January 2006 Archives

Adam Greenfield has tagged me...

Four jobs I've had
- forklift operator
- Chief Philosopher
- R&D lab manager
- outdoor trips manager (Dartmouth Outing Club Trips Director)

Four movies I can watch over and over
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- 七人の侍 (Seven Samurai)
- Blade Runner
- Lord of the Rings Trilogy (I'll count those 3 as one :)

Four places I've lived
- New York City
- Tokyo
- Hanover, New Hampshire
- Los Angeles

Four TV shows I love
- 攻殻機動隊 Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
- ...
- ...
- *crickets*

Four places I've vacationed
- Mexico
- Hawaii
- Italy
- Chile

Four of my favorite dishes
- dinner at Tre Vaselle, Torgiano, Umbria
- sushi at a real sushi restaurant in Japan
- mom's potato leek soup
- M's curry & rice

Four sites I visit daily
- digg.com
- my account at bloglines.com
- metafilter.com
- FZ1OA (Yamaha FZ1 owners association)

Four places I would rather be right now
- Onizuka Center for International Astronomy, Mauna Kea, Big Island, Hawaii
- Umbria, Italy
- New Zealand (on a motorcycle - excellent!)
- Khadgar server, World of Warcraft

Four bloggers I'm tagging
- Paul Baron
- Peter Adams
- Fazal Majid
- Jon Yongfook Cockle

Cabel has a great review of the #1 video game in Japan, which isn't even really a game.

東北大学未来科学技術共同研究センター川島隆太教授監修　脳を鍛える大人のＤＳトレーニング

cabel.name: On Brain Training

Just a handy reference for those who are watching the search marketplace.

(And those of you who think that Yahoo! is not going to compete on search because their CFO mis-spoke are nuts.)

Seeking Alpha � Yahoo Q4 Earnings Release Conference Call Transcript (YHOO)

I'm testing the Performancing plugin for Firefox.

Great post by Joi on the topic of the media and press in Japan.

Joi Ito's Web: Public floggings

Sony Europe has finally posted an official statement to their website regarding the horrendously unusable Sony Connect software that was to replace the very poorly made SonicStage.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR SONY NETWORK WALKMAN OWNERS - NW-A1000 , NW-A3000 and NW-A608 ONLY :

A number of users have reported problems with their Sony Network WALKMAN NW-A1000 , NW-A3000 and NW-A608 when using "CONNECT Player" software.
Such problems may include slow performance or difficulty in installing the software.
Where they occur, these issues arise as a result of aspects of some system environments and usage conditions. To enable customers to enjoy their purchase, Sony is currently investigating these problems.
...
The current version of "SonicStage" software does not offer the full range of features and functionality offered by "CONNECT Player". A description of the different software features available with "SonicStage" can be found here. Sony intends to provide a further release of "SonicStage" with additional functionalities in the near future and in parallel remedy the issues of the "CONNECT Player".

The bold and underline is my own emphasis.

So the bomb that has been dropped here is that SonicStage should have been replaced by Connect Player. That Sony will be going back to the SonicStage code (very old code by today's consumer electronics standards) to provide another release, additional functionality, while IN PARALLEL working to fix Connect Player, is basically an admission of defeat. You know things aren't going as planned when you have to go back to old software that you had not planned to use and renew the old stuff while working to fix your new software. And the sad thing about this- it could have been avoided and many people knew of the problems with the software before it became public.

Between my two posts on Sony Connect Player, Sony Connect Player fiasco and Sony Connect Player 1.0 review, I currently have over 1000 comments from frustrated Sony customers, generally EU/UK customers. Japanese customers are just as angry.

Trust me when I tell you that there will be/has been already a shakeup within Sony and that you'll see it reflected both at Sony USA and in Sony Japan.

CNet covers the story here:

Sony reorganizes struggling Connect service | CNET News.com

It is truly a shame, however, that at the key moment when Sony needed to have a successful digital audio player, and reviews of the hardware seem to be generally positive, to be let down by unusable software in 2006 is, as we say in Japanese, なさけない。

You know that there are changes that are either yet-to-come or that there are things unmentioned when you see a one-line press release:

"Connect Company has been renamed Connect Business Division."

In Sony speak, this means that a stand-alone unit has now been moved underneath another unit. Where I come from, this is not a good thing.

Sony Global - Press Release - Organizational Announcement and New Appointments

Fazal does a great review of Shoebox. I wanna try this out but my Powerbook is maxxed out. I want to get another desktop Mac for photo stuff but we're right in the transition to Intel. Not sure if I should find a used PowerPC and use that for another year or wait for an Intel Mac.

Shoebox review

This is a funny story that I caught via Adam Greenfield's del.icio.us. It deserves some explanation.

Mr. Mori, who is Tokyo's current top real estate magnate, spent decades and probably billions to build the gigantic city-within-a-city that is Roppongi Hills. If the 1990s was Ebisu Garden Place's time in the sun, the 2000s is for Mori in general and Roppongi Hills in particular. Roppongi Hills is worth visiting as it is, like the new Time Warner Center in NYC, a vision of the future of a city.

But the reality of Roppongi Hills for those who live or work there is far different. People who work at Roppongi Hills frequently complain of high prices for lunchtime food, long lines due to tourists, not enough public transit access (only Hibiya and Oedo lines- neither which are that convenient) and generally-speaking it's an inefficient space to commute to. It is certainly a prominent address in Tokyo today, but if you had to actually work there, you'd be annoyed in a few weeks an actually inconvenienced often.

I actually think Yahoo! Japan ought to move if only in principle. If I was a shareholder, and I am not, I would not want the company to be paying the highest rent in Tokyo.

In addition, Mori is the developer behind the new Tadao Ando redesign of Omotesando. They're very close to completion and it's clear that the new Omotesando is quite different from the old Omotesando. Most of the people that I've spoken to who loved the old Omotesando really dislike the glass and steel monstrosity that Ando has architected. We'll see what the consumers do because that new "Omotesando Hills" essentially took residential units and exchanged them for more retail and office space. If Omotesando wasn't already the 5th Avenue of Tokyo, it certainly is now.

Yahoo Japan boss may leave Roppongi Hills to shed negative image - MSN-Mainichi Daily News

Rebecca Blood intervews one of my good friends, Adam Greenfield, of Studies and Observations, who has a new book out, "Everywhere: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing" which I am very eager to dive into.

Thanks to Rebecca for a great interview and Hello to Adam and Nurri!

Why, Halo there kitty, originally uploaded by Heroine Sheik.

One (Halo) plus one (Hello Kitty) makes for funny :)

Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, was interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.

Did anyone catch this? How did he come across?

Does anyone else think it is crazy that Stringer's family is in England, his home office is in NYC, and where he is most needed most is Tokyo? If I had anything to do with his schedule, I'd move him to Tokyo with his family and take out any appearances at movie premiers in Los Angeles- that's a waste of his time at the CEO level.

Carlos Ghosn lived in Tokyo when he was turning Nissan around. Stringer needs to do the same.

The company has 150,000 employees, $70 billion in revenue and products ranging from movies to music to all things electronic. Sony long defined the leading edge in gadgetry, transistor radios in the 1950s, Trinitron TVs in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, the revolutionary Walkman.

But if Sony had the market cornered for 25 years, it took Apple just months to steal it away.

Stringer admits that looking at one of Apple's iPods hurts, a major symbol of where Sony went off the tracks.

"There’s no question that the iPod was a wakeup call for Sony. And the answer is that Steve Jobs was smarter at software than we are," he says.

Stringer says Steve Jobs came up with the iPod and iTunes, a simple system for people to download music — while Sony, worried about its record company — wasted precious time trying to figure out how to keep people from stealing songs.

"We tried to have a secure device. And that was a myth," says Stringer. "And a mistake. Sad for the music company, mind you."

It’s not just the iPod. Samsung hurt them in flat screen TVs and, in videogames, Microsoft’s Xbox challenged the PlayStation.

Sir Howard Stringer: Sony's Savior? [cbsnews.com]

Horie's Livedoor portal makes a Flickr clone, right down to the tags and even the color scheme.

To the Livedoor engineering team: sucks to be you who has to copy the work of others.

livedoor PICS

via (R) Richstyles!

Alex Rankin, who produces phenomenal bicycle videos, has a trailer out for his new video.

It's wild to see how far those guys fly on those new downhill bikes.

E3 Trailer

Great, great, great insight into the failure of the XBox 360 in Japan

Don’t blame the Japanese people for not buying a product that was not designed for them. It would be stupid of them to buy something that offers nothing they are interested in just for the sake of helping an American company. Give the Japanese gamers a product that meets their needs and wants and you will have another iPod on you hands.

As it stands, there are some very promising games coming up for the 360 by Japanese developers. But it might be too late, the Japanese already see the system as a failure. They should have delayed the launch until they had a strong launch lineup rather than have an early but weak launch.

This was most likely written by a gamer in his 20s, not an industry professional. That he has greater insight into the Japan gaming market than Robbie Bach and all of Microsoft _and_ Microsoft Japan's gaming strategy teams is quite humbling, if I may say so. I agree that the Japan launch for XBOX360 should have been delayed to launch with more Japan-market-specific games, because without a successful launch, it will be hard to get gamers to invest in a new system when they believe that the PS3 is coming in Spring 2006.

The comments are also great too. This is why blogs are awesome.

The Xbox 360 And Japanese Nationalism [4colorrebellion.com]

Free, free, free... thank you to Tim & O'Reilly & the authors!

O'Reilly Asterisk Book Available For Free Download

Happy New Year everyone!!

Best wishes to you and your families for 2006.

Apologies for being offline for the past two weeks- I was moving apartments over the holidays and the ISP screwed up my order and I still don't have Internet access at home.

I should be back up and blogging regularly tomorrow.

To be honest, being offline for a decent chunk of time was liberating. You should try it sometime :)