The Tomigaia Blog

Japanese Site Goes Up

Cyrus and the crew here have made a first draft of a Japanese version of the web site. Please send us your comments and suggestions!.

Internet Phone Number fight in the USA

I read this article yesterday, and I was struck by the rate of change in the telecommunications world. There will be battles over assiging phone numbers, I am sure, but traditional phone companies have already lost the war with packet-switched Internet services.

What I find interesting is that Japan may be ahead of the US is accepting Internet Telephony. From the media reports that I get, it seems that the Japanese public feels ready to embrace this fundamental change in communications technology.

In any case, my prediction is that any local phone service providers that do not offer IP phones will be out of business in 5 years.

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!

I have started a Blog.

After a long delay, I have started a blog.... I installed the software this morning on my web server, and in about 10 minutes, I was publishing my first entry. I have to thank Joi Ito for pushing and prodding me. I couldn't/wouldn't have done it without his input.

Of course, there is a bit of "blog jealously" involved as well. Since Joi and other friends have such great blogs, the pressure to "keep up with the Jones" is there. So far, I think the blogging infrastructure is well-enough developed to be less frustration prone than previous technologies. I may rue these words.