The Tomigaia Blog

CeBit USA is Quiet.

I attended CeBit USA today at the Javitz center here in New York City. It was the third day of the show, and there were very few attendees on the floor. All the people manning the booths looked tired and bored. Perhaps I should have gone on the first day.

I did see some interesting demos at the NTT Docomo USA booth. They have developed a video pet feeder that lets you feed your dog or cat and watch it eat through a video phone. What will they think of next?

Mr. Ono, head of NTT Docomo USA gave a keynote speech, and he said that currently voice makes up 80% of their network usage, but in 7 years it will only make up 20%, and data will take up 80%. I hope he is right!

He ended with a very (unintentionally) funny video that was dubbed into English from Japanese. It seems that in the future, Japanese people will have mobile phones built into their clothing, and use their phones for everything. I sure hope they are wrong about that!

Oddpost as News Aggregator

As this blog has noted before, I love Oddpost. They have just added a new feature that allows customers to add RSS news feeds. For people who like to get their news/blog feeds along with their e-mail, this is a killer app.

I can't wait until the calendar feature is fully functional!

Book-Off, Selling the Ripped-Off

There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about the changes taking place in the fabric of Japanese society. I was recently talking to a friend who lives in Japan, and he told me that there has been a recent development there that shows how much things have changed in the last few years. It seems that young Japanese males have discovered a new way of making pocket money. First they go to a bookstore and shoplift a couple of expensive books. Then they take them to a used bookshop called Bookoff, which will buy them for a percentage of the list price, no questions asked. Some bookstores are losing up to $1 million a month in inventory due to this trade (see this article, in Japanese). I'm sure that the bookstores, who began to improve their security systems, , will work with Bookoff to prevent stolen merchandise from being fenced in its shops, but there are definitely some conclusions that we can make about the changes in Japanese culture from this story.

Young people in Japan think very differently about morality and ethics then their parents do. This generation gap will cause enormous conflict over the next few years in Japan. Of course, Japanese youth will begin to take advantage of weak and inefficient systems, but they will also rebel against attitudes of conformity toward work and other pillars of Japanese society. I hope that the parts of Japanese culture that I love will not be destroyed but I worry that this abrupt shift in values will do just that.

Internet Cash Tournaments: A new way to go?

After years of growth the Internet is said to be stagnating by some. Many sites are shutting down because there is no more money out there to be made in advertising or in selling content to consumers.

In fact, some sites have been forced to change into sex related businesses to survive. In parallel growth with porn and sex-related sites, there are gambling sites. The number of ways to gamble on the net always seems to be growing. One new kind of gambling site that I discovered recently allows users to participate in a legal kind of gambling, called "cash tournaments". These are games, like pool, where players put money into a pot, and then play in a tournament. The winner of the tournament wins most the money in the pot (games site takes it's flat fee out of the pot for facilitating the game). One restriction is that only US citizens and read or residents of the US over age 18 are allowed to play. When you win a tournament, you get points, and you can then convert those points back into money at the same rates of 100 points to one dollar. MiniClip and GameTrust, built the this gaming system together, and it seems popular was sometimes 500 users in games at a time. They seem to have solved all the security issues with Java applet games, as well as the physics of pool.

For people who are lovers of pool and gambling this game system must be extremely addictive. I worry about compulsive gamblers and how they could lose all their money very quickly to games like this. Some people are winning hundreds of dollars per week playing this game! On the other hand, this may be a valid form of entertainment on the Internet.

If the GameTrust system ever is integrated with the micro payment systems developed by Peppercoin and the like, I believe that there will be an explosion in Internet gambling, and perhaps a new business model for many gaming sites.