A Wandering Engineer's Remarks

Am I "Care Taker?"

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

This article written in Japanese criticizes how Japanese expatriates are spoiled and they are worthless to respect.

I fully agree this criticism and have to admit that the expatriates have room to improve their way of lives.

According to this article, the expatriates are called “Care Takers" which means “Immature Kids of whom locally hired employees always have to take care.”

CEO sent from Japan is called King of Care Taker, and well-known in terms of his/her inefficiency where instructions are vague and not-prioritized.

The expatriates know very well what are taking place in Tokyo Head quarters, but they don’t know what is happening over the world. They can’t discuss topics related history, culture, and politics, but can enjoy chatting on baseball, golf, and gossips.

It’s a painful truth to overcome.

Here is the original article. Unfortunately, it is written in Japanese and worthwhile to translate to English.

http://business.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/topics/20111226/225643/

A New Year's Resolution

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:48:00 +0000

Read an article, "Managing for breakthroughs in productivity" by Allan L. Scher, 2005, during New Year's vacation.
How might we intentionally produce productivity breakthroughs in our existing
organizations and culture?
There is a correlation between the magnitude of the possible breakthrough and the size of the gap between the business-as-usual results and the results committed to.
You commitment to pursue your dream will be your great priority.
Knowing a breakdown which is the result of the gap between what can be
predicted and what is committed, you have to come up with your agenda to fulfill the breakdown.

That is a part of my new year's resolutions.

Wine Party with Opus One

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 05:55:00 +0000

I'm not into Opus One, which is a premium wine more expensive than its value. One of my friends nevertheless asked me to buy it last month. I remember he asked me Kistler chardonnay before. Buying premium wine bottles is a bit embarrassing. It's like buying Louis Vuitton bags during a business trip in Paris.

Anyway, I got one bottle, and donated it to a wine party yesterday.

Five wine addicts started with Pertois Moriset Grand Cru Brut, then tried to blind wine tasting a usual.
My score was two points. Here is a memo for my memory.

Opus One 2008, Cabernet Sauvignon 86%, Petit Verdot 8%, Merlot 4%, Cabernet Franc 1%, and Malbec 1% from Napa
Chambolle-Musigny Premer Cru Les Noirots 2003, Pinot Noir from Chambolle-Musigny
Chateau Calon-Segur 2003, Cabernet Sauvignon 60%, Merlot30%, Cabernet Franc 10% from Saint-Estephe,
Lisini Brunello di Montalcino 2005, from Montalcino,Toscana

Guessing Pino Noir was so easy, then I got one point. Nrinello confused me so much. It tasted like thin but elegant French Bordeaux. I took it for Chateau Calon-Segur. Opus one showed traces of clove and dark chocolate. Then I scored the second correct guess.

Emergencce of Big Data found in Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:20:00 +0000

October 13, 2011

translated from my Japanese version in Wireless Wire News

From the author’s understanding, during the past decade, "social media was born through information shared instantly via human networks, and likewise, the era of 'information socialization' has arrived, in which scattered information is extensively collected, assigned value, and provided." When Tim O'Reilly proposed the concept of "What is Web 2.0" in September 2005, his insight was fresh.

One of the concepts is a database that grows in conjunction with users. As the amount of user data increases, services are enhanced, pulling in more user data. When data exceeds critical mass, a service with great value is created, against which other companies cannot compete. Typical examples are various Google services. Data is an asset; the principle asset of competitive power. O'Reilly said that "Data is the Next Intel Inside" and how to design places where data is generated is important. He showed the direction of Internet services in the Web era.

Around this same time, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the word "cloud" to describe a large, global scale server group, which came into being about a year later on August 9, 2006. Then, two weeks later, the Amazon EC2 service was introduced on August 24. This was not due to simple happenstance. The iPhone was launched in the US the following year, on June 29, 2007, and smartphones emerged that provide services in collaboration with the cloud. The introduction of Android, which followed the iPhone, clarified the functions of the device, that is, it generates real global data and is a cloud device.

In short, as the concept that data is an important asset for corporate activities was shown by Web 2.0, SNS using accumulated data, and Internet services such as media accumulation, distribution, and search, etc., have advanced dramatically due to the emergence of the cloud, cloud devices, and large scale database processing technology. "Information socialization", in which public services are provided on a global scale by linking as many as 100 million computers, created the value-added resource called "Global Brain," to borrow from Tim O’Reilly’s term. Examples include Google voice recognition, machine translation, Facebook, and Twitter data analysis recommendations, etc. The situation in 2011 can be expressed using the following formula.

Professor Maruyama, chairman of Japan Android Group, described the size of data accumulation and processing happening on a global scale as "Web-Scale" (2009).1

What is Web-Scale data? At this time, Web-Scale data includes server logs, sensor information, images/video, SNS data, blogs, and social graphs from Twitter and Facebook, etc. I call those items “Big Data.” In general, the characteristics of such data are that they are large-scale, their structure is not constant 2, and a quick response is required. Furthermore, much of the data has a historical meaning and thus, in many cases, it cannot be thinned out. The challenge is how to process Big Data. There are two aspects to this: algorithms and systems.

1. If it is not Web-Scale, it is not a cloud. A cloud is a system technology or platform that supports the Web-Scale explosion of information and expansion of users, and simply calling the data warehouse of a company a "private cloud" cannot be considered to be grasping its true nature.

2. Because the structure is not constant, one idea is to use NoSQL. However, since data modeling allows data to be handled as structured data, I think it is proper to handle data in SQL. Also, it is necessary to use NoSQL+Hadoop when you want statistical data, and to use SQL by placing importance on consistency when you want to reproduce data itself. I think the spread of Hadoop will depend on how popular the statistical use of Big Data becomes.

Designing the "place" for Big Data collection as part of a service

Machine learning technology that automatically learns useful rules and statistical models from data, as well as pattern recognition technology for identifying data from acquired rules or statistical models, have been researched to date. Pattern recognition researchers were interested in methodology and algorithms themselves, such as how to convert voice data to text, how to automatically enter handwritten text into a computer, and how to automatically follow images of the human face. They could easily write research papers if they conceived a good algorithm and simply conducted experiments implementing real data.

Until 2005, there was no Big Data. However, after 2006, the time came when people began trying to create and improve services by applying machine learning and pattern recognition to Big Data. You can look at the success of Google. There have been many case examples of "More Data beats Better Algorithms (MDbBA)". Google's auto driving demonstration is one good example. Without relying on combinations of complicated algorithms, the demonstration showed that a car was able to automatically drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles using collected map data and combinations of distance measurements and image sensors.

Automatic driving is an example of a service that exceeds a critical point involving machine learning when there is sufficient data. That being said, there are also many successful case studies for introducing machine learning frameworks. Machine learning is a framework in which the system, when there is correct data, automatically makes adjustments in order to obtain the appropriate answers. Therefore, if good learning algorithms are designed for a given problem class--in other words, a service--the data correction and performance improvement loops correctly.
Such machine learning frameworks are carried out by character recognition, voice recognition, machine translation, landmark recognition, or facial recognition and are provided as Internet services. For example, the level of machine translation has almost reached a practical usage level between related language families, such as English, French and Spanish. There is still room for improvement in translation algorithms, and this is a good opportunity for publishing research papers. But the important thing is to actually design a location for Big Data collection in which the machine learning framework is incorporated into part of the service. We must be aware that the pattern recognition study environment has changed significantly in the past decade.

Finding what comes next in facial recognition

In 2001, at a facial recognition conference, Paul Viola and Michael Jones gave a presentation about an object detector called boosting. The announcement of this algorithm was the moment when the service called facial identification entered the area of "More Data beats Better Algorithms (MDbBA)". After that, there were many algorithm improvements to greatly improve performance, but facial region tracking used in digital cameras was based on the method used in this announcement.

▼ Presentation at face detector conference[PDF]

Researchers are requested to do two things.

1. Develop the next MDbBA area by inventing new algorithms and methods. Become the second Viola and Jones.

2. In the MDbBA area, study platforms for Big Data processing, in addition to algorithms. Engineering is designing both the algorithm and the platform.

IT engineers and entrepreneurs are requested to do the following:

• Be the first to find out what is ready for commercialization in the MDbBA area and use it as a device for Internet service.

Silicon Valley is not the only outlet for Internet service innovation. The advent of the cloud, database processing technology, and cloud devices gave Internet design opportunities to all people. In general, it is important to think about devices that collect Big Data, but this is not limited to pattern recognition applications, since there are pattern recognition technologies scattered throughout Japan. By all means, I want them to adjust their focus.

The following five topics can be highlighted:

1. What is the next area for Big Data beats Better Algorithms? Achievement of character, voice, and facial recognition, and then the next thing is food? How about predicting the weather or consumer behavior?

2. To what degree can the latest algorithms, such as Bayesian modeling, scale for Big Data?

3. What are the facts and fictions about Big Data? How effective is it for social networking analysis?

4. How popular can Hadoop and NoSQL become?

5. What will the Global Brain look like in 10 years?

Big Data is used in a wide range of areas, including marketing, financial security, social infrastructure optimization, and medical care. This conference cannot possibly cover them all. However, above all, we would like you to focus on this conference as a place for exchange between pattern recognition researchers and the IT industry.

Minoru Etoh, Ph.D.
Director at NTT DOCOMO, Service & Solution Development Department, and President & CEO of DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA). Visiting Professor at Cybermedia Center Osaka University. He has been engaging in research and development in the multimedia communication and mobile network field for 25 years. He entered Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (currently Panasonic Corporation) in 1985 and researched moving image coding at the Central Research Laboratory and pattern recognition for ATR. He entered NTT DOCOMO in 2000 and wasCEO of DOCOMO USA Labs (Silicon Valley) from 2002 to 2005. Currently, he is in charge of development related to data mining, media understanding, smartphones, home ICT, machine communication, and information search.

An Italian Bar near Shimbashi Station

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:50:00 +0000

Yesterday, I joined Android Bazaar and Conference 2011 Winter which was held in University Tokyo. After the conference, I stopped by an Italian Bar called "Italian Bar UOKIN" which is being operated by UOKIN restaurant group.

Someone might say this is not Italian but Spanish, maybe another one says this is not Italian nor Spanish but Japanese. That implies this restaurant serves a fusion cuisine from Italian, Spanish and Japanese.
The food is delicious, Aqua Pazza, Terrine, Carpaccio, Bagna Cauda, Smoked Oysters, Steamed Mushroom and Whelk with very affordable prices, say JPY500-800 (USD6-10) for each plate. They have a wide selection of wines also, you can try various reasonable prices.
This restaurant is very small and busy. Within 2 hours, you are asked to leave so as to welcome other guests. In that sense, the atmosphere is casual enough to rush into four or five small plates with a bottle of red wine.

Tokyo has many Italian and Spanish bars; I'd appreciate living here.

New Year's Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:53:00 +0000

The next decade will show another landscape which is completely different from what the last decade has shown to us. During the last decade, we have been experiencing the successful innovation of i-mode derived in 1999 from the combination of ACCESS micro-browser and DOCOMO’s always-on mobile packet network that had been already existed in 1998, years ahead GSM GPRS packet network development.

After having the success, rules of the game are changing from local to global, from walled-gardens to open markets, and from pay services to fee-on-free serves. Telecommunication operators need to act otherwise they are doomed. Given no status quo, a rolling stone gathers no moss (in American Interpretation).

The i-mode business is now hitting on a plateau on the first ‘S’ curve, thus DOCOMO R&D needs to jump onto a second ‘S’ curve.

(http://anphase.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Innovation-S-Curve.jpg)

Where will be such a next ‘S’ curve? Here are some hints.

The essence of Communication is secure and reliable “Redirection” which appears at several levels: packet routing, directory services for session creation, search engine applications, and SNS relation such as Facebook. As we know, that essential redirection functionalities are now away from telecommunication operators’ monopoly, and being integrated to web services. Any Internet company who owns data enough to provide redirection functionality may replace the telecommunication operation with their own. Google voice, skype, and twitter are good examples. Only data with a large customer base for redirection has the power to win the game. Thus, operators’ leverage lies in two holds: 1. Scale of data, customer-base, delivery system and sufficient free cash flow, and 2. Trustability, in other word, reliability of redirection.

Redirection may have effects in the following two areas.

Machine Communication.　That means “non cellular phone communication” in a broader sense. The market expansion of wireless internet card shows very positive figures nowadays. Dr. Keiji Tachikawa, the CEO of NTT DOCOMO at that time in 2000, predicted that around 20 million cats and dogs in Japan would wear tracking devices linked to cellular networks by 2010. Although his prediction has not come true yet, his envisaged direction is valid enough to explain the current non-voice cellular application trends.Seeking non-voice communication services is the key to expand the revenue. Here the crucial point is that we design our business model carefully so as to promote our business to be a machine communication platform business. At this moment, most “Machine Communication” businesses have remained at just selling data communication cards.My colleagues at DOCOMO Service & Solution development department invented a digital photo frame service called Otayori Photo Service™ in 2009. (This system was adopted by Korean Telecom and exported to Korea. See http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2010/001492.html). That’s a good example to thinks about the next step. Any Machine communication platform should have a redirection function empowered by data or reliability.
Federation of Data Monetization. There are things multiple companies can accomplish working together that they couldn't do alone. That’s O’Reilly’s remark in “What lies ahead: Data” (see http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/12/2011-data.html) .Data mining, to which I devote everything from machine learning algorithm developments to high-performance massive parallel servers deployment at DOMO, is a tough process, since without mining the data we cannot find its value. Data mining involves very ironically self definition. If we are allowed to federate data among data-driven companies, we can reach to critical points where innovations emerge. Let us see what will happen. http://strataconf.com/strata2011 may give us some clue to figure out the future.　Data is the power. Federation is the key to reach the critical points.

That’s it about S-curve identification. In identifying the next ‘S’ and increasing its success rate, we need collaboration with external companies. The open innovation concept described by Chesbrough is essentially imperative to generate the next innovation. That includes, in general, licensing out of patents, collecting ideas, collaborating with other businesses, external R&D or consultants on development and so on.

(http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/uploaded_images/Open-Innovation-Funnel-718893.jpg)

The term, open innovation, is easy to understand though, it is not easy to implement.

We need the culture transformation Our way of seeking next S-curves with open innovation scheme should move toward High Performance Culture. Those consists of

• Empowered people and cross-functional communication,

• Creating focused, collaborative, results-driven teams; energizes others,

• Integrating existing solutions without not-invented-here syndrome and adding new values,

• Facilitating the creation and communication of a compelling and strategically sound vision,

• Changing our mind from “technology push” to “collaborative innovation” with business departments (ultimately i.e., our customers), and

• Transforming our value from technology consultation to commitment of any necessary technical support until its service launch; that means we need to engage “concurrent engineering.”

Implementation of Open Innovation scheme requires culture transformation.

With the above consideration, I hope year 2011 will give us good developer experience.

What Innovation entails, i.e., Neuer Kombinationen

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 07:38:00 +0000

Innovation is the source of new business. We need to understand what R&D efforts are needed to generate innovations in this era where the ecosystem is currently undergoing great changes driven by globalization.

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the leading economists of the 20^th century, defined innovation as “new combinations” (Neuer Kombinationen). He asserted that innovation refers to the new goods, new production methods, new markets, and new organizations that are borne out of these “combinations.”

This points to a new way to change society, particularly the process of setting new values and bringing about change by coming up with new combinations from existing elements. I learned from my mentors that development is based on existing technology, i.e., it is made up of validated technologies, and that including unvalidated technologies, i.e., those still in the research stage, is not allowed. An iconic example of using only validated, i.e., dependable, technologies is the Apollo Project, which aimed to land a man on the moon and bring him back to Earth. In that massive system development, only dependable technologies were used. The plan was implemented by combining existing technologies. But research is different. In research, the goal is to come up with innovations based on technological discoveries or inventions. If inventive technologies have foundational versatility, then combinations geared towards practical applications can be made from them later. This is the reason that in the development of scientific technologies, the wave of inventions and discoveries of technical elements and basic theories and the wave of systematization, although the latter did not come right after, came about through mutual interference.

NOTE: The field of communications is still experiencing the systematization wave.

Going back to innovation, the main thing is how to be able to come up with new combinations. As an example, in 1998, i-mode was born out of the combination of DOCOMO’s　always-on mobile packet network and microbrowsers.

You can either seek out combinations around the world, or, more importantly, come up with attractive platforms that the world will seek out. To do this, open innovation and concurrent engineering must be practiced. In open innovation, a new system is designed from a combination of your own company’s and other companies’ technologies. In such cases, even the operation of the system can be delegated to other companies. In concurrent engineering, development of technology is carried out in coordination with the operations department and with a constant evaluation of its relationship with the market and with other companies. In other words, market search and technological development, which includes research, should be done in parallel. These two are indivisible activities and must be linked with investment activities.

When I was fresh out of university and entered the industry, I learned this saying, “The more half-hearted you are as an engineer, the more conservative you become.” The average successful engineer would stick to his technology and work style of ten years ago and would not change and challenge himself to learn about new technical fields. He was content with the status quo. Since innovation is a process that brings about new values and changes to society, it revolutionizes the ecosystem. Around the world, convergence of terminal platforms and consolidation of network services on the Internet are advancing. There is no stopping the wave of innovation; there is the emergence of cloud computing, which enables a service delivery platform that can serve from millions to several hundred millions of clients, as there was the emergence of search services, internet shopping, electronic publications, social network services, and smartphone application stores. Ecosystems for these innovations did not exist ten years ago. Thus, innovation necessitates creation of new ecosystems rather than just adapting to them. In this era, there is no room for conservative and half-hearted engineers. It would be easy to find comfort in existing ecosystems, but this will not encourage innovation. I hope that we can have the readiness to challenge ourselves to create new environments and take up new technical fields.

To conclude, let me reiterate that what innovation entails is facing the challenge to pursue new combinations and to reconstruct ecosystems.

Out of nowhere strategy for Fly Fishing

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:37:00 +0000

As for a successful fly fishing, there exist three ways to achieve it. Those are to be

1. a Fly Fishing master with excellent F.F. skills and tactics
2. a wealthy person who can fly to north in a long distance.
3. a healthy person who can climb up/down through mountains from/into rivers.

The latter two approaches adopt an “out-of-nowhere” strategy, in which we can go to a promising place dedicated only for my company. None except us can do F.F. there.
On August 30th, I woke up 3:00 AM, and I drove my car 100 mile to north. Moreover, 10 mile trail walk and 1000 foot cliff climbing brought me to such a promising place.

I was so tired and exhausted though, I got three trouts of 1 foot size.
This F.F. concludes this season.

Somewhere in north

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 01:13:00 +0000

Fly Fishing (F.F. in short) is one of my favorites. I think F.F. is completely different from other fishing sports which use real baits such as worms. Thus F.F. by definition is an artificially difficult sport. I prefer dry fly fishing, with line and artificial flies that float on cold mountain streams. Targets are trouts.

Have you ever watched the movie called “A river runs through it?”

The movie shows American F.F. which is in wider and deeper rivers. I prefer small cold streams in high mountains. This summer I enjoyed such trout fishing in north. Doing F.F. in mountains relives me of stress and pains in urban life.

There was a perfectly peaceful atmosphere. I felt an illusion I almost met the Forest Spirit (Shishigami in the original Japanese), described as a "god of life and death" which appeared in Princess Mononoke.

I caught trouts, some of them had beautiful parr mark, bigger trouts became pseudo smolt.

Nice weather, goof friends and beautiful trouts were there.

A yamame, a kind of trout

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:34:00 +0000

Last weekend, I took a train and hit the road to Fukushima, a northern prefecture 200km up from Tokyo.
Cherry trees were still blooming with pink color and the atmosphere showed early spring.

The reason why I was there is fly fishing(F.F.). I don't like fishing, which is time consuming and boring in general. As for F.F., however, it is not fishery, but shooting sport, which really implies "deportare" in Latin meaning.
On April 29th, Greenery Day, I got just one chance to hook a yamame, a small nimble trout, and caught her into my lading net. She was beautiful and released to the stream.

Bordeaux Wine Tasting Party

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 02 May 2010 00:12:00 +0000

I had a wine tasting party with my regular friends on April 18th
The main theme was to enjoy Bordeaux.

Wines were
1.Les Forts de Latour 2003 from Pauillac, Cabernet Sauvignon 78% Merlot 22%
2.Chateau Prieure-Lichine 1998 from Margaux, Cabernet Sauvignon 52% Merlot: 42% Cabernet Franc: 1% Petit Verdot 5%
3.Chateau Canon 2003 from St Emilion Merlot 55%, Cabernet Franc 45%
4.La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion 2006 from Graves, Cabernet Sauvignon 48%, Merlot 45%, Cabernet Franc 7%
5.Chateau Clerc Milon 1973 from Pauillac, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc
Those are shown from left to right in this picture.

Five participants enjoyed gorgeous rich tastes gifted from Bordeaux.
Food was also great. Thanks to the host family.

Latour was said it was of the best year, and Parker point is around 93!

My score was two out of five unfortunately. I correctly told Canon and Clerc Milon because of those different Merlot & Cab Franc and aged tastes respectively.

Les Forts de Latour was marvelous though, I made a permutation error by taking Haut-Brion as Latour, Latour as Prieure-Lichine, Prieure-Lichine as Haut-Brion. Four of us made the same score “two,” and the host marked three right tastes, which includes Latour in addition to the two. Congratulations on his win.

Crowd Computing (not Cloud Computing)

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:26:00 +0000

This week, I completed a technical report draft, which was submitted to an IEICE MoMuC workshop , at Yokosuka, on Mar 4th 2010
The panel title is “Real Value of Cloud with Devices” and my document is entitled “Mobile, Cloud, and Crowd Computing”, which was uploaded to my home page.

Here is the highlight.
"Cloud Computing" is a marketing buzzword in some communities with no real user experience. Does cloud computing mean gigantic scale server integration with scale-out technologies? The question is hard to respond for people who haven't experienced benefits from cloud applications without knowing those are from clouds. More insights are needed to understand what it really means.

Don’t stick to server technologies when trying to understand “cloud computing.” We should pay more attention to “cloud devices” also. Cloud devices with personal data integration will be an extremely fertile incubation environment for new and innovative killer applications.
Let me explain the reason. In 1990s, we saw the dawn of personal communication with always-on anytime anywhere connection by phone, e-mail, and web browsing. Many web services emerged. Years 2000-2010 are characterized by social network services. i-phone has become an irreplaceable gadget for Facebook and Twitter in US and Europe. People are now using cloud devices to share (quasi) real-time information with their friends and family. That is a different communication style besides the personal communication in 1990's. Recent five years, cell-phone has become an information hub in our daily life. ``always-on'' mobile infrastructure has brought a community-based popular communication culture that was never seen.
The author is using Apple's MobileMe, Evernote, Google's services, SugarSync
, and DOCOMO's address book backup service. Those applications represent data store and integration as essential functions in communication.
The core data must be not only personal ones but also community ones.

With the recent popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and similar microblogging systems, we must note that it is increasing "social capital." Twiter is used for (1)daily chatter, (2)conversations, (3)sharing information/URLs, and (4)reporting news. Those usage are shared over people by clouds, specifically information source, information seeker, and friends.

Now, the personal data is surely being stored into clouds through information hubs (i.e., cell-phones). All the data is not necessary to carry. Those are stored in the clouds, and invoked over wireless broad band networks when necessary.
The race just began on to aggregate and to integrate the data over people so as to promote the data to social capital. Location, identity, schedule, addresses, and SNS connection of people online with whom we have a shared connection will create interpersonal functions. A system based on the integration may foster relationship building by allowing users to interact other members of their community, and consequently contributes to harnessing collective intelligence.
Let me call it “Crowd Computing.”

My Talk at Japan Android Group

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:27:00 +0000

Japan Android Group invited me to give a talk, given two keywords:cloud and Android.
Here is the abstract and snapshot of my presentation at Japan Android Group, Tokyo, Jan. 18th, 2009.

An Operator's View on Cloud Device Era
This talk conveys three major messages: 1.Emergence of cloud devices and its impact to communication culture among people, 2.Role of broadband wireless, especially of 3G Long Term Evolution (3G LTE) in the era of cloud devices, and 3.Operator’s imperatives to foster a new ecosystem with innovative content providers (CPs), e.g., Android Market participants.The concept of cloud computing is not far from Tim O’Reilly’s insight: Web 2.0 (see http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html) . What is changing from the original web.2.0 concept is that data aggregation and integration over clouds is in full progress and those have reached to a critical stage for communication paradigm shift. You can see those examples in Google applications, Twitter, mobile SNSes, etc. (see also my blog article at http://micketoh.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-2010-r-plan-beyond-web-20-and-cloud.html) The 3G LTE technology will support such cloud devices in two years by providing a fat pipe with very low latency, say 10msec. Lessons learned from AT&T wireless' case in launching i-phones are reported and discussed so as to emphasize inevitable broadband wireless. As for the last message, operator’s imperatives, we point out operator’s customer base, with payment systems and customers’trusting data, leverages creating a new ecosystems in the cloud device era. Those imperatives are (a) providing service charging system, (b) customers’ data aggregation and its fair use, and (c) providing network APIs especially of location, presence and AAA, to CPs in the new ecosystem. Detailed discussion follows in the talk.

I uploaded several keynote presentations which I made in the past.
If you are interested in mobile multimedia, content delivery over wireless network, and cell-phone sensors, please visit this URL http://micketoh.web.fc2.com/keynote.htm

My 2010 R&D plan beyond Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:51:00 +0000

Here is my My 2010 R&D resolution (to be exact, that is my consolidated R&D plan.)

Nowadays, I am often invited to several conferences so as to present my thoughts about “cloud and mobile devices.” I have been saying that killer application enablers will emerge from these ideas:

Cellular Fat Pipe (will be available soon)
Cellular Phone as Sensor Hub, where cellular phones are now equipped with GPS(commodity) +Compass +Gravity +Motion + Intelligent Processing of Image and Audio data
Cellular Phone as Information Hub over Cloud that integrates the data: mail, address, schedule, .whatever!
Application Market as Incubation Platform toward Cambrian Explosion of Killer Application Candidates.

See one of my presentations for further details (MS IE is recommended to see).

As for the new term, “cloud”, personally speaking, I don’t have a strong opinion. “Cloud” is a buzz word recent two years. As for the definition of “Cloud Computing”, you can refer to the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
A more important point is that the recent technology and market trend are still in good accordance with Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 concept.
On 09/30/2005, Tim O’Reilly described “What is Web 2.0” at his home page
The key concept consists of

The web as platform,
Harnessing collective intelligence,
Data is the next Intel Inside,
End of the software release cycle,
Light weight programming models,
Software above the level of a single device, and
Rich user experience.

I admire his and his colleagues’ insights in what was going on mid 200X.
“The web as platform” implies “cloud computing.” Of course, the web as platform doesn’t explain web-scale (i.e., gigantic scale) computing technologies such as Google File System and Amazon EC2 virtualization for Platform-as-a-Service. Nevertheless, the concept expressed by the buzzword “cloud” has been mostly covered by the heart of web 2.0.

What is changing from the original web 2.0, in other words, the noteworthy point of change is that data aggregation and integration in cloud servers is in full progress and those have reached to a critical state for a communication paradigm shift. According to O’Reilly remark about “Data is the next Intel Inside, he said “the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

Yes, that’s why I started a data-mining project in 2006 inside NTT docomo, given tons of data (tera-byte order) every single day. Data has been and will be vitally important.
The discussion point is what type of paradigm shift we are facing.
When looking at people’s data from the viewpoint of communication, what we are experiencing can be depicted by the following figure.

Before the cloud computing emerges, cell-phones have been at cross-roads of personal data. There have been several research topics to utilize the data for service coordination, where a scheduler launches a mailer, vice versa, and there is also some limit of coordination benefit due to poor computation power, battery and amount of data.

Now, the personal data is surely being stored into clouds. I’m a user of Apple’s Mobile ME, Evernote, Google’s services, SugarSync, a teleco’s address book backup service, and its GPS tracking service, etc. All the data is not necessary to carry. Those are stored in the clouds, and invoked over wireless broad band networks when necessary.

Thus, in Earth, we individuals are living with personal handheld devices, i.e., cell-phones. In Heaven, the cloud servers are taking data integration over people. How far we can integrate the data over the people? That depends on the consensus of our society. If the society and individuals allow the data under our trusteeship, we may have the paradigm shift in communication. It’s going to be beyond “Harnessing collective intelligence” and to be a communication facilitator. I hope the society doesn’t see any similarity to Big Brother of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
My 2010 plan is to facilitate a virtuous circle of People’s trust as depicted here. We have done it to some extent, by initiating the inner circle of individual personal data integration. More important and essential one is to rotate the outer circle. We need a couple of killer applications with people’s data integration. That is one of my year 2010 wishes.

Wine Tasting Party

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:17:00 +0000

It was a great night. We tested six bottles by five persons, wine addicts
As usual, a blind tasting game was set; the participants were requested to tell correct pairs of wines and those descriptions.

The picture shows seven bottles
Givry Clos De Lasevosine -1er Cru- Domaine Joblot 2005
Les Forts de Latour 1995, 2003 (http://www.chateau-latour.fr/)
Casamatta Igt.Toscana Rosso 2007
Gevrey Chambertin 1er Petite Chapelle 2004
Tursan Kalecik Karasi 2005
Klikun Crni 2007

Two Larour were excluded from the blind tasting, since it was so easy to tell the difference from the rest of wines.The game was so tough that all of us could tell just one out of the five. I could shoot Domaine Joblot and failed to tell the rest.
There were several reasons, where Klikun Crni (Croat wine), and Tursan (Turkish wine) put us out in unknown wine tasting, and Chambertin was of Pino Noir. Those tasted similar light flavor.

After having those light-bodied wines, we enjoyed Les Forts de Latour 1995. The other Latour 2003 was stocked for a next occasion). Can’t wait to get our next party started.

10km Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 03:21:00 +0000

Since my high-school age, I've never tried a mid-distance running around 10km. The high-school from which I graduated compelled male students to run 16km (called "10 mile race") as a part of physical education though, after the graduation I have been enjoying a short-distance running typically of 5km. My typical running pace is 4 min 30-45 sec/km.
According to Wikipedia, it is said that the distinction between jogging and running is the speed 6 mph (10 minute per mile pace, 10 km/h, 6 min/km). Thus I'm a runner so far.

This morning I felt a slight hungover　due to drinking a bit heavily last night, but I wanted to switch on my body and mind with vigor. Then I took 10km run. It took 48'43" for 10.02 km. Here is my nike+ipod record. Not so fast but no so bad. My wish is to run a half-marathon faster than 2 hours/20km. It seems doable, doesn't it?
See below for my record and 10km course.

No perfect universal cell-phone so far to my own life

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Using cell-phones is my profession. To understand how the cutting-edge of user interfaces and application technologies is evolving, I’m using three types of cell-phones: Apple’s i-phone, Google Android phone, and FOMA (i.e., docomo’s standard 3G cell-phones, developed by various manufacturers, branded by NTT docomo). Here is my personal summary.

i-phone (left in the picture)
Pros: fancy user interfaces, good integration with i-tunes, synchronization with Apple’s cloud service (http://www.me.com/), maturity of localized open application store
Cons: short battery durability (it cannot last one single day and not replaceable!), heavy weight (133g), no strap

Google Android phone (HTC’s phone, middle in the picture)
Pros: light weight(123g), wide variety of applications, battery charge thru a standard mini-USB, synchronization with Google’s applications(mail, calendar, address, etc.), good software architecture that allows background processes
Cons: no i-tunes, poor localization, small key-touch screen.

Docomo standard 3G phone (Panasonic phone, right in the picture)
Pros: light weight(122g), NFC(near field communication) for e-commerce, network-integrated services such as “earthquake and tsunami early warning system” , localized contents, carrier-operated quick mail system (not SMS), digital TV, long battery durability
Cons: poor integration with the Internet cloud applications (such as Apple’s mobileme, Google’s apps), small open application market

What I really need are 1. i-tunes, 2. Gmail, 3. Scheduler and address book synchronized with my assistant’s outlook, 4. Networked NFC for e-money , e-ticketing and security applications, 5. Earthquake warning system to survive, and 6. carrier-operated mail system that is not SMS but Internet-equivalent real-time one.

So far none of those can solely give the perfect answer. Thus I have been carrying the docomo standard phone and i-phone both.
This week I started to use Google phone. It is unexpectedly good. I’d rather like to use it in stead of i-phone. I found http://www.beyondpod.mobi/android/ for podcast services with my Google phone. It is working well without connecting to my PC. All the scheduled podcast (including video) self updated during midnight.

Buddy Runner (http://www.buddyrunner.com/ ) gives me a fun of running. It provides the capabilities of an expensive GPS enabled personal trainer on my Android phone. Bad news is that my andoroid phone is heavier than my ipod+Nike though, exact GPS measuring and automatic update is quite useful. The track record can be exported to FaceBook. I’m enjoying the combination of bluetooth connected audio and an armband cell-phone holder.

Velox provides me another fun of workout. See http://www.veloxgps.de/. The experience is marvelous. It shows biking statistics in realtime, which includes altitude, heading direction, pace in various durations, and Google map.

Localization (i.e., adaptation to Japanese) of Android phones is pre-mature, while English software stuffs are commodities and general population in Japan are behind the world. Android users at this moment must speak English.
Nevertheless, my Android phone (manufactured by HTC) is fitting to my life.

The Earthquake Early Warning System worked

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:06:00 +0000

It was a scary morning.
A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 hit Shizuoka Prefecture, south west of Tokyo, at 5:07 a.m. on August 11 (Japan Time). So far one was killed and more than 100 were injured mainly in Shizuoka Prefecture. I’m living in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, which is next to Shizuoka.
Just before the time 5:07am, to be exact, 15 seconds before I felt the earth quake, I had been awakened by my phone. My phone was beeping and showed early earth quake warning, “Now you are going to be hit by earthquake soon.” That was the time at which I felt a strong fear for an unknown upcoming event. Could you imagine the situation in which you were sentenced to have a big earthquake hit 10 or 20 second beforehand? I experienced such a terrible but valuable occasion.

Then, let me explain how I came to know the event.
The prediction is owed to the Earthquake Early Warning system which provides advance announcement of the estimated seismic intensities and expected arrival time of principal motion. These estimations are based on prompt analysis of the focus and magnitude of the earthquake using wave form data observed by seismographs near the epicenter.
Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) developed the core system in 20005 and deployed it in 2007 for a general use with communication systems. The core system is connected to not only broadcasters but also cellular phone companies. (see the above picture: source http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/eew1.html).

My colleagues developed well-integrated warning system called “Area Mail.” The emergency information “Area Mail” is a message based on the earthquake early warning distributed by the JMA via a local information distribution system developed by NTT DoCoMo. The distribution architecture is depicted in the next figure.
The location of the epicenter and the magnitude of an earthquake are immediately detected at observation points near the earthquake epicenter, and estimated from the difference in arrival times of the Primary (P) wave (about 7 km/s) which is produced by the initial tremor of the earthquake, and the Secondary (S) wave (about 4 km/s) which is produced by the principal motion. A prediction of the magnitude and arrival time of the earthquake can then be sent out as a warning. Emergency information “Area Mail” converts the earthquake early warning distributed by the JMA in an emergency information “Area Mail” message and broadcasts the message to mobile terminal users who are in the affected region.
For further information on the warning system see
http://www.jaee.gr.jp/stack/submit-j/v04n03/data/pdf/2-5.pdf
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/binary/pdf/corporate/technology/rd/tech/main/emergency_info/vol9_4_04en.pdf

At this time, the epicenter was located almost 200km south west of Yokohama, and the distance gave me 15-second long chance to worry about my next move.
Fortunately, I was not injured and my home was not damaged either. The technology is so advanced and told me a near future. Thanks God, It’s Free.

D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:08:00 +0000

One of benefits from living in Tokyo and its vicinity is to access various works of art.
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo now holds an exhibition of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) , through July 3rd to Sept. 23rd this year.

This morning, I went to the museum to see his works , especially for his great masterpiece which was painted in Tahiti, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), which represents the consolidation of what he was attempting to achieve through his art. His works have been collected from other museums, as on loan, which includes the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which houses that master piece.
He inscribed the title in French in the left upper corner. The title was influenced by his mentor, the Bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert, where the three fundamental questions in this catechism were: "Where does humanity come from?" "Where is it going to?", "How does humanity proceed?"
I was fortunate enough in this chance, since without going to Boston, I saw his soul there.

The soul is on an oil painted canvas of 139.1 cm × 374.6 cm (54.8 in × 147.5 in).

The soul is depicted by enhanced colors as other symbolists did.

The soul is with people who lived from their birth to death with the original sin.

The soul is also symbolized by iconography of a god, a bird, etc.

The soul is full of unspoiled nature which the painter believed to exist.

That French painter moved restlessly from France to Tahiti in Southern Pacific Ocean.

It is said that he searched for the essentials of humanity whilst being torn apart by the extremities between civilized and savage, sacred and profane, life and death, man and woman, spiritual and materialistic. Gauguin was not trying to become uncivilized but more civilized by being more modem by understanding (at least superficially) primitive culture – he saw himself as more sophisticated, more modern and more avant-garde and he was exploiting their culture by getting food and sex from a local marriage that was permitted despite his real marriage in France.

All the story was new to me, and very impressed.

Behind the painting, the man made the history.

Champagne lunch at Chinois Shibuya

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:42:00 +0000

If you are interested in wine restaurants of Tokyo, you might take a look at http://www.chinois.jp/

Chinois is well-known of Tokyoite wine lovers with high reputation. It has two wine restaurants in Ginza and Shibuya. They serve dinners with luxurious wines. Usually, open hours are 18:00PM-2:00AM or 0:00AM. Chinois Shibuya, in addition, has a special lunch menu named “Champagne lunch” only on Saturday, Sunday, and National holidays, where open hours are 12:00-16:30 .The lunch costs JPY5,500 (USD58 or so), including sale tax, and it offers appetizer, main dish, dessert, coffee, starting Champagne, and unlimited wines.　It seems that that is for promotion, by which the restaurant is attracting potential dinner customers with affordable wines and good foods.It is a best buy in Tokyo wine restaurants, I think. I visited Chinois Shibuya on May 5th around noon. 65-70 seats became full at 1:00PM. In case of your visit, thus, reservation is strongly recommended.
Wines are not pricy (affordable :) ) though, the variation was well-designed from light to heavy, from thin to thick, and from fruity to dry. The glasses vary from white wine glasses, Burgundy glass, Bordeaux glass and so on. If my memory is correct, the order was as follows.

Champagne: Jose Michel et Fils, Rose Brut
1st white: Gatão Vinho Verde (Portuguese light and thin)
2nd white: Sileni Sauvignon Blanc　(NewZealander’s fruity one)
3rd white: VINUS Chardonnay Vin de Pays d’Oc (Yummy Chardonnay)
1st red: De Bortoli Windy Peak Pinot Noir 2007 (Auzee’s gift, served as well-chilled)
2nd red: Recorba Duero Cosecha 2006 (from Spain)
3rd red: TERRASSES DE GUILHEM CABERNET-SAUVIGNON (from Languedoc)

I asked several extra glasses of the above wines.

One thing noteworthy is that the food was also marvelous. The selection of appetizer and main dishes is very flexible. I’ll recommend “foie gras rice served in a bowl” for main dish.

It's a perfect day, isn't it?

Running around the Imperial Palace

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:45:00 +0000

Mecca, a place which an activity or interest is centered, for Tokyoite casual runners (joggers) is the Imperial Palace. Of course, we, general populations, are not allowed to get into the palace. I mean it a round run around the palace.
The run distance is about 5km, that is 3.1 miles, and theoretically no traffic signals which force runners to stop over.

Its scenery is very nice as depicted below.

I and my friend, Tam, tried to get there on April 28th. That was my first run around the palace. I jumped out from Tameike-sannoh office at 5:20M as soon as the last business meeting was finished. There are two runner's stations.
One is near Jimbo-cho station and the other is located at Koujimachi station.
See http://runsta.jp/ for further information, unfortunately in Japanese.

We joined at Jimbo-cho runner's station (3-11-1-1F Kanda Jimbo-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. TEL: 03-3264-0089), and payed JPY700, with which we used a dressing and shower room and a locker.
Runners’ Station hours of operation will remain:
Monday: not available (Koujimachi station is open)
Tuesday-Thursday: 7am-20pm
Saturday:8am-20pm
Sunday: 8am-18pm

Note that we might have an alternative, which is to chose a public bath which costs JPY400. I heard beforehand that the bath is always busy and clouded by runners because of its high cost performance.

We started running at 18:07pm (according my nike+ipod system) from Kitano-maru park. The course was counter-clockwise as most of runners take.
Nice cool April weather welcomed us and that beautiful experience lasted 25 minutes or so.
Here is my record from the nike+ipod logging system.

According to Wikipedia, the distinction between running and jogging is the speed, where it is defining jogging as running slower than 6 mph (10 minute per mile pace, 10 km/h, 6 min/km). My run was slightly faster than 5min/km, and thus I was a runner on that day.

Phony QR Codes Everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:02:00 +0000

2D barcodes are everywhere in Japan as introduced by my previous blog article. (above picures are from http://www.atpress.ne.jp/view/5401 and http://blog.goo.ne.jp/qr_quel/e/f109124f6ee13baf0bb9c065ceb4e0a5) Real objects are linked to related information sources. The observation, linkage between the real world and the cyberspace, reminds us two key concepts: digital signage and crossmedia communication. You may see digital signs with flat displays in downtowns. That emobies the concept of digital signage. If a 2D barcode appears at the display, you can switch the storyline from that display media to your cell-phone. In general, signs (including digital ones) can be found everywhere, and those invite you to another medium, in this context, mobile communication. Insight found here is that such crossmedia communication gains coarse-to-fine information retrieval, in other words, public-to-personal level shift in communication. Shifting communication from public to dedicated medium exposes a risk of privacy violation and resulting a phishing crime, which attempts to acquire usernames, passwords, credit card numbers etc. In 2007, Prof. Sakamura and his research team of University Tokyo conducted a interesting experiment at Shinjuku district, a downtown of Tokyo. In thier experiment, 2D barcodes were attached onto 300 telegraph poles. They tried to prove vulnarability of 2D barcodes for phishing, in comparison with their trusted code schemes. That intent was proved successfully. Three hundred 2D barcodes were maliciously replaced by someone with phony barcodes which invited potential customers to adult content providers. Here is an example which I and my colleagues demonstrated.

Prof. Sakamura’s paper “Verifying Identifier-Authenticity in Ubiquitous Computing Environment(2007) ” proposes an authentication mechanism of 2D barcodes. We need more bits for authentication of barcodes, supposing PKI based technologies are adopted. Microsoft’s High Capacity Color Barcode(HCCB) is a typical technology. (see my article Minoru Etoh, "Cellular Phones as Information Hubs," Proc ACM SIGIR Workshop on Mobile Information Retrieval, Singapore, July, 2008.) On one hand, we can add an authentication mechanism to a code system as proposed by University of Tokyo and Microsoft, on the other hand it’s hard to see “conjunction integrity” of the code and the real object. We can paste verified codes to any objects. The code itself is not phony though, the integrity where the right code is attached to the right object is not guaranteed. Verifying the integrity of code attachment, in other word, indivisible authentication of integral objects: code and object is the key technical issue.

SNS enabled by Broadband Mobile Network

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:01:00 +0000

Broadband Mobile Network Outlook in Japan

2001 is the first year in which NTT docomo launched its W-CDMA service in Japan firstly of the world. In the following several years, mobile broadband networks (i.e., services offering a minimum speed equal to, or greater than, 256kbit/s in one or both direction) were deployed over the world. The next figure shows top 10 economies by the number of mobile broadband subscribers, in millions, as of the end of 2005.

The two far east countries have been leading on the cutting edge of mobile broadband. Note that those countries have well-established mobile multimedia ecosystems which are independent from PCs’. As i-phone differentiates itself from PC not only in its innovative user interface but also in its mobile application ecosystem, broadband cell-phones in the far east countries have been a kind of premature i-phones for general population from the aspect of the mobile application uniqueness.
In 2009, the commercial deployment of the W-CDMA system is still progressing steadily not only in Europe but in North America and Asia as well, and at present, more than 180 mobile network operators have commenced 3rd Generation technologies. For example in Japan, the maximum downlink transmission data rate provided by NTT docomo in its packet services via High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is 7.2 Mbit/s, but the technical specifications of HSDPA and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) support maximum transmission data rates between a base station and mobile terminal of 14 Mbit/s in the downlink and 5.7 Mbit/s in the uplink.

Fig. Top ten mobile broadband economics (source: ITU Internet Report 2006)

Those HSPA and EVDO technologies are categorized into “3.5G” mobile broadband. Roughly speaking, at this point, Japan’s market has 100miilion subscribers, of which 90% are using 3G cell-phones , and half of them are taking benefits of 3.5G technologies. Mega-bps cell-phones are now majority there. That is the key killer application enabler in the mobile application space. The music and video clip download is quite common among younger generations, and web accesses to a wide variety of services are common practice of 70% of our general population.
What we can see beyond the HSPA technologies is 3G-LTE (Long Term Evolution) that is planned to be launched late 2010 in Japan.　3G-LTE will be required to provide short delays in addition to a dramatic leap in data rates and improved spectrum efficiency. Achieving short delays means that the time required for call setup (connection delay) and the time involved in data transfer during a call (transmission delay) will be reduced enabling the high-speed data transmission by a protocol like TCP/IP.
LTE’s downlink uses the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) radio access providing high resistance to multipath interference and flexible support for a wide range of frequency bandwidths by changing the number of subcarriers. That highlights 3G LTE from the existing 3G technologies. The uplink, meanwhile, uses Single Carrier - Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) that can achieve low power consumption by decreasing the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of cell-phones and reduce interference from other users. It is said 3G-LTE will be provided, at the beginning, to lap-top PCs as the cellular correspondent to WiMAX. Eventually, however, we will see 10~100 Mbps applications for ordinarily people with popular cell-phones in five years. The point is not the bandwidth, but the improved user experience, by the fact that the fairly improved low-latency and high-capacity mobile broadband environment will emerge soon, and it will accommodate new killer application environments in the sense of mobile Internet beyond the cellular networks.

Mobile Social Network Services in Japan
As the far east has very unique mobile ecosystems based on mobile broadband networks, VGA size display cell-phones, mobile contents (i.e., exclusive to PC users) and “smart mob” culture, SNS is also different from the other regions. Let us see its uniqueness in two SNSs: mixi and mobage-town in Japan. Those use only one language, Japanese and therefore don’t have a global reach to the rest of the world, unlike MySpace and FaceBook. Those business models are similar mainly in on-line advertisement (banner and click), and slightly different in several side businesses such as job-brokering, e-commerce, auction, and so on.
Mixi launched their business in early 2004, and has reached at having 16 million subscribes as of early 2009. A half of the age group early 20s are using this SNS, and around 15% of the nation at ages from 18 to late 50s have subscribed. The active visit rate within three days is about 52%. That is the king of SNS in Japan. Unlike MySpace, most of mixi users are using nicknames and meeting in a small group space, so as to get community entertainments, for which they write diary, read and comment each other in their daily lives. It seems that mixi provides semi-real communities that overlay real ones. Nicknames are used to keep them anonymous though, they know each other in real names within a community to which they belong.
A very interesting observation is that mixi users are becoming mobile. In late 2006, a survey on mixi access method among respondents said that it was 78.6% mainly from PC, mobile supplemental, 15.4% mainly from mobile, PC supplemental, and 6.0% solely from mobile.

Fig. mixi’s growth (source: mixi’s IR report)

The above figure summarizes the current growth of subscribers and page views. The figure shows that the number of page views from PCs is declining. On the other hand, the number of page views from mobile is getting significant. The page sizes of mobile contents is almost 1/10 of PC contents though, it seems the communication structure of mixi is changing from PC-oriented to mobile-oriented. There are several implications: 1. new subscribers are mainly from mobile users, 2. 3G mobile broadband has technically fostered the transition from PC to mobile, and 3. A way of community entertainment by its nature is required to be casual, instant, and personal.
Mobage-town is the queen of SNS in Japan. The name comes from a Japanese abbreviation of English term “mobile game town.” That has 12.3 Million subscribers and 15 billion page views per month as of late 2008. They started the SNS in 2006, and have sharply attracted teens to join them. This SNS can be conceptually summarized as an extension of Second Life in a mobile space plus their unique attractive services. The SNS has similarity with Korean game-site “Han game.” There must be nonlinear synergy effects in combination of games, SNS, content share, and e-commerce. Especially, gaming is so poplar enough to lure the teens that they have attains more than 50% penetration to Japanese teens. Interestingly, mobage-town only allows cell-phones to access. That is mobile-only SNS and requires their subscribers to use high-end cell-phones equipped with adobe flash players, since all the contents are provided in the flash format, and thus (on-line) gaming has become possible for millions of cell-phone users. We can summarize the technical enablers. Those are always-on-anywhere, flat rate pricing broadband networks, VGA-size display, graphic processors tolerant to manipulate adobe flash contents. Without those enablers, mobage-town has not emerged.

Recent five years, the term “convergence” has been a buzz word in communication industries. Especially, the convergence between fixed and mobile networks is getting attracted in a wide range of mobile services that utilize fixed communications infrastructure to complement the mobile service. That convergence remains just at network economics in providing less-redundant functionality and less-payment. What we see here, on the other hand, is mobile unique evolution of multimedia applications, where application-layer convergence has occurred as “mainly mobile, complementary PC.” As mobile broadband technologies evolve, a higher layer convergence will be essential. Mixi shows a good example, which is not from the single invention.

Bridging the two spaces (prep. for ICASSP 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:58:00 +0000

I was invited by Berna Erol to a panel discussion at ICASSP 2009 which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan in April 19th-24th 2009. (further information at: http://icassp09.com/)
My main topic will be related to “bridging the real space and the information space” as depicted in the picture below.

The point is clear and crisp where many mobile phones are now being equipped with various I/O devices and sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS, microphones, and cameras. These allow applications to be context-aware and enable easy integration of user's real environment wit applications. Mobile device's peripheral and sensor enhancement will be an extremely fertile incubation environment for new and innovative killer applications in our daily life. That definitely differentiates mobile Internet from fixed-line Internet of PCs. That is already happening in far-east countries, where mobile devices are evolving not as miniaturized mobile PCs but as devices with unprecedented capabilities.
2D barcode, called QR code, and its related applications are good instances in discussing the difference. A QR Code is a 2D matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. Let’s see one video shot which I shot two weeks ago.

Now you saw how the real object (i.e., a magazine page) is connected to the related portal site through the phone. The usage of the 2D barcode is not limited to magazines or published documents. Such a code can be attached with any real objects as far as those have a printable room. Here is another good example:when I was walking around Ginza (corresponding to the fifth street in N.Y.) in Tokyo. I found a big 2D bar code which introduced a company’s home page.

That was readable with my cell-phone!

Apart form the barcode approaches, connecting real objects with the internet by capturing a natural scene is on the way. Evolution Robotics, a US-based company, commercialized a visual search engine called “ER Search” on a line of camera phones. Here is another video which I shot two weeks ago.

That technology can search only a set of registered image patterns like CD jackets, magazine cover pages, etc. For my wine labels, the engine couldn’t retrieve my favorite California wine descriptions, although the technology was developed in California!

Now, we have a technical progress in bridging the two worlds: real and virtual on one hand. On the other hand, we are confront with a big technical challenge, which is authentication of visual tags such as the 2D barcodes or the registered images. You can imagine that malicious QR codes can be pasted over original QR codes. Those phony codes can lead phone users to wrong malicious sites. Phishing with phony QR codes now is going to be a big threat to our mobile society. The world is not simple.

This is it! for Sake lovers.

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:46:00 +0000

Sake means “liquor“ in Japanese, made from rice. That is the rice wine that represents Japanese spirit of the culture. For further information on the spirit, please refer to this web site. http://www.japansake.or.jp/sake/english/index.html

Nowadays, Japanese rice wine (hereafter “sake”) is loosing popularity in Japanese diners. That consumption has declined 40% over the recent decade. Can you guess why? Sake and Japanese original cuisine had a good marriage like cognac meets chocolate. As French cuisine got influence Japanese “light and lean” taste and very sophisticated presentation in dishes, Japanese cuisine, on the other hand, got a westernized a bit heavy and fat meet to some extent. (but it is still lighter than other cuisines). As a result, thus, we needed another marriage for new westernized Japanese cuisine. The new partner to that marriage is 'shochu' (white distilled liquor) made from potato, rice, or other various materials, which is growing in this decade.

I still love sake and I’d like to introduce a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo downtown, who devotes all the foods to appetizers for sake drink. The owner, Mr. Ohno, designed everything just for Sake lovers at affordable prices. Very unique restaurant it is and thus I’ love it. The reservation is strongly recommended, while Friday is first-come first served basis ( 5:30PM or after 9:00PM you may have a chance to get a few seats if you are very lucky).

According to http://www.att-japan.net/modules/tinyd1/rewrite/tc_37.html
it is described as:
Shimbashi Koju
Shimojima Bldg. B1, 1-2-17, Higashi-Shimbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
5 minute walk from JR Shimbashi Station
Tel 03-3575-0939
(If you want to really master sake, you should visit Shimbashi Koju. Its range includes many kinds of sake from the more famous brands to those much harder to come by. The food here is relatively cheap but delicious making it a popular spot for sake fans. So much so that reservations are again recommended.)

Here is a day story of my life.
Feb 16th was my special day. I had a very important presentation to the CEO, CFO, COO and other board executives form 8:30 AM in Tokyo. After having 30minutes discussion, fortunately I made it, and got through their approval for my project. Thanks friends and colleagues. To memorize this morning, I took two pictures from my Tokyo office. Tokyo Bay was shining and beautiful.
In the evening, I went to Shimbashi Koju, very casual, inexpensive and affordable Japanese sake restaurant as mentioned above, so as to celebrate the progress of my and colleagues’ achievements. At 6:30PM, unoccupied seats welcomed me. Toast to ours! Let’s call it a day!