The Tomigaia Blog

Radio Interview on JWAVE

I have an interview coming up on J-WAVE 81.3FM, a Tokyo radio station, on Sunday night. It will be on the air, live, in Tokyo at 7:30 am JST, Monday February 10th. (CHANGED FROM THE 3rd....)
I will be talking about a partner company of Tomigaia, Thinking Pictures, and their new service called ThinkPix Entertainment Network.

The radio show is called Good Morning Tokyo, and as I remember it, it is a very popular variety show that always has phone-in guests from overseas.
The host of the show is a well-know media figure in Japan, John Kabira, who will interview me in English for five minutes, and then give a condensed version of the interview in Japanese. It is fun and educational for the audience, as I recall.

In case you were wondering, the ThinkPix Entertainment Network is a network of digital posters that display interactive content in public spaces. They are deployed right now all over the USA, and are gaining the interest of theater owners and the public. They display movie ads, trailers, other ads, and short films on large, vertical plasma screens attached to a wall. Inside is a linux machine playing digital video, and a WiFi card talking to a local server. Since they have a proximity sensor embedded, these posters can tell when people are standing in front of them, and then start playing video. The most interesting part is that they also have radio smart-card readers built in, and if customers register for a membership to a theater chain, and not their movie preferences, the poster will play a trailer chosen to match their interests. This also allows for the user to avoid seeing the same trailers again, as the server keeps track of what a person has seen, and does not play the same trailer twice.

Content management is done from Thinking Pictures HQ in New York, and then sent over the net to all the theaters, and then viewer response data comes back.





I used to work with Stephan Fitch, the founder and CEO of Thinking Pictures back at the MIT Media Lab, and I am working with him again now to help him find a partner to launch this new advertising medium in Japan.

I hope someone who listened to the show on the radio in Japan and post a comment here!