Kengo Kuma, Riken Yamamoto, Naito Hiroshi and Kazuyo Seijima from Sanaa. A veritable who’s who of Japan architects all committed to helping rebuild Japan. The group spoke on some of their projects they are currently involved in which included town planning and relief housing design up in quake stricken Tohoku. “Local architects and craftsmen are the most important people to help in rebuilding the area, and vital to this is the use of local resources in the process”, commented Kengo Kuma during his frank presentation where he stressed that the group are not part of the government, who have been heavily criticized recently, but working together with the people in need.

The full session was broadcast on Ustream and translated into English:

Video streaming by Ustream

The International Congress of Architecture, UIA, will be held in Tokyo this year from September 25th to October 1st, described as the “Olympics of Architecture”. Designers and architects from around the world will gather to discuss this years main theme, ” “DESIGN 2050,” discussing the future of architecture and cities, no doubt focusing upon how Japan can rebuild in sustainable ways. CScout Japan will also be running archiTokyo immersions around the same time, not only exploring the hidden designs and secrets we have uncovered, but actually meet the most influential architects working in Japan today. Participants will have the chance to discuss the way architecture and design can play a part in the way our future environments are shaped, not only in Japan but on a global scale.