Mobile Monday: Trends in Japan

I could attend the Mobile Monday in Zurich which had the topic Trends in Japan. Koji Fukada, President of YUMENI Inc., gave a tele-presentation live from Japan. He emphasized the importance of social networks on mobile networks, yielding fives times more users than accessing these services from desktop computers. I also liked the twitter-wallr being projected next to the slides where some people from audience did a pretty good job in posting summarizing life tweets of the talks...

Second Daniel Scuka, former editor of Mobikyo claimed in his talk that the mobile business success in Japan is not due to the unique user culture, instead it's the unique competitive culture in the business environment and regulatory regulations. The different carriers were competing not just on services but also using different communication technologies. This has fostered much more innovation than in Europe (see also here for details about this talk). I especially like table the showing "innovations" of the iphone having been released before.
Finally there was the talk of Jan Michael Hess, founder of MobileEconomy. He was reporting about the success of Felica and deriving lessons for Europe. He was a proclaiming Japan being six years ahead. However, what I didn't was the trick he was playing: taking the huge number of wireless payment and assuming that all of those would use this technology on their phones while there wireless cards being used in Japan as well.

Overall, I was pretty impressed from what we can learn from Japan. However, we also have to be careful to consider and understand ecosystem: I'm pretty convinced that the success of mobile internet in Japan largely depends also on the long commuting distances. Japanese often commute an hour and more to work using public transport where making calls is strongly forbidden. So, people have to do something else with their phones...gaming, web surfing, social networking.

The Case of RFID in Japanese public transport

Tokyo has rather a complex transportation system. First there are many lines, second they are operated by various private independent players cutting the entire network into smaller pieces. Each line featuring its own pricing schemes makes ticketing and payment as complex as mobile roaming. Apparently, RFID provides a nice abstraction from this underlying complexity. Using PASMO, a standard chip card players all over Japan have agreed on enables a complete track & trace of passengers, measuring entry and exit, and adjust the fare to the travelled distance accordingly - RFID sits like an "application layer" on top of the pricing scheme.
As of April 2009, over 11 million card (wikipedia) have been issued.



Watching the masses of people rushing through the gates shows the convenience and necessity of RFID. Nevertheless, I'm surprised that people still rather stick to their magnetic cards than using the Felica feature of their phones. I probably have to watch out for Mobile Suica eastern Japan...
Comparing this clear advantage with the open access system of public transport in wesgtern Europe makes the case for RFID much more diffcult. Sometimes it can be easier to introduce new technology than changing tradition of a complex payment system...

Is Japan a high-tech country?

When I arrived in Japan I suddenly remberred Prof. Schildhauer's talk who claimed that "everybody in Japan reads books on his mobile mobile. Well, I've never been there - but I had been told...". Not surprisingly that was not the case. Obviously, internet on mobile phones is common-sense but other than that it's not really all that different. Of course I encountered some interesting innovations, the toilet with integrated tap, the high-tech toilet with hot/cold shower etc.
What's also undisputable is the openness or addiction to games, that's not necessarly shot'em all but also entertaining stuff as virtual music.
I very much enjoyed the internet simulation based on ball paths displayed in Tokyo's innovation museum.

Overall, of course the availability of electronics is much higher than in Europe (see the 'electronics grocery-like booth'). Also the openess to use new devices appears to be there. It is argued that this attitude could be explained by the Shintoism which does not differentiate between lively and not-lively objects.

However, Japan is still not that technical advanced that the initial claim about reading books on mobile phones would hold, Japan is still also very traditional (as you can see on the black-board representing the digital display).

Visiting our Auto-ID Lab in Keio

After the pervasive conference in Nara I headed back to Tokyo again to visit our Keio Auto-ID Lab in Fujisawa. Besides discussing the continuation of the Internet of Things conference we started back in 2008 in Zurich, I got a nice tour and was particularly amazed to see the works on the recorder tag [1] and tag monitor, an active RFID tag mimicing a passive tag but allowing to monitoring the data-traffic between tag and reader.
My schedule was pretty packed and intense. First, I gave short talk (slides) about what we are doing in Zurich, then had the great chance of visiting a lecutre of Jeff Lawrence, global policy officer of Intel (you find a short bio here). Quite interesting, this lecture was broadcasted live to several other universities in Asia. He talked (these slides are mostly it) about policy in digital content policy. He mentioned that protection does not have to be perfect, e.g. DVD is broken but still supports a business model (the same argument also applies to anti-counterfeiting). France has passed a law against content protection - most important argument: access to internet is a human right! Intel wants to press ahead, rather lead than follow, as a tech provider for hollywood when selling technical assets: if people do not like it they do not use it at all. He mentioned the case of betamax: hollywood tried to make the producers liable. Generally, he outlined that policy always comprises different bodies: service providers, content providers, it, ce, government.

Intel's policy perspective is: everything free vs. content is king, respect intellectual proprty for right holders and consumers. Protected content but should be moveable.

Law cannot solve all problems: it's about business and not about good or bad.

Every content scheme is to be broken: only good enough to break business model...does not work against hackers - but that's law enforcement is for. Overal goals: keep honest people honest, perfect systems are not possible, commercial viability is key.

Technology goals: design freedom, low cost (no body pays for protection), world-wide availability. "Apple builds services to sell elegant devices...", Intel want's to acknowledge a diversity of sources, where as Apple is just in verticals. His final thoughts were interesting: DRM-free is the best world - but how to make money out of it?

Finally, I also could arrange a last-minute meeting with Masaki Ito who gave me a nice tour around Prof. Hideyuki Tokoda's Lab. They showed me impressive prototypes of the objsampler [2] - a pipette that records real objects one encounters over time - and the airy nodes [3] that measured the temperature in Tokyo's Shinjuki garden and focussed on simplyfying the set-up of larger sensor networks. In the end I also got to see the smart they are currently setting-up allowing to experiment with smart home environments where various items can be controlled remotely, e.g. mobile phone.
Overall, I very much enjoyed my visit at Keio and I'm looking forward to get back there for a much longer stay some time later...

[1] MITSUGI, JIN; TOKUMASU, OSAMU; HADA, HISAKAZU: RF Tag with RF and Baseband Communication Interfaces for Product Lifecycle Management, Auto-ID Labs Whitepaper, 2009, AUTOIDLABS-WP-HARDWARE-046.pdf
[2] Junichi Yura, Hideaki Ogawa, Taizo Zushi, Jin Nakazawa, Hideyuki Tokuda, "objSampler: A Ubiquitous Logging Tool for Recording Encounters with Real World Objects" rtcsa, pp.36-41, 12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006
[3] Ito, M.; Katagiri, Y.; Ishikawa, M.; Tokuda, H., "Airy Notes: An Experiment of Microclimate Monitoring in Shinjuku Gyoen Garden" Networked Sensing Systems, 2007. INSS '07. Fourth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.260-266, 6-8 June 2007

Traced by my credit card

I had a really pleasant arrival in Japan. Indeed looking into all the face-masks of custom official and police (swine disease!) looked scary. I was also a little bit worried when I had to identify myself as a potential threat admitting that I have visited the US less than 10days before. However, the countermeasures were quite funny: I received a white info slip where as the "good" ones received a yellow which, however, in the ende did not make a differences. I was neither temperature scanned nor treated differently, but I eagerly avoided to start any coughing;)

Finally, I just had to withdraw some money. For some reason both my debi-t and credit-card were always rejected - very annoying. I tried it several times at several machines. Suddenly, I received a phone call - what a surprise thanks to 3G I finally have a world-wide working phone. It was my credit card company asking me whether I would be in Japan, whow track & trace works: "Are you currently in Japan? Someone continously tried to withdraw more than 5000 swiss francs from your account...". Hmm, I had to admit that it was myself, stupid.

But the amazing thing was that they really have a real-time alert system revealing my stupid behavior on the spot: I had an order of magnitude wrong exchange rate in my mind...

That was just a big relief: if there is value you don't think about privacy!!!