If you haven't visited our project hitotoki.org recently, then now is the time.

The small literary website building an emotional map of Tokyo is growing faster than we ever imagined, with London and NYC launched recently and the impending launch of 3 cities DC, Paris (in French and English) and Shanghai!

If you haven't submitted a story, now is the time!
Looking forward to reading you soon online.

Bokurano

Without a doubt!! Great story, great character dvpt, no moe BS.

But careful though, it's gloomy!! gloo-my!! As the series progresses, you discover all the hardships that those kids have already gone through and it's pretty painful to watch, but that makes it all worth it!

A very unique story. Don't let yourself be intimidated by the couple robot fights happening in the background...
What matter are the lives of those kids! In more ways that you can imagine...

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OK, I deleted all my comments by mistakes months ago and was hoping to be able to restore everything; but as this is going nowhere and new entries are piling up in the meantime, I have decided to just move on. So here you go, I am reopening this blog.

(Oh and I am thinking about redesigning the whole site!)

After my recent announce of the new AU Summer Collection, I had to wait a couple months before the official release of the Casio W53CA phone.

I got the phone a few weeks ago and it's a beauty, as always. It's even thinner than the 43CA, the hinge is even smaller and more elegant. The screen is wider and QVGA (480x800) resolution. You know all those phone ads where the screen looks incredible crisp, but then you buy the phone and it's some crappy 120x60 resolution... Well the 53CA screen makes pics look like printed matter. Simply incredible.

The camera is pretty amazing too. It does take beautiful Exilim pics, better than any other camera phone I have ever seen. Of course, certain lighting condition will always be challenging but this thing can survive just about anything.

So is there anything to complain about?

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So I've spent the past couple hours helping find Steve Fossett. I have become a Mechanical Turk for Amazon and have been reviewing satellite imagery of the area where Steve is supposed to have disappeared last Monday.
I am not a super fan of Steve but I have followed his record-breaking exploits in the news over the past few years and felt kinda touched by his disappearance; enough to wish that I could help actually, and enough to subscribe to Google Alerts on Monday to receive alerts in my inbox as soon as any news site would update us on him.

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This just in!
A week after DoCoMo announced their new accelerometer-fitted mobile phones, AU have just done the same with their own Summer 2007 collection...
10 phones!

Quick snippets:
- 2 Casio phones. One of them (the W53CA) is now branded with Casio's digital camera brand Exilim and boasts a 5.1 MP camera! You know which phone I am already considering buying... ;-)

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Hitotoki Tokyo has launched in Japanese, after the successful launch of the English version. We have a few stories up there already so go have a look.
We will also open in New York in September and are currently looking for submissions.

I have published an article on how to make better presentations at Pecha-Kucha Night events. It is up on the AQ blog, where I work.

The 3rd collection of our TAB T-shirts has just been released in our new online store. 5 designers have donated graphics illustrating their love of Tokyo to help us promote the city as a lively and happening place, as well as support our Non-Profit Organization team (paid staff and volunteers). The Shop has been entirely redesigned and includes a new bilingual cart system, interfacing with Paypal.

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AQ, the Tokyo-based little webdesign/print studio I work with has a fancy new website.
I am really pleased with its looks. Simple, not geeky and with cute little illustrations to accompany visitors.
We do Japanese & bilingual web design, localization, usability testing, graphic design and consulting.

Check some of our selected works, and bookmark our new blog.

Our new project has pre-launched:
Hitotoki.org.

The site is a little non-commercial project we put together in a few weeks as a joint effort between AQ (little design studio where I work) and Chin Music (Tokyo/Seattle-based publishers).

The site will attempt to record and broadcast short location-based narratives written by people that have visited Tokyo or live in the city.
The stories, like the title indicates (hitotoki in Japanese means a single moment), should capture those special moments one encounters when living in Tokyo where it just feels good/weird/tough to be here, and must be tied to a specific location in the city.
Hopefully, the memories emerging from the site will allow people to enjoy a more intimate and deeper view of the town, its people, and the authors profiled alongside the stories.

Updated: We have launched!! hitotoki.org

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Just for personal reference on terms I made up and would like to see used more:

Nicolas Nova says:
A "100Gb evening" is a term coined by Paul Baron to refer to, as he says, “events where I have discovered so many things that I want to research more”
referring to that meeting with Adam Greenfield and Fabio Sergio in February 2003.

As a caption for this February 2007 photo on Flickr I said:
oh, and they have spermalinks: (for many baby readers)

Should I dare rename all the "permalinks" as "spermalinks" on this blog?

Updated I miss Jean's Anime columns, but try to keep up with what's going on via other means. This past season, I found myself enjoying the very decent Ergo Proxy and Kemonozume series and Production I.G's mind blowing OAV Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society.

But when he told us there were about 50 new series starting in April this year, I got very excited! I did a bit of research and below are the 8 series that look like potential keepers:

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I have been following with interest the development of Spanning Sync's Google Calendar <-> iCal syncing software.
But after 7 months of hard work, the development team gave the finger to 18,862 beta testers couple days ago, by launching the final v1.0 with a very steep pricing scheme that resulted in more than 90% of angry comments on their blog post announcing the launch.

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Updated
The Spring 07 collection of AU phones is out and AU has not let me down this time. It will have finally taken 12 months (3 collections) to lure me away from my uber-awesome bestselling W41CA. It is now time to upgrade!
Out of the 10 phones on the shelf, only 2 caught my eyes. They are the only 2 phones to have the new WVGA screens with resolutions of 800x480px. And unfortunately, the forever-beautiful-W41CA-inspired form factor of the W51CA will probably not be enough to distract me from those screens.

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It's been possible to use gmail on Japanese AU phones (sorry for DoCoMo and Softbank...) for 3 months now, by simply going to gmail.com on the EZ browser and logging in there. No mojibake guaranteed (!!), unlike the previous gmail.com/m version.

But I recently discovered that you can check your Google Calendars too!

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What a silly title... Almost sounds Engrish. (it's also a silly post! Yes!)

But I am trying to build a list of foreign designers/artists (notable ones...) married to Japanese nationals..
please help me!

Here are the ones I know:
Jonathan Barnbrook (Male - British nationality - living in the UK)
Alexander Gelman (M - US - JP)
Nicolas Gwenaël (M - FR - JP)
Büro Destruct's Lopetz (M - CH - CH)

Any more?

added:
Simon Taylor from Tomato (M - UK - JP/UK)

I have finally sorted, tagged, geotagged and uploaded pictures I took last October in Hong Kong when I joined my friend Kallen for a week of holidays there.
Here is the set on flickr
Here are the geotagged pictures on a map.

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[Bethemedia] And kids (and Media Types from London) are telling me my blog is totally Book. WHAT? Here's the great new thing. Because 'Book' comes up before the word 'Cool' on T9, effectively kids are now re-associating the 'Signified' - our perfect Platonic notion of 'Cool' - with a signifier that shares no traditional meaning derived from existing language, but jumps to another (almost) randomly associated signifier - simply because of T9 associating them through structural similarities.[via]

[37signals] There's an interesting tradeoff presented by the iPhone. While the phone can do more, and its interface is fluid, in some ways it widens the gulf between human and computer.
When you touch it it doesn't touch you back.
That may prove to be a good thing. It may prove that what we think we need we don't really need. The tradeoffs may payoff. But we've certainly lost the tactile feedback humans are used to when dealing with things that are right in front of us. Now the connection is simulated. Rich textures have been replaced with androgynous glass.

How can you dial the iPhone without looking at it? How can you reach in your pocket and press "1" for voicemail? How can you orient yourself with the interface without seeing it? With a traditional phone or device with buttons you can feel your way around it. You can find the bumps, the humps, the cut lines, the shapes, the sizes. You can find your way around in the dark. Not with the iPhone.

We, at AQ, have just released a redesigned website and corporate identity for Welkam, a small but smart company that directs, designs and builds booths and displays for exhibitions and events in Japan and worldwide.
Those 2 powerguys can do many things, in several languages and many countries. Our mission was to design a site that would reflect that in a clear and engaging way.
Let us know what you think!

The New York Times: Streets Are Paved With Neon's Glare, and City Calls a Halt (By Larry Rohter - Published: December 12, 2006)
SAO PAULO, Brazil - Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million, overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to press the "delete all" button and offer its residents an unimpeded view of their surroundings.

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Italian photographer Francesco Jodice worked together with film director Kal Karman on a well-edited video documentary about a little-known Japanese social phenomenon: hikikomori which Wikipedia describes as reclusive adolescents or young adults who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement due to various personal and social factors in their lives.

Nothing too new here, but it's pretty rare to find videos in English about the subject. I would recommend Jodice to put the video on YouTube though. (via wmmna)

Taking inspiration from a recent trend in the US IT industry, Tokyo Art Beat has debuted a new section: "TAB Jobs".
TAB Jobs is a new job board that will launch on the 1st of December with job offers specially targeted at the dynamic community of creative professionals living and working in Tokyo, Japan.

Finding the right job in our industries is a difficult endeavor, with too few tools specifically targeted at us. We want to make TAB Jobs this new tool, where companies can advertise directly to a core target of designers and where we can easily find jobs specific to our skills.

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Yay, the Ramenzu, famous Japanese comedy duo, are back in the Japanese version of the popular "Hello, I'm a Mac; and I'm a PC" ads.

Not nearly as funny as their other works, but worth a look.

Wouuuuh! the new DoCoMo phones just came out and I am blown away (for the first time in 4 years!); they have managed to 1-up ALL of the recent AU phones! My jaw is on the ground!
The Sony-Ericsson has a 3!! inch screen + a 1.5in sub-display (and a dual Mini SD !!! / Memory Stick Duo Pro slot) and at least 6 of them do GPS and most have 3MP AF cameras and can send mail attachements of up to 2!! MB (against 500kb in AU)...
*puts head in freezer & goes to buy more exclamation marks from the corner shop*

OK, more details later (I need to sleep) but I was on the market for a new phone, and hadn't really been impressed by the latest AU collections (hence my silence) and the long-awaited "number portability" freedom operation ("take your number with you when you change carrier") is 11 days away...
I have a feeling I may be taking my business to DoCoMo real soon!

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NEPRO Japan, following their previous study published in January 2004, have again published the results of a study into people's useage of their mobile phones' GPS function. [via]

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If, like me, you have been tagging your pics with location data for a while (a practice called Geotagging), then you will be happy to learn that Flickr recently released a new geotagging feature allowing you to place all your pics onto a world map.
However, the location data of my pics is embedded in their EXIF tags by the mobile phone I use to take the pics and the new feature doesn't read them from there, in the case of pictures added to Flickr before this new feature was released.
Thankfully, Sam Judson has released GeoReTagr, a little script that will import geotagged pics' EXIF data into the new location fields that Flickr uses to place the pics onto the map.
Thank you Sam!!
Here are my geomapped pictures on an UGLY Yahoo map!

UPDATE:
aemkei has released a delicious little bookmarklet that lets you tag any pic onto the nicer Google maps, from within any of your flick photo pages, without the need of an external script or application etc... (and it works with most browsers) and it also lets any person view your pics mapped on a nice Google map when they visit you Flickr pages or even as a standalone version:
here are my geomapped pictures on Google Maps with a delicious interface!