Hasta La Gadget!

This is the first column in a new biweekly series introducing newsletter content provided by our local research partners, INterRIDE Inc..

Mobile GPS apps

2010 saw several social media GPS apps join the bulging ranks of digital tools already out there for Japanese consumers. International names like Facebook’s Places — launched in Japan last September as its first market outside of the U.S. — and Foursquare were joined by the likes of local giant mixi also offering their own version of geo-fun. Mixi’s Check In was used 2 million times in its first month alone, indicating the strong potential for these services.

Japanese GPS services can currently be categorized as map-style apps (e.g. Navitime), “spot” or site-searching apps (Hot Pepper FooMoo), gaming apps (CoroPura), or the newer SNS apps (including Tou.ch).

The local growth isn’t surprising when set against the overall global advance of geo-services, predicted to continue expanding until 2014 and reach $134 billion. Advertising on GPS services was a mere $2 billion back in 2009 but is expected to increase to some $59 billion by 2014.

Last February saw another major release, RecoCheck by Recruit, which has information on over 4 million sites and integrates Twitter. It aims to be the number one service of its kind by March 2012. Yahoo!’s Loco, set for release in June, also promises to be the biggest in Japan and to push the market yet further.

However, as reported by SPiRE, GPS is still a minority interest for most consumers. In a survey of over ten thousand mobile phone users only 20% used the apps, of which the leader was the rather generic Google Map.

Lawson x GREE

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of its Ponta loyalty card, convenience store chain Lawson launched a campaign with mobile game platform GREE’s virtual reality shop, Omeseya-san. Users collected digital items in order to complete their Ponta mascot-themed Lawson uniform avatar. Omeseya-san’s one million members had to get five items (including digital representations of Lawson products) to claim their prize.

Liberal Democratic Party

While last year Japan’s politicians tried to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, the Opposition Liberal Democratic Party (or Jiminto) took a different approach. In February they became the first local party to open an official Facebook page. Within four days a 1,000 people had “liked” the page; this has since grown to over 3,000. Not a lot but in proportion to the numbers of Facebook users who are LDP supporters it might be a large number indeed!

In an age where Presidents are announcing their bids for re-election via their Facebook pages this might not seem a radical move, but considering the opacity and intransigence of local politics, and the stolid growth of Facebook here, it’s an interesting development.

Osaifu Keitai for Smart Phones

As smart phone sales continue to prove healthy there will be innovations to localize them, or adapt other technology to work with them. This is especially true of popular Japanese mobile actions like reading QR codes, infra-red data transfer, and e-money functionality via FeliCa chips (osaifu keitai).

Previously mophie announced plans to create an add-on casing to the iPhone so that it could work with FeliCa readers, and Softbank more recently began selling a cruder solution in the form of “e-money stickers” that could be placed on your handset to allow it to connect with an e-money system like Waon or Edy.

Now BUG (pronounced as an acronym, not an insect) has developed the Smart Sound Touch system, where stores uses readers at the POS to allow even non-FeliCa-integrated smart phones to be scanned and read, to launch apps or connect to coupon websites. This ultimately means that smart phones will be able to offer loyalty programs and e-money services. (The readers apparently also work with FeliCa-integrated handsets too.) All the SST hardware requires now is for service providers to develop apps for consumers to download.

Look, violence doesn’t solve everything, but ING Direct reckons a gentle fist bump can help fix financial quarrels between you and your buddies. Recently added to the bank’s iOS app is a feature that makes use of Bump Technologies’ API, with which a physical bump between two active devices instantly triggers a money transfer, thus saving the sender from having to put in account details. ‘Course, this is only usable for transactions within ING for the time being, so you’ll have to stick to other methods for some quick and dirty mobile payments to the outside world.

ING Direct’s iOS app adds ‘bump’ money transfer feature for well-heeled posses originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 May 2011 12:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Mashables  |  iTunes  | Email this | Comments

AT&T’s new cell tower can fit in a suitcase, help restore networks after natural disasters originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AP (PhysOrg)  | Email this | Comments

Intel's low-power-consumption Atom series — meant for notebooks and mobile devices — debuted in May of last year. Photo courtesy of Intel

Intel’s x86 chipset is coming to Android tablets. Soon.

So says Intel CEO Paul Otellini. In the company’s first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Otellini announced that Intel had received the source code for Android version 3.0 (Honeycomb) for tablets from Google, and the company is working on porting the operating system over to the x86 architecture.

Intel “expects to be able to ramp those [Android tablet] machines over the course of this year for a number of customers,” Otellini said on a conference call with reporters. And in a separate interview with Forbes, Otellini said we may see those Intel-based tablets as early as May.

While Intel’s chips have dominated the desktop and notebook industry, the company has not had so much luck with mobile devices. Instead, ARM architecture predominates among smartphones and tablets, through ARM-based chips made by various companies including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and, most recently, Nvidia.

Part of what has kept Intel’s processors from making gains in the mobile market may be the same thing that makes it so strong in the desktop and server areas.

“The big issue is power consumption,” Richard Fichera, a semiconductor analyst from Forrester Research, told Wired.com in an interview. “ARM was designed from the beginning to be low-power consumption, while Intel’s x86 came from a whole different design perspective.”

Intel, however, has taken strides in reducing power consumption with its Atom series of processors: the 2009 Atom debut found power reduced by 20 percent from the previous generation of processors.

“Intel has radically improved their performance per watt on their server and desktop chips,” Fichera said, “but this is a threshold they need to break past to move this architecture into mobile devices.”

Last week, Intel debuted its “Oak Trail” series of Atom processors — the latest in the company’s series of low-consumption chips — though some say they don’t measure up to ARM offerings.

“Intel’s core strengths are building advanced manufacturing processes and optimizing processor architectures,” wrote Romit Shah, an analyst with Nomura Equity Research. “That said, we believe the x86 architecture is not competitive versus ARM in low power applications such as mobile handsets and tablets.”

Intel’s low-consumption Atom chips are currently implemented in notebooks, not smartphones or tablets.

Otellini also signaled Intel’s move into the smartphone space should be expected in the future. “I would be very disappointed if we didn’t see Intel-based phones for sale 12 months from now,” he said.

Some of these mobile moves has been hinted at before by Intel, with little to show for it. Last July, Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired.com that January of 2011 “would clearly be the window of opportunity” for the company to bring its processors to mobile devices. January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — the premier annual event for electronics industry debuts — came and went, with no sign of Intel’s processors in smartphones or tablets premiered at the show. Many of the devices introduced are using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, which is based on the ARM version seven instruction set.

“We’re not a strong player in phones yet, but we will be,” Otellini told Forbes. “We were able to bring volume economics and technology to [PC markets], and you’ll see us do the same here…drive the power down, drive performance up, drive costs down, in typical Intel fashion—boom, boom, boom.”