The viral Harlem Shake meme has been taking the world by storm recently, as you have likely already seen in your internet travels. The infectious dance has even made its way to Japan too, as the folks over at Pixiv have produced a really fun and particularly elaborate version. As you can see in the video above, it starts off with a lone Stig-like dancer, followed by the rest of his office mates once the beat drops. Ranging from an inverted/skirted office lady to a fuzzy costumed panda in the background, the Pixiv team certainly looks to be having lots of fun here. In fact, the Tokyo-based company, which runs a very popular online art community of more than 6 million members, is known for having a lively and creative company culture. When a new staff member recently came to the Pixiv office from Malaysia, they welcomed him with a fun personalized hanging banner. They have an amazingly colorful work space (pictured right) which almost makes Google’s famously playful office seem drab. Stay tuned for more information about Pixiv, as we hope to bring you more details about them in the future. Written with contributions from Junya Mori
The viral Harlem Shake meme has been taking the world by storm recently, as you have likely already seen in your internet travels. The infectious dance has even made its way to Japan too, as the folks over at Pixiv have produced a really fun and particularly elaborate version.
As you can see in the video above, it starts off with a lone Stig-like dancer, followed by the rest of his office mates once the beat drops. Ranging from an inverted/skirted office lady to a fuzzy costumed panda in the background, the Pixiv team certainly looks to be having lots of fun here.
Photo: mdn.co.jp
In fact, the Tokyo-based company, which runs a very popular online art community of more than 6 million members, is known for having a lively and creative company culture. When a new staff member recently came to the Pixiv office from Malaysia, they welcomed him with a fun personalized hanging banner.
They have an amazingly colorful work space (pictured right) which almost makes Google’s famously playful office seem drab. Stay tuned for more information about Pixiv, as we hope to bring you more details about them in the future.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate is planning to launch another co-working space at Odaiba, Tokyo’s waterfront area. The group already has a venue for incubating startups at another location, but the new one will focus on gadget and hardware manufacturing startups. It is jointly organized with a local architectural firm. The new incubation venue will be called MONO, and will be launched in the end of this month. To commemorate the opening the incubator recently held an exhibition and conference event for startups called Samurai MONO Festival Vol. 1, featuring a number of notable people from the gadget and hardware manufacturing scene. Let’s have a look at some of the interesting ideas and startups who we met at the event [1]. The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Tokyo ¶ A team from this university showed us several interesting ideas including: Kansei Senkyoku – Mind Jukebox ¶ Kansei Senkyoku (literally ‘music selection by sense’) chooses a song that fits your current feeling by detecting your brain waves. It’s known that alpha brain waves emerge when you are stable before sleep, and the beta wave is usually seen when you are doing something that requires concentration. Accordingly, the app selects a song…
February 16th 2013, at Telecom Center in Aomi, Tokyo
Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate is planning to launch another co-working space at Odaiba, Tokyo’s waterfront area. The group already has a venue for incubating startups at another location, but the new one will focus on gadget and hardware manufacturing startups. It is jointly organized with a local architectural firm.
The new incubation venue will be called MONO, and will be launched in the end of this month. To commemorate the opening the incubator recently held an exhibition and conference event for startups called Samurai MONO Festival Vol. 1, featuring a number of notable people from the gadget and hardware manufacturing scene.
Let’s have a look at some of the interesting ideas and startups who we met at the event [1].
The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Tokyo ¶
A team from this university showed us several interesting ideas including:
Kansei Senkyoku (literally ‘music selection by sense’) chooses a song that fits your current feeling by detecting your brain waves. It’s known that alpha brain waves emerge when you are stable before sleep, and the beta wave is usually seen when you are doing something that requires concentration. Accordingly, the app selects a song to play, and help you get a better sleep or do your work more efficiently.
This tablet app’s name is a combination of ‘recipe’ and ‘receipt’, and it helps you find a recipe for a meal the items you have just bought at the supermarket. By scanning the receipts for your groceries, the app will search for possible meals that can be cooked with these materials. You can then print out the recipe from Ricoh’s internet-enabled photocopiers. (The project is jointly conducted with Ricoh.)
Large glass projection film, often used for digital signage systems at convenience stores and other public places, is usually very costly. But by combining normal frosted-glass and a camera-enabled Android handset, the team has developed a very cheap interactive touch panel system that allows users to control a screen with flicking motions over top of the glass, as your fingers are detected by the camera of the Android handset on the other side of the glass. The coodinate data for the screen is stored in a Google Docs file, and the app will show you the next screen which corresponds to your finger motion.
Link, a user-generated, short novel posting site ¶
With this app users can create multiple parallel universes, based on someone else’s previous postings. This collective/collaborate writing results in a wide variety of novel endings, which sounds like a lot of fun. The app is expected to be available on iOS and Android soon.
This idea reminds me of the British-American film Sliding Doors, where the story alternates between two parallel universes.
Goeng, an iOS app that aims to help Japanese Facebook users communicate with foreigners ¶
Goeng helps Japanese Facebook users find friends from outside the country who share the same hobbies and interests, or like the same things. Once you and that friend get along well, you can obtain their national flag and add it to your collection. Through this sort of collection you can also earn badges.
Making a report and submitting it to your boss on a daily basis can often be way too much hassle. Gamba allows employees to post daily reports to their bosses in a very easy way. I assumed this app was targeting SMEs or startups, but the app’s creator says they have many big Japanese companies as their users as well.
The festival also had an elevator-pitch session, where entrepreneurs were requested to pitch with a handheld megaphone (see picture below). When all was said and done, the winners were:
3rd place:Shokunin-san, a job matching site for construction workers.
2nd place:Anipipo, a crowdfunding site for animation content. It’s launching soon but still waiting for Paypal to approve them as a merchant.
1st place:Craftstep, a how-to collection of handcraft matters, including things like Japanese paper foldings.
Tablet-focused web developer Social Agent pitches at Mono Festival
Note that not all the startups introduced above have received fundraising from Samurai Incubate. ↩
Few among us can resist the simple pleasure of popping bubble wrap. Japan’s Bandai capitalized on this widespread public fetish a few years back when it produced its Mugen Puchipuchi keychain. And now, phone accessory vendor Strapya has just released a similar product, as its new Puchipuchi iPhone 5 case brings bubble wrap goodness to the backside of the Apple’s latest smartphone. Like Bandai’s keychain, the bubbles can be popped an infinite number of times, so you can keep popping for as long as you want — or until someone comes along and punches you in the face for making a racket, whichever comes first. Check out the demo video below, which shows some lucky fellow in bubble-popping ecstacy. The case is priced at 2,100 yen (or about $23) and can be ordered from the Strapya website. Of course that case only gives you bubble popping on the back of your iPhone. But if you’d like to take care of the front too, check out the Puchipuchi kibun application for iOS which lets you pop virtual bubbles on your screen. Similarly for Android users, there’s the Hatsune Miku-themed bubble pack + miku application available on Google Play.
Few among us can resist the simple pleasure of popping bubble wrap. Japan’s Bandai capitalized on this widespread public fetish a few years back when it produced its Mugen Puchipuchi keychain. And now, phone accessory vendor Strapya has just released a similar product, as its new Puchipuchi iPhone 5 case brings bubble wrap goodness to the backside of the Apple’s latest smartphone.
Like Bandai’s keychain, the bubbles can be popped an infinite number of times, so you can keep popping for as long as you want — or until someone comes along and punches you in the face for making a racket, whichever comes first. Check out the demo video below, which shows some lucky fellow in bubble-popping ecstacy.
The case is priced at 2,100 yen (or about $23) and can be ordered from the Strapya website.
Of course that case only gives you bubble popping on the back of your iPhone. But if you’d like to take care of the front too, check out the Puchipuchi kibun application for iOS which lets you pop virtual bubbles on your screen. Similarly for Android users, there’s the Hatsune Miku-themed bubble pack + miku application available on Google Play.
In Japan, when someone leaves a company, or if there’s a special occasion like a new baby or someone’s birthday, very often people will add personal notes on a big card to convey best wishes. In Japanese this is called yosegaki which means “to gather” and “write”. But the problem is that you can only gather messages from people you’re physically with, so if you need to collect messages from people who are not in the same place, it can be difficult, if not impossible. But a relatively new company called Yosetti has created a digital yosegaki card service. You can now go to Yosetti’s mobile-optimized website, and sign up using Facebook, Twitter, or email. Cards are available for many occasions including birthdays, farewells, marriages, new babies, and more. Each category comes with corresponding design templates, and once you’ve selected one, the service provides you with a unique URL which you can then share with friends so they can contribute messages. The resulting card can be sent for free as a link that can be browsed on the web. There are also options to download the card as a PDF for 300 yen (about $3), or print it on a…
In Japan, when someone leaves a company, or if there’s a special occasion like a new baby or someone’s birthday, very often people will add personal notes on a big card to convey best wishes. In Japanese this is called yosegaki which means “to gather” and “write”.
But the problem is that you can only gather messages from people you’re physically with, so if you need to collect messages from people who are not in the same place, it can be difficult, if not impossible. But a relatively new company called Yosetti has created a digital yosegaki card service.
You can now go to Yosetti’s mobile-optimized website, and sign up using Facebook, Twitter, or email. Cards are available for many occasions including birthdays, farewells, marriages, new babies, and more. Each category comes with corresponding design templates, and once you’ve selected one, the service provides you with a unique URL which you can then share with friends so they can contribute messages.
The resulting card can be sent for free as a link that can be browsed on the web. There are also options to download the card as a PDF for 300 yen (about $3), or print it on a fancy piece of cardboard for 2800 yen (about $30).
Check out the the promotional video below to learn more about how the site works.
大きな地図で見る Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) today has announced that it has expanded its Street View coverage in Japan to a number of new areas, including Kochi and Tokushima prefectures [1]. What’s especially cool about this latest addition to Street View is that in Tokushima city, Google cooperated with a local tourist organization so that it could shoot the Awa dance festival, an annual event where musicians and dancers parade through the streets wearing traditional costumes. As you can see in Google’s video below, the company rolled its famous Street View trike through the procession, capturing the spectacle all the way. As fun as the video is, take a moment to explore the Street View map as well, if you want to feel like you’re in the middle of the action. On a more serious note, Google’s Street View has served an important archival purpose in Japan in the past as well, capturing the state of the areas affected by the tragic 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Overall, it’s good to see the company getting involved in all these ways to share and preserve the country’s culture and history. The full list can be found in Google’s blog post here (Japanese). ↩
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) today has announced that it has expanded its Street View coverage in Japan to a number of new areas, including Kochi and Tokushima prefectures [1].
What’s especially cool about this latest addition to Street View is that in Tokushima city, Google cooperated with a local tourist organization so that it could shoot the Awa dance festival, an annual event where musicians and dancers parade through the streets wearing traditional costumes.
As you can see in Google’s video below, the company rolled its famous Street View trike through the procession, capturing the spectacle all the way. As fun as the video is, take a moment to explore the Street View map as well, if you want to feel like you’re in the middle of the action.
On a more serious note, Google’s Street View has served an important archival purpose in Japan in the past as well, capturing the state of the areas affected by the tragic 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Overall, it’s good to see the company getting involved in all these ways to share and preserve the country’s culture and history.
The full list can be found in Google’s blog post here (Japanese). ↩
As you pass through train stations in Tokyo, you may stumble upon Acure vending machines with bright 47 inch digital screens. These Acure machines are a product of the JR East Water Business Co. Ltd [1], and they are anything but normal. They use facial recognition technology to detect the age and sex of whoever is standing in front of them, and they recommend the product determined to be best suited for that person. When recommending a drink, Acure also considers the current temperature, the time of the day, and even the season. So it might serve up a steaming hot can of coffee on a cold winter morning, or an icy soda on a hot summer day. The vending machine includes other interesting features such as filling in new beverages in place of sold out ones when a spot becomes available. It also stores demographic data of its users which can later be used to help with product development and sales. In fact, a new apple juice “Aomori-Ringo 100” (‘ringo’ means ‘apple’ in Japanese) through analyzing the accumulated data on Acure. The company expected fruit juice to be preferred by women, but they were surprised to find out that…
As you pass through train stations in Tokyo, you may stumble upon Acure vending machines with bright 47 inch digital screens. These Acure machines are a product of the JR East Water Business Co. Ltd [1], and they are anything but normal.
They use facial recognition technology to detect the age and sex of whoever is standing in front of them, and they recommend the product determined to be best suited for that person. When recommending a drink, Acure also considers the current temperature, the time of the day, and even the season. So it might serve up a steaming hot can of coffee on a cold winter morning, or an icy soda on a hot summer day.
The vending machine includes other interesting features such as filling in new beverages in place of sold out ones when a spot becomes available. It also stores demographic data of its users which can later be used to help with product development and sales. In fact, a new apple juice “Aomori-Ringo 100” (‘ringo’ means ‘apple’ in Japanese) through analyzing the accumulated data on Acure. The company expected fruit juice to be preferred by women, but they were surprised to find out that men also buy fruit juice in late afternoons to night time. The company carefully chose a package that would appeal to both sexes.
But are these smarter vending machines really any better than traditional ones? According to Acure they are indeed a big improvement, selling three times more than regular vending machines. So far the user demographic of Acure is about 63% men and 37% women.
Men in their 20s and 30s are the machine’s biggest fans, and Acure knows exactly when and what they buy. Typically they begin their mornings with a can of black coffee, usually moving on to a different kind of energy drink depending on the time of the day. RedBull sells more in the late afternoon to night time, for example.
The company is searching for other uses of it’s technology too. An Acure machine for general goods was placed in a newly opened mall just recently. These remotely controllable vending machines can be a life saver in times of crisis as well, as they can be instructed to give away all stored beverages in times of disaster.
A solely owned subsidiary of the East Japan Railway Company. ↩
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
