April 2005 Archives

Jason Kottke recently attended the Gel Conference (hosted by my good friend Mark Hurst) and got a chance to check out the Sony Librie e-book reader. He was very impressed by it.

The interesting back story of the Sony Librie, at least for Japanese customers, was that the Librie was launched in Japan in 2004 with a very nasty DRM policy and a very restrictive and limited content library. Basically there was once website in Japan that was selling "Librie compatible" content at fairly outrageous prices. Even content that was old enough to be beyond any copyrights was being sold for a fee by this service.

Needless to say the product did not sell because the content restrictions and limited content.

A few months ago, Sony decided to open up the DRM of the Librie to allow users to upload their own content to the device. Too little, too late. I've yet to see anyone in Tokyo using a Librie. It's a failed product not because of the product itself- as Jason says, it is very readable and portable - but because the DRM policy was beyond heinous and the content limitations were absurd.

The Sony Librie (kottke.org)

James Seng, an acquaintance of mine via Ole J., is one of the founders of Tomorrow.sg, which is a blogger's portal for Singapore. They've been up for about a week and have already been written up by the main stream media in Singapore.

Good luck to the Tomorrow.sg team!

(We need something like this for Tokyo...)

Tomorrow.sg

This is a very, very incisive report on the deadly train accident down near Takarazuka, Osaka, Japan.

Norimitsu Onishi, who writes for the NY Times, hits the core issue when he focuses on the punctuality culture of Japan. The argument is that the extreme focus on punctuality in Japan caused this accident because the young train conductor was focused on being on time moreso than being safe.

Across the country, the accident has already caused much soul-searching over Japan's attention - some would say obsession - with punctuality and efficiency. To many, the driver's single-minded focus on making up the 90 seconds seemed to reveal the weak points of a society where the trains do really run on time, but where people have lost sight of the bigger picture.

"Japanese believe that if they board a train, they'll arrive on time," said Yasuyuki Sawada, a 49-year-old railway worker, who had come to look at the crash site. "There is no flexibility in our society; people are not flexible, either."

Sawada was one of many who came to stand and watch behind the yellow police line here, and who saw hidden in this accident deeper problems.

"If you go abroad, you find that trains don't necessarily arrive on time," Sawada said. "This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people."

In Japan, punctuality proved deadly [iht.com]

5 new Apple iTunes Music stores are expected to open this week: Australia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland.

No love for Japan...

Think Secret - Briefly: New systems, Apple Remote Desktop, iTunes Music Stores due this week

The University of Essex is hosting a conference on the cultures surrounding eBay. One of the accepted papers is by Yasushi Fujita of the University of Texas, looking at why eBay Japan failed. This is very interesting information for any internet entrepreneur in Japan.

An eBay Japan's Mistake

Mr Yasushi Fujita

University of Texas

Everybody knows that eBay has succeeded globally, but does not know that there is a country where eBay had failed its business. It is Japan. Why was eBay's business unsuccessful in Japan?

There had been a prior player "Yahoo! Japan Auctions" in Japanese Internet auction market. EBay founded eBay Japan, Inc. to defeat it or even eliminate it. But this challenge became unsuccessful and eBay Japan, Inc. was dissolved. Thereafter, eBay Headquarter released a statement mentioning that eBay was intending to acquire Japanese Internet auction companies (even including Yahoo! Japan Auctions), but eBay has performed nothing in Japanese market yet.

The auction items that eBay handles are thoroughly categorised and structured in directories. EBay users can reach an item which they want to bid on or purchase through tracing the directory tree. For instance, when you want to find a desktop PC memory module, you can trace directory layer of Computers & Networking > Desktop PC Components > Memory for Desktop PC in order, and may find an appropriate one.

EBay Japan, Inc., however, constructed and provided another approach, which depended strictly on its search engine function. For a category Computers & Networking, sub-directories were not prepared at all. A search engine was done instead. It should be obvious that this style is quite inconvenient for every user. When a user enter keywords "desktop memory" for his wishing item, a listed PC itself whose description includes memory amount would be also fetched.

In the same period, Google was about to magnify its business in Japan. Compared with Google, eBay Japan's search function was insufficient and unsatisfactory for the users. It can be mentioned that poor usability eliminated eBay itself from Japan. Further survey about the parties who selected this inappropriate tactics may be needed.

chimera - people inspired innovation

This is interesting: digital photographers are banding together to educate the public about the lack of open standards with respect to digital photography "raw" file formats. They hope to pressure the manufacturers to release the standards to allow 3rd party software manufacturers the ability to read/write these currently proprietary formats.

OpenRAW - Press Release

Thomas Friedman in the NY Times points to an excellent overview in Foreign Affairs of the state of broadband Internet in Japan and Korea by Thomas Bleha, an 8 year US State Department veteran of Japan. Bleha is writing a book on the race for broadband Internet with an Abe Fellowship.

I'm still in the middle of reading the article as it is long, it's a great overview of the state of broadband in Japan and Korea. Broadband in Japan is truly incredible- $22/mo. gets you at least 16 Mb/sec. and a little more, about $40/mo., can get you fiber optic broadband at 100 to 1000 Mb/sec.

Related to broadband in Japan is James Seng, who points us to a great presentation by Sadahiro Sato of Softbank (pdf). In it, Sato explains how Softbank has gone to great lengths to build out a VoIP backbone in Japan to support Yahoo!BB Phone services. Lots of great stuff in here.

One challenge is to understand what does 100 or 1000 Mb/sec. mean? Sure it means things like on-demand content, but beyond that, fiber is something of a chicken/egg issue. It's not clear what that speed of broadband will mean.

I am very much interested in trying to answer that question.

Kishore Mahbubani, the permanent representative of Singapore to the United Nations, has a book out "Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West" and was speaking at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affiars. (This interview is a few years old it seems.)

The most interesting part for me was the Q&A part where Mahbubani talked about Japan within Asia.

QUESTION: One of the question you ask is: Where are the models within Asia for development? I believe you stressed Japan in particular. Could you expand on how Asian societies can draw upon their greatest strengths to fuse them with Western qualities that you have enumerated?

KISHORE MAHBUBANI: If you are in a comfortable, civilized room, like today, you accept the idea that we all have equal potential, and that there are no natural distinctions between the two of us.

But in the 18th century or 19th century, my ancestors happily accepted second-class status in the British colonial empire. And I asked myself: Why? Why did they allow themselves to be colonized? The colonization occurred in societies which were not necessarily backward compared to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of the great miracles of world history is that a small country like Portugal carved colonies out of huge countries like China. How did a country of 3 million people go to China and say, I’m taking Macao from you? Asians should be forced to think, What did I do wrong? Why did I fall behind?

And what’s even more puzzling is that about 100 or 200 years after the great industrial revolutions, after the great economic advances in the West, still today only one Asian society has caught up with the West, and that is Japan. Maybe Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, et cetera, are getting close. But even a country like China, which was, by far, the most developed society a thousand years ago, has flipped so far back relative to the rest of the world. What has happened?

Asians are doing themselves a huge disfavor if they fail to analyze what has held them back, and, at the same time, they will lose another hundred years if they don’t understand what they must change within their own system to catch up with the West. It is very strange that I am seen sometimes as an advocate of superior Asian values, because when I look at Asian societies, I just see their weaknesses. It amazes me that they are still repeating the mistakes that they made in the past.

For example, in an essay I wrote on the turn of the millennium, I argued that the West succeeds on one very simple principle: meritocracy. You always ensure that you pick the best people to run your societies, your universe. A lesson I learned at Harvard after one year was how ruthlessly meritocractic Harvard was. They didn’t care if you were from Harvard or you had a Ph.D. from Harvard. If they appointed any professor, they made sure that professor was the best in his field anywhere in the world.

That’s the way you run a society and progress. And the trouble is that, unfortunately, most Asian societies haven’t learned such basic lessons.

If more Asian societies are going to achieve what Japan has done, there will have to be far more fundamental questioning than there exists today in the Asian world.

This is a fascinating, fascinating speech and interview. Highly recommended.

The interesting thing is that Japan is far from a meritocracy. For the past 60 years, since the end of WW2, Japan has never been a meritocracy. It is not one today. The prime example of the past few years is Shuji Nakamura, the scientist who developed the blue light-emitting diode which was necessary for the DVD and white LEDs for lighting. He was not compensated appropriately for his innovations and subsequently filed suit against his company. The Japanese courts ruled against him and today he is a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West [carnegiecouncil.org]

via bubblegeneration.com

Become.com , the main competitor to Google's Froogle product search (ecommerce search) has come out of Beta.

On first glance they look a LOT like Google in terms of their search results.

Susan Mernit's Blog: Become.com: 3.2 billion web pages from over 40 million web sites

Look at the store that the Chinese are rioting in front of...

Chinese demonstrators clashed with the police Sunday in Guangzhou in front of a Japanese-owned store. [nytimes.com]

Bubblegeneration has an interesting post on the economics of feeds. I'll leave it at that.

Don't miss Niall Kennedy's comment at the bottom. It negates most of the criticism leveled at Technorati.

Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only

Joshua Schacter, developer of memepool.com, muxway, geourl, and del.icio.us, has quit his day job to focus on del.icio.us.

He recently announced his investors:

"Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, [Half.com founder] Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young."

With backers as illustrious as that Joshua will have a great head-start. As a New Yorker myself, it's great to see a NYC startup funded by a NYC VC (Union Square.)

Good luck Joshua!

[delicious-discuss] more on the announcement

Yuki of Kissui.net points us to an article in Salon.com which actually hits the emotion that I have about Gwen Stefani's "Harajuku Girls" and the related music video.

Kissui.net: Harajuku Girls by Gwen Stefani and Tokyo Girls by Hellen van Meene

via bopuc/weblog

Xeni Jardin of boingboing.net is profiled in the LA Times.

Behold, the wizard of blogs

Cool! A way to turn a Shuffle into a regular MP3 player.

iPod shuffle Database Builder

Go get it! I'm reading it now...

Crooked Timber » » Internet blag of the year - “Wall Street”

I can't really describe this without being close-to-scandalous except to say that this is a very funny site written by an English language teacher in Japan.

Outpost Nine :: Editorials :: I Am a Japanese School Teacher

I am sick and tired of this crappy bank. For the past two days I've been trying to get a credit card for my account with no luck.

Yesterday I was told that I didn't bring the right identification (my bank account was opened with my passport which has my name in roman characters, and I had brought my driver's license, which has my name in Japanese kanji.) Today I brought the right identification and was turned down. I'm sure it's because I switched jobs recently, but it's absolutely crazy because the bank knows how much money I have in my account and they still reject me. I have a not-insignficant amount with that bank.

Today is the last straw. I'm moving banks. I'm going to go through all the pain of switching all of my automatic debits (cable Internet, cellphone, water, electricity, gas, what else is there?) and the deposits from my company. All because Mitsui Sumitomo Bank does NOT VALUE THEIR CUSTOMERS. WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO MORE BUSINESS WITH THIS BANK IF THEY'RE NOT GOING TO GIVE ME A CREDIT CARD!!! I AM NOT A CREDIT RISK! LOOK AT MY PROFILE YOU STUPID IDIOTS!

The bad thing is that there's no other good choices in Japan. Shinsei Bank maybe. Citibank Japan actually has the best online banking, but they dont have many branches. And there's the bit with their private bankers breaking laws in Japan.

Banking in this nation feels medieval.

Oh, and there's the part where foreigners who visit Japan (Yokoso! Japan) can't download money from Japanese bank's ATMs because they're not on the Plus or Cirrus networks. So welcome! To the country where you can't get money from the ATMs! Welcome!

I've covered this issue before and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I did want to note that one of the leading Chinese movie directors, Chen Kaige, has made comments criticizing the casting of Chinese actresses in quintessentially Japanese roles because it further blurs the non-Asian stereotypes that many Western people have: that Asians are all the same.

The choice of a pan-Asian cast raises hard questions about the way Hollywood views the world outside America. By using Chinese actors in quintessential Japanese roles, has Marshall become the Quiet American director, an innocent abroad, shaving the edges off human diversity to produce an imagined Japan for an American audience that doesn't know the real thing?

Or is it a progressive act, as Marshall says, nothing more sinister than hiring the best-qualified actors, regardless of ethnicity, to do what actors do: act?

"Geisha is a part of Japan's eternal culture," leading Chinese director Chen Kaige ("Farewell, My Concubine") said at a symposium on Asian values at Japan's Kobe University last November. Chen has directed Gong in three movies, but he sharply criticized Marshall's decision to cast her and other non-Japanese actresses as geishas.

"Every action you make, how you walk, how you use a Japanese fan, how you treat people and what kind of facial expressions you have when you talk is going to be expressed based on your Japanese cultural sophistication. ... For Hollywood, however, this does not matter. For them, there is no difference between Japanese and Chinese."

Marshall defends controversial 'Geisha' casting decision - PittsburghLIVE.com

I love, love, love Italian food, so any news that there is a new wave of chefs in Sicily who are doing new things with traditional ingredients sounds yummy to me!

In Sicily, an Appetite for the New [nytimes.com]