Opening the palm-sized Snow White book created by Japanese architect/design-engineer Yusuke Oono, you’re instantly drawn in to an amazing 3-dimentional world. He created the breath-taking diorama by precision paper-cutting each individual page.
The Snow White book was born out of a contest held at FabCafe in Tokyo, a space which opened about a year ago with more than 30,000 customers visited the unique design cafe since then. The folks at FabCafe encourage the creation of new designs using a laser cutter installed at the venue, and so far the number of laser cut art works exceeds 2,500.
When FabCafe held its first You Fab 2012 design contest for laser cutter designs, Yusuke Oono’s 360 degree “Snow White” book won the Free Fab award after careful review by panel of judges including Dytham Architecture, Mark Frauenfelder, Hiroya Tanaka. It won out over 359 designs from all over the world.
The 360 degree book design data is now availabe at the online store, FabCafe Deals, for 980 yen (about $11). So anyone who has access to a laser cutter can create their own 360 degree book anywhere in the world. You can see a collection of works by Yusuke Oono over at loftwork.com.
There’s much anticipation over the very futuristic Google Glass, which promises to deliver smartphone-like capabilities in a pair of wearable glasses. But the idea of providing useful, supplemental information through a pair of glasses is actually nothing new, especially in Japan where a number of manufacturers have already created such solutions, and there are more on the way. Today I thought I’d take a quick look at some projects and ideas which I think were important in the development of smart glasses technology. Brother’s AirScouter Japanese printer manufacturer Brother has been developing its AirScouter which came to light almost 5 years ago, announcing its commercialization in 2011. While it’s certainly a little bulky, the AirScouter is practical if nothing else, providing useful information in situations like assembly line work to explain complex tasks. Check out the video below for a more complete explanation. Docomo’s AR Walker Another such solution is Docomo’s AR Walker, a augmented reality prototype that the company exhibited way back in 2010, creating what I believe is the first head-mounted display that didn’t look awful. The project, at that time, required a wired connection to a smartphone using wires, but after that it could deliver handy information…
There’s much anticipation over the very futuristic Google Glass, which promises to deliver smartphone-like capabilities in a pair of wearable glasses. But the idea of providing useful, supplemental information through a pair of glasses is actually nothing new, especially in Japan where a number of manufacturers have already created such solutions, and there are more on the way. Today I thought I’d take a quick look at some projects and ideas which I think were important in the development of smart glasses technology.
Brother’s AirScouter
Japanese printer manufacturer Brother has been developing its AirScouter which came to light almost 5 years ago, announcing its commercialization in 2011. While it’s certainly a little bulky, the AirScouter is practical if nothing else, providing useful information in situations like assembly line work to explain complex tasks. Check out the video below for a more complete explanation.
Docomo’s AR Walker
Another such solution is Docomo’s AR Walker, a augmented reality prototype that the company exhibited way back in 2010, creating what I believe is the first head-mounted display that didn’t look awful. The project, at that time, required a wired connection to a smartphone using wires, but after that it could deliver handy information about the world around you via a QVGA display positioned just in front of the right lens.
This was a somewhat crude execution of augmented reality glasses, but an important one, I think. I had a chance to try this one first hand a few years back, and it worked very well, displaying information about the areas where your head was pointing, even showing you the weather when you look upwards. You can learn more in the video from Diginfo News below:
Dennou Coil (TV series)
Perhaps one of the lesser publicized influences on the development of Google Glass-like technology is the 2007 television series Dennou Coil, where characters use of augmented reality glasses to explore a virtual world that is superimposed on top of their city, visible only when they wear their glasses. The series was written and directed by Mitsuo Iso who also worked on the well known Ghost in the Shell film.
It’s hard to say how much this series affected or inspired the development of augmented reality a in Japan, but I would not be surprised if many individuals or even companies followed concepts seen here.
In the consumer space, Google Glass might be the leading product over the next few years, but we can expect more intriguing attempts to create such smart glasses from Japanese companies pushing the technology further as well. Both Fujitsu and Brilliant Service reportedly showed off some cool technology at the recent Mobile World Congress, promising to make significant improvements in the coming years.
Japan is considered one of the safest countries in the world, and it usually feels safe enough even for most women to walk home late at night. Each year, approximately just one murder is commited for every two hundered thousand people. But that doesn’t mean that Japanese people are all fearless about their own safety, and occasionally some women might find themselves harassed by stalkers. The total number of stalking complaints in Japan were 752 as of June 2012 which is still very low, but nevertheless is a 60% increase compared to the same time the year before. For women who wish to enhance their security at home, Magrex has invented a wireless door monitoring hardware called Kowagirlie (“Kowa” means scared in Japanese). All you do is place the required hardware on top of your door and download the dedicated app which is available for both iOS and Android. Kowagirlie transfers what’s displayed on the monitor over wi-fi so you can then see who’s at the entrance simply by looking at your smartphone, with no need to approach the door. Kowagirlie records video as well, and users can not only monitor live video but also save images and videos on…
Japan is considered one of the safest countries in the world, and it usually feels safe enough even for most women to walk home late at night. Each year, approximately just one murder is commited for every two hundered thousand people. But that doesn’t mean that Japanese people are all fearless about their own safety, and occasionally some women might find themselves harassed by stalkers. The total number of stalking complaints in Japan were 752 as of June 2012 which is still very low, but nevertheless is a 60% increase compared to the same time the year before.
For women who wish to enhance their security at home, Magrex has invented a wireless door monitoring hardware called Kowagirlie (“Kowa” means scared in Japanese). All you do is place the required hardware on top of your door and download the dedicated app which is available for both iOS and Android. Kowagirlie transfers what’s displayed on the monitor over wi-fi so you can then see who’s at the entrance simply by looking at your smartphone, with no need to approach the door.
Kowagirlie records video as well, and users can not only monitor live video but also save images and videos on their smartphone. Kowagirlie is 14,800 yen (about $158), and is currently available on Amazon. You can check out the device in action in the video below. (Via weekly.ascii.jp)
[Update] The group has announced that UK-based play performance group Whole Hog Theatre will conduct a Japan tour of Princess Mononoke in April and May in partnership with the Studio Ghibli animation studio. Dwango’s CEO is currently working at the studio as a ‘trainee’ to explore a possible collaboration. Dwango, a Tokyo-based ringtone distributor and the parent company of Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga, announced today that Japanese publishing giant Kadokawa Group and Nippon Television Network would take a major stake of its shares. The company’s largest shareholder prior to this announcement, music company Avex Group, will now be the third largest shareholder. Dwango has been partnered with Avex for seven years, but it has been exploring other partnerships in different businesses to diversify its service portfolio. Kagokawa also recently acquired Skyscraper Inc. from Dwango, a company which primarily handles ads for the Nico Nico Douga video service. A group of ten companies [1] including Dwango and Nippon TV Network will unveil a major joint project of some kind on Tuesday afternoon. The press briefing will be broadcast live on the web on Nico Nico Douga starting at 2pm Tuesday, Japan Time. The ten companies are Dwango, Nippon…
[Update] The group has announced that UK-based play performance group Whole Hog Theatre will conduct a Japan tour of Princess Mononoke in April and May in partnership with the Studio Ghibli animation studio. Dwango’s CEO is currently working at the studio as a ‘trainee’ to explore a possible collaboration.
Dwango, a Tokyo-based ringtone distributor and the parent company of Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga, announced today that Japanese publishing giant Kadokawa Group and Nippon Television Network would take a major stake of its shares. The company’s largest shareholder prior to this announcement, music company Avex Group, will now be the third largest shareholder.
Dwango has been partnered with Avex for seven years, but it has been exploring other partnerships in different businesses to diversify its service portfolio. Kagokawa also recently acquired Skyscraper Inc. from Dwango, a company which primarily handles ads for the Nico Nico Douga video service.
A group of ten companies [1] including Dwango and Nippon TV Network will unveil a major joint project of some kind on Tuesday afternoon. The press briefing will be broadcast live on the web on Nico Nico Douga starting at 2pm Tuesday, Japan Time.
Tokyo-based VC Incubate Fund recently announced that it had established a new 2 billion yen fund (about $21.4 million), with the aim of investing in seed startups and young venture capitalists. Specifically, the firm expects to invest in 100 startups within the next three years. To establish the fund, the firm fundraised from Infocom Corporation (the publisher of a bilingual news blog on Japan-made Android apps), Sega, SME Support, D2C (a joint venture of Dentsu and NTT Docomo), Nissay Capital (an investment arm of Japan’s second largest life insurance company), Mixi, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. Until now, the firm has been known for investing in a number of notable Japanese startups including game companies Gumi, Pokelabo, Aiming, and Axel Mark; as well as San San, who runs a business card-based CRM solution. In the past several months, the firm has been expanding its scope beyond gaming startups, investing in seed and early startups like Coffee Meeting (people-to-people matchmaking on a chat over coffee), Storys.jp, Designclue, Voip, and Booklap.
Tokyo-based VC Incubate Fund recently announced that it had established a new 2 billion yen fund (about $21.4 million), with the aim of investing in seed startups and young venture capitalists. Specifically, the firm expects to invest in 100 startups within the next three years.
To establish the fund, the firm fundraised from Infocom Corporation (the publisher of a bilingual news blog on Japan-made Android apps), Sega, SME Support, D2C (a joint venture of Dentsu and NTT Docomo), Nissay Capital (an investment arm of Japan’s second largest life insurance company), Mixi, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital.
Until now, the firm has been known for investing in a number of notable Japanese startups including game companies Gumi, Pokelabo, Aiming, and Axel Mark; as well as San San, who runs a business card-based CRM solution. In the past several months, the firm has been expanding its scope beyond gaming startups, investing in seed and early startups like Coffee Meeting (people-to-people matchmaking on a chat over coffee), Storys.jp, Designclue, Voip, and Booklap.
Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) doesn’t often do business beyond its home market, so I was pretty intrigued recently to get a preview of a relatively new project from its innovation team that is making an effort to go after global users. DeployGate initially launched last year, promising an easier way to distribute test versions of Android applications as part of the development process, all without an SDK. That service is getting an update today, one which expands its focus past just developers, placing more emphasis on the users. With this shift, it moves in on the territory of Test Flight, although its focus is still heavily on the development process. DeployGate initially came about as a result of the Mixi in-house developers scratching their own itch. As the were developing Mixi Android clients they often ran into problems, finding they had a need for easier deployment of apps to test users. DeployGate is the solution they came up with, eventually becoming a product that The Mixi innovation team would ship as a product, spun off from the Mixi development team. The process looks simple enough from a developer’s point of view. Your app is uploaded, and then you can…
L to R: Kenta Imai, Yuki Fujisaki, Kyosuke Inoue
Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) doesn’t often do business beyond its home market, so I was pretty intrigued recently to get a preview of a relatively new project from its innovation team that is making an effort to go after global users. DeployGate initially launched last year, promising an easier way to distribute test versions of Android applications as part of the development process, all without an SDK. That service is getting an update today, one which expands its focus past just developers, placing more emphasis on the users. With this shift, it moves in on the territory of Test Flight, although its focus is still heavily on the development process.
DeployGate initially came about as a result of the Mixi in-house developers scratching their own itch. As the were developing Mixi Android clients they often ran into problems, finding they had a need for easier deployment of apps to test users. DeployGate is the solution they came up with, eventually becoming a product that The Mixi innovation team would ship as a product, spun off from the Mixi development team.
The process looks simple enough from a developer’s point of view. Your app is uploaded, and then you can create a unique deployment page (or distribution panel) for that iteration which can then be circulated to whomever you wish, typically via email. It can be password protected too if you like. The amount of users you can reach depends on your payment plan. After deployment over-the-air, a developer can then monitor error and crash reports from the web dashboard (pictured below), push updates, debug remotely, or even cancel privileges remotely if they choose.
The ability to deploy different app versions to different groups means that the newer version of DeployGate makes AB testing a little easier than before.
The new version of DeployGate has a number of new features, most notably a new pricing plan that makes it more accessible to more people. The pricing plans are listed below. As you can see, the new version follows a freemium model, although paid plans are reasonably priced.
With this new version, the hope is that developers and marketers will use the free plan and want to do more, eventually upgrading to paid plans. So far the team has mainly used Google Adwords for marketing, so this should give the product an extra push now that more people can try it out. But the advantages for any individual developers are obvious.
The team has high hopes for DeployGate too, saying they want to become the de facto solution for developing Android applications. That’s a lofty goal, but it looks like they have some prominent clients already. So far, notable companies who use DeployGate are Baidu (Japan), Kayac, Zaim [2], and Tokyo Otaku Mode. I’m told that currently the service has enough paid customers to sustain their current ecosystem, and that’s certainly promising.
So far they have users in 90 countries, with 3,400 apps distributed in total. And surprisingly their customers appear to be more global that than I’d have expected from anything associated with Mixi, with 76% of usage in English, and 24% in Japanese.
It will be interesting to see if this service from the innovation team can break free of the stagnation that has been hampering Mixi as a whole in recent years. But with DeployGate, along with the recently launched Nohana camera app, it’s certainly great to see them try.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
For women who wish to enhance their security at home, Magrex has invented a wireless door monitoring hardware called Kowagirlie (“Kowa” means scared in Japanese). All you do is place the required hardware on top of your door and download the dedicated app which is available for both iOS and Android. Kowagirlie transfers what’s displayed on the monitor over wi-fi so you can then see who’s at the entrance simply by looking at your smartphone, with no need to approach the door.
Masaru Ikeda
Tokyo-based VC 
