Dave Jenkins

Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn’t doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had “no intention to buy”, and another 26% had “no interest.”  That left 2.5% who intend to buy, and another 13% who may think about it.

Apple just doesn’t have the juice in Tokyo– almost everything there is either clearly wabi-sabi and traditional, or slick-plastic-wonderland-emotive.  This goes for cars, buildings, magazines, shows, and even the girls in Harajuku.  The iPhone’s sex appeal that is so compelling to clunky plaid-shirted Americans is just another plastometallic toy to the Japanese.  Even at that, the iPhone comes up short in functionality– no terrestrial TV, poor kanji anticipation, and an underdeveloped app market.  Japan, like Europe, has fierce competition amongst calling plans and contracts; they don’t have the Faustian vendor plans like in the United States, so iPhone’s lock in with Softbank is a big turn off.

I don’t have an iPhone.  I think I want one, but at the same time, I find myself using a cellphone less and less.

Meh.

(thanks to Gen Kanai and Joi Ito for the photo)

Well, I’ve been here in Tokyo a week, and have yet to go sing karaoke. As it is, I’ve been back and forth between Japan, Korea, and China for 20 years now, and I’ve only been to karaoke 3 times. Here’s how it usually goes down: someone in the office [misguidedly] decides that Karaoke is a good idea, and books a room (a.k.a. “karaoke box”, and no that’s not a euphemism– get your mind out of the gutter). We all go, start drinking, and start singing. In general, it’s an okay time, if only because the office is buying all the whiskey sours you can drink and savoury snacks you can munch. Unfortunately, not all of us humans can sing, and even less of us can perform. But the kicker is: are you sure you want to perform in front of people you want to take you seriously in a meeting the next morning?

Karaoke Do’s:

1. Drink. Drink a lot. Don’t drink so much that you pass out, because your co-workers will draw things on your forehead.
2. Sing Japanese enka ballads. To be honest, they are the only songs that sound half-decent in karaoke.
3. That’s about it.

Karaoke Don’ts:

1. Don’t sing heavy metal rock songs. You’re not David Lee Roth, nor are you Steven Tyler. Even if Diamond Dave were to show up in your karaoke box (again, no euphemism), are you sure you’d want to hear him singing ‘Jump’ to a pre-recorded half-assed track 4 feet in front of you ?
2. If you’re a gaijin, and don’t understand Japanese/Korean, you’ll likely find your friends shoving the Elvis Presley or Beatles or Animals onto your lap. Resist this urge, unless you want to make everyone depressed. House of the Rising Sun is a kick-ass song, but only because that singer takes it that seriously and pulls if off, and that organ solo is the greatest organ solo of all time.
3. Don’t just sit there and thumb through the catalog looking for the next track. This is the most common death of karaoke night: 6 people with their noses buried in the song catalog, fearing what to sing when their turn comes around, and simultaneously embarrassed to make eye contact with the schnook up in front of the room belting out an off-pitch Madonna track.
4. Don’t stay for more than 90 minutes. You should be good and loaded by then, to the point where you’re willing to sing on the train with no backing music required. Why pay the room fee at that point?
5. Beware of the whiskey goggles. These are people you work with, and it doesn’t matter how much she seems to look like Gwen Stefani up there with the Mic– you’ll regret it later. Remember there are not enough people here to hide your flirting, like you did at that one Christmas Party.
6. When someone invariably passes out, don’t try to help. You’re blotto yourself, and you’ll just cause more trouble.  Just amuse yourself quietly by drawing on their foreheads and wait for the paramedics.

So, there ya go.

As goes Tokyo, so the rest of the world will follow. This is hard to swallow for women’s fashion, but it certainly holds true for cell phones, personal electronics, and violence comics. I’m in Tokyo, and here’s my prediction: the laptop’s days are numbered.

People want portable computing, no doubt. However, the market is quickly being divided into two camps: larger laptops for 20-something hipsters in studio apartments where the laptop really doesn’t go anywhere but cannot take up the entire desk, and small palm-tops that carry all the power of a “laptop” but actually fit in your pocket, aka, the palm-top.

My wife wanted a smaller (10 inch screen) laptop, but we are hard-pressed to find one at Yodobashi or Yamada Denki. My theory was confirmed by 3 different salesmen: either go bigger for the unportable all-in-one (with georgeous 19″ screens), or go down to the palm-top tablets.  It is worth mentioning that, here in Japan, this laptop comes with a TV tuner, and serves as the entire media center: DVD player, TV, mp3 player, and AV anime download-o-rama.  For what it’s worth, the Playstation3 also does all of these (including a browser) along with some kick-ass games, and just needs a nice LCD screen.
The only thing that may prevent the death of the laptop in the US is the college system that allows laptops (Japan does not)– students need something that fits on a desk, gets hauled from class to class, and has a big enough screen to watch ’scrubs’ or ‘chuck’ or whatever the kids are into lately.

Linkedin.com was down for a ‘major upgrade’ a few days ago. When I saw that, I guessed (correctly it seems) that they would be moving more toward a personal network with more facebook-like elements: groups, what are you doing now, what are you reading, etc.

I for one welcome our new serious older brother equivalent to facebook. Lest we forget, Linkedin came first, but it was stodgy, the interface confusing, and prone to sychophants from the telecom industry. Facebook is moving more into Stage 5 (the overcrowded party where you cannot hear anyone and the cops are on the way), and the sheer number of chainmail apps and stupid-ass games all over the place are making facebook distasteful for anyone who was expecting a ‘real’ networking tool.

Welcome back, linkedin. For what it’s worth, browsing through people’s profiles on linkedin is a great way to learn what to write and what not to write on your résumé– It’s easy to spot the liars, the blowhards, and the self-important.

Facebook is great to mess around at the coffee shop for an hour, or to waste time on Sunday morning, but Linkedin has a potential to keep real associations together, and to help you find that next job. When I worked as a recruiter in Tokyo, every agent in town relied on Linkedin to see who knew whom, and to do a quick check on backgrounds.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the iPhone, and how I was not so impressed by all the functionality there, because I have seen what the keitai (mobile phones) in Japan can do. Well, I missed a big fat chunk of it– the keitai are capable of a lot more than what I had considered at the time, and things are about to get very interesting over in Tokyo.

Son Masayoshi, the maverick entreprenuer behind Yahoo BB (Japan Yahoo as an ASDL provider) and some other wacky schemes, recently flooded the market with cheap cell phones with a prepaid-package of minutes every month. When I say cheap– I mean $10/month– that’s it (the phone is free). My 68-year-old father-in-law recently got one, as did his wife (these two have resisted cell phones for 15 years, if that gives you any idea of their technological inklings). The deal from Son Masayoshi was finally too good to resist, and they’ve joined the masses.

So what? Well, The Economist just came out with a rather good piece about the death of cash society, and how everyone is going to be moving toward Near Field Communication (NFD). Japan has been pioneering this with the Suica cards in the trains, and then the shops around the train station– wave your metal card (or now your keitai) near the register and tada! everything is paid for. Here’s the trick: people will have their salaries deposited to their bank accounts as normal, but now they wil lgo one step further and transfer all their “walking around money” from the bank account to their keitai, maybe 20% of their salary. Son must have understood that by putting phones in everyone’s hands, he doesn’t need to make a damn dime on the airtime, he has a chance to capture 20% of the cash holdings of the entire country.

Not bad– he hands out cell phones and creates maybe the 5th or 6th largest “bank” in Japan. But it gets even better: cash is untraceable (that’s why they call it “cash”); but all these keitai transactions are traceable at the atomic level. The data around buying trends alone is worth millions (for both internal investment data as well as for sale back to merchants).

Let’s see if Son Masayoshi can pull off what may be the biggest game changer since Visa created the debit card.  I would welcome any comments from those who have used smart cards– are they easier than cash?  Do you worry about the (lack of) privacy)?

Well, I don’t have one here in my hands, so this is mostly conjecture, but I really am not all that impressed by what I’m reading about theiPhone from Apple. Why not? Because I had a better phone TWO YEARS AGO when I was here in Japan, not to mention the mind-bending stunts the cell phones are doing now here in Tokyo.

Phones are the primary bit if digital candy that everyone has. I know they are the primary bit because the cell phones take up the entire ground floor of the big electronics retailers (BicCamera, Yodobashi, Yamada Denki, etc.). Those retailers would not waste the most valuable real estate if cell phones were not the most profitable, highest volume, highest turnover (most Tokyoites keep cell phones about one year) items. With volume and turnover like this, the only place to compete is on functionality. Japanese mow send mail by _default_ on their cellphones, not their work computers. Young people, especially girls, access mail. photos, the internet, reservations, train schedules, and tunes all via their phones– rarely a desktop or laptop computer.

Wanna do business in Japan? One word for you:

keitai.

Cat street will be home to a new Burton store in Tokyo. I love that neighborhood

Forgive the shameless plug, but I have launched a new website at www.openasia.org that will focus on Open Source projects occuring here in North Asia (Japan, Korea, China). The site will carry project introductions, company profiles, interviews with developers, evangelists, and decision-makers. I will also carry reports from events such as LinuxWorld Tokyo, PostGreSQL conferences, and other places that are within my budget to attend.

If you have a news story or lead you think worth pursuing– please email me here or submit the story yourself at the site. Enjoy!

Well, July in Japan means one thing: Tokyo is too hot! We all took a weekend trip up to Lake Saiko at the base of Mt Fuji again this year. More people came, and everyone brought their camera. As a result, there are a LOT of photos here.

So, I suggest we do the following:
1. Everyone please register as a member on the right (if you are not already a member)

2. Look at the first set of photos and add comments to your favorite 20 or so pics (and maybe your least favorite 20?)

3. Look at the second set of photos and add comments for your favorite 20, and least favorite 20 photos

4. Once everyone adds their comments, I can rearrange the photos in order (and maybe delete some that most people are okay to delete)

5. Ken has copies of all photos, as do I. This will just make the albums a bit more easy to browse.

ALSO: Don’t miss the photos from our climb up Mt Fuji!

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Married!!!
Well, that was absolutely the best day of my life! Yumiko looked fantastic, the weather was perfect, and my father and some good friends traveled all the way from the US to see our wedding in Kamakura. 

Certainly there are many things I could say here, but I think I will leave it simply at “Thank you” to all the friends and family who came to our party, and made the whole thing possible. One more thing: I love you Yumi.