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?

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.

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... ;-)

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.

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!

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.

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!

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]

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!

I am getting pretty excited by this spy shot of what looks like a shop-shelves dummy model of the forthcoming AU Kddi Sony Ericsson WIN phone series W42S.
Notice the "Walkman" icon (weird... all AU phones are already mobile digital music players thanks to LISMO)...
Notice the weird metal dial at the bottom of the phone (some kind of attach for a hook system to strap your phone on your bag or clothes?)...
Notice the unusual Xpad with a weird plasticky area at the center (this has to glow and blink during calls, or it could be some sort of novel trackpad area... scroll pages by rubbing your thumb there...).
Woooooooooooooh!

woua! am all over this one! Especially cos it's not supported (yet) by my new phone, but AU is releasing a complement to their popular Naviwalk pedestrian navigation service, called 3D Navi, that will detail road intersections and destination maps in 3D. Only one phone is supported for now, the WIN43T to be released at the end of April. 2 view angles will be available, eye line and bird view. The service will keep its current price between 95¥ a day and 315¥ a month. The funky views will only be available to lucky Tokyo strollers.
Look at the pics!!

[via]

AU Kddi Japan has finally updated their 3G offering, or should I say their 7G, if you were to compare AU's data transmisison speed rate with that of DoCoMo FOMA's, but I disgress... and I love to.
I have been waiting for this update for ever and I always get so excited when I see new AU phones, even more so since I am now on the market for one to replace my dear W31S.

So, what's on offer? Well... iPods?! and e-Wallets. All 7 new WIN phones will connect to AU's iTunes NON-killer service Mobile Listen Service. Can't be bothered to pull any numbers (search the Wireless Watch for that) but they have apparently made a nice pack of cash with their full song download service and they are definitely moving up to 3rd gear. But wouldn't it be great if I could fill the 4GB hard drive of the W41T with the songs I have on iTunes... seamlessly...

Added: RealReplay, The Shroud, Mystery at the museum, Environmental Detectives, Monopoly Live.
This is a repository for all those mobile phone games using GPS or cell towers signals. I combined and reworked other lists to add most location based (or augmented reality) mobile games I could find info on. And it is updated as soon as another reference is found. Do you know of any others?
Nov 2005 - 42 games referenced.

[Engadget] KDDI has announced a new navigation service for their CDMA 1X WIN handsets over in Japan called EZ Passenger Seat Navi. Based on the same technology that made the EZ Navi Walk pedestrian GPS navigation system possible (yes, walking directions are frequently needed in Japan), EZ Passenger Seat Navi provides basic driving direction assistance to those with compatible handsets. The system offers most of the basic GPS features such as voice commands, auto-reroute if you go off course, refreshes every second, and preference-based searches. But what's most attractive is the price of the service - you can pay either 157 yen (about $1.42) for 24 hours of usage, or 315 yen ($2.86) for an entire month. Considering the costs associated with purchasing a dedicated GPS system for your car, this makes a nice low-cost alternative for those only wanting basic functionality.

Superstar is a massively multiplayer real-world game that takes place in Tokyo starting Sept. 12, 2005. The game uses Japanese Puri Kura sticker-clubs as a starting point for a playful experiment in social networks, automated
phonecam image analysis, and urban visual culture. The goal of the game is to see and to be seen, using swarms of microscopic images woven into the complex fabric of Tokyo streetlife.
The game is intended to run in conjunction with Ubicomp 2005.

Updated If you have one of those unlimited packets WIN mobile phone from AU, you can now play Bomberman in network with up to 3 other players. This new Brew application ("APULI" as we say here) puts you in a battle with other WIN phone owners, wherever they may be in Japan. When you first login, you are made to wait for sufficient opponents to join the game until the battle starts (the same way most PC network games proceed).

My friend Chris alerts us that his mates Kentaro and Tozaki (of Tokyo Picturesque fame) have just launched DuoSnap: photos sent from GPS-enabled mobile phone are mapped onto a satellite picture of Japan.

David Collier has made available the presentation he did at the Game Developers Conference 2005 with Matthew Bellows from WGamer.
Their annual "Cool mobile game demos from around the world!" show. Heavy PPT presentation. (15.6MB)

On March 10th, Navitime Japan added aerial photography maps to its personal walking/car route-finder mobile phone app. It complements the current vector maps, with real shapes and scenery, in an effort to bring more precision to the users.

2 weeks ago, the servers hosting the Japanese GPS mobile phone game Mogi Item Hunt crashed. To date, the servers are still down and the front page of the site simply displays a little note explaining that they are working on getting it back online asap. I have no details on the causes of the crash (technical or financial) or why it is taking so long to restart them...
Has it just become too expensive to maintain this game alive? Applications are endless and the technology could be reused to build a hundred offspring apps, but in the meantime, Mogi had always struggled to find a sound business plan.
Does anybody have more info than that?

[mobile-weblog.com] Who said LBS was dead already? Well, obviously not the legendary VC's Draper
Fisher Jurvetson and Nokia who've just pumped in $9.4 million into Wavemarket.
Wavemarket's flagship product is Crunkie, which is an interesting app I've been meaning to post about for a while. It's a kind of Friendster meets Location meets Virtual Graffiti meets MoBlogging meets a Business Model.

Updated. The city has just become more exciting!
We built what we thought was most missing in our city of Tokyo: an Art and Design amplifier. We know there are hundreds of artists and venues broadcasting in the city, yet so few ways to hear about them.
Now there is Tokyo Art Beat.

In the midst of 2 recently announced games involving cultivating vegetables in Japan or your own garden in France, I want to try to put together the recent ideas I've had of a massively multiplayer GPS mobile phone green game.

[PhysOrg.com] Samsung Electronics unveiled the world's first "3D movement recognition" mobile phone SCH-S310. 'Accelerometer' is built in to accurately calculate and ascertain movement in three dimensional space and then carry out commands according to those calculations.
Mobile phone input devices to date include the keypad, touch screen and voice recognition. In the future, however, 3D movement recognition technology will become an important user interface and revolutionize mobile phone designs and features.
This technology will do away with the need for complex keypads on mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and other handheld products. This will particularly effect the way games are played on a mobile phone. Many functions will be controlled by movement instead of buttons.

Last week I went to the SFC Open Research Forum 2004, held on the 40th floor of Roppongi Hills; an event that serves as a window to most projects under developement at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University in Tokyo. On the event's website, the lists of sessions, poster sessions and exhibitions are impressive (unfortunately, most linked materials are in Japanese).

[RFID in Japan] An elementary school girl was kidnapped in the Japanese city of Nara yesterday. The girl had a GPS-enabled mobile phone. At 5PM, the girl called her mom and hanged up immediately. The mother knew that she could get a map indicating where her daughter was if the daughter's cell phone was turned on. She fetched a map and found that the girl was located in a park near her house.

[The NYTimes.com] Nothing, not even Hurricane Frances, was going to keep Zach Dill from answering that phone. Everyone else had fled indoors. But with the storm just minutes away, the 24-year-old technical-support specialist stood in a Burger King parking lot in Tampa, Fla., waiting for a pay phone to ring. [...] I Love Bees is the latest in a series of so-called alternate reality games - immersive, endlessly intricate hybrids of scavenger hunts and role-playing adventures.

big game + treasure hunt + phone cam + semacode + giant animal + totems. ConQwest is a high-stakes, team-based treasure hunt in the urban jungle. Five teams race through the city searching for treasure in the form of printed codes that can be captured by phonecam. Each code has a dollar value, and the first team to find $5,000 worth of treasure codes wins the game and earns a $5,000 scholarship for their school.

[TechJapan] At the "ITS World Conference Aichi/Nagoya 2004," KDDI and NEC held a demonstration of a 3D pedestrian navigation system. The demonstration was held in the "Oasis 21" underground shopping center, which is close to the Nagoya Art and Culture Center, where the opening ceremonies of the conference were held.

[PSPrumors.comGamespot has an article about the appearance of cryptic PSP ads in Japanese magazines. The ads themselves are composed of just a QR code - like a 2 dimensional bar code which when decoded, presumeably points to a URL with more information or perhaps a release date. The only software I could find for decoding them was in Japanese and I couldn't get it do do the right thing - anyone else want a shot?

I found this post through my bloglines RSS searches. And they looked desperate for answers, so I fired up my W21S and decoded the QR-code and herd's what I found:
The code when decrypted links to http://www.playstation.jp/psp/ but the site can only be viewed on a mobile phone. The site is a small info site where I could see 4 items.
One was explaining the origin of the name PSP, the other one was giving more details on the screen that the console will be using (272x320) sounds crap to me... for a screen this size. Thirdly, there is an "En-Ke-Tto" as they say, basically a questionnaire that if answered gets your name entered in a draw giving you a chance to win one of a 100 PSP.
Finally, they claim you will be able to see the PSP again at the forthcoming festival called ENTAMA from October 22-22: the 2004 Tokyo International Entertainment Market.
That s it. I suppose that they wil keep on adding some info on the site as time goes. And no release date this time lads... sorry.

AkuAku: j2me bluetooth gps mo-pho-weblogging. Another c.r.a.z.y demonstration of love by Dave for Mie.
How geeky cute!

[TheFeature] Surprisingly, for mobile gameplay innovations at the Tokyo Game Show this year, there was more happening on phones themselves.

Not the first time I hear about the idea, but is this the first concrete QR Code Blog on the face of the blogosphere? Each entry is posted as a big QR-code that you have to decode with your mobile phone to read. [via]
Pretty Ghost in the Shell-ish if you ask me.
The site will probably become a good source of QR-code related news, it's already in my bloglines feeds (browse my public ones)... and my WIN21S is perfect to decode the posts.
Now how smart do I look, pointing my mobile to my monitor...
Or what about a QR-T-shirt-blog...

Crap name, Fun game. Digital Street Game is a hybrid game of misadventure set on the streets of New York. It's a battle for turf, a contest of wills in short an excuse to explore the city. Players compete for turf by performing and documenting stunts on the physical streets of New York in order to claim territory on a virtual map. Stunts are comprised of a random combination of 3 elements: 1) an object commonly found in the city (e.g. bodega) 2) a street game (e.g. stickball) and 3) a wildcard/urban situation (e.g. happy hour). Players interpret these elements as they wish, then stage and photograph their stunt in order to claim a spot on the map. The more stunts players perform the more turf they claim. But of course some players may want to compete for the same territory. In order to hold on to territory, players stunts must score high with the rest of the game community.

Sony's "Viable future alternatives to the keyboard interface" Flash presentation includes work (Gummi and Block Jam) by two of my friends at Sony Japan.

I just bought a new mobile phone. AU's Sony Ericsson W21S. It's a WIN phone, so I have unlimited packet transfer. I own the ultimate moblogging tool. I can moblog for ever, for the same price, and at high speed! I can send 640x480 pics straight to my gallery again thanks to Kevin's mfop2 tool. I even have an RSS feed of that. So you can expect a resumed stream of pics of varying qualities (some shots will be very mobloggy, others won't). Having recently passed the bar of 3000 pics, I am looking forward to the next 10000...

[Wireless Watch Japan] You may have read about it in Wired or The Feature, but our program today is the first Web video coverage for Mogi, a GPS game that may be The Future of Mobile Content, Version 1.0. Mogi is a multi-player network game in which individuals or teams hunt down virtual treasures hidden in Tokyo's concrete jungle; Mogi players interact in ways that even the much-talked-about i-mode has yet to deliver. It's new for Japan, even newer for the rest of the world, and there's no lucrative revenue model. Yet.

You can now watch a preview or full version of the video program done by Lars Cosh-Ishii of WWJ in which you see me present parts of Newtgames's Mogi GPS game. Enjoy.

If you read Swedish, then you might want to read this write up of Mogi by Jon Thunqvist, a Swedish reporter based in Tokyo: Ny Teknik - Mobil jakt på skatter i Tokyo
There's a nice "iconic" photo of me playing Mogi in Roppongi Crossing, the exact same place where Mathieu Castelli came up with the basic ideas for the game a few years ago.

[Ore no Buloggu] Bumped into a really kewl mobile location based game called MogiMogi. Finally got my hands on the game, and experienced what the GPS on my phone can do. It's a trip to see my keitai pin point my location just with a few keystrokes, then find virtual items nearby, and even showing other users that are physically/geographically close. The character creation process was cute ... I love creating characters.

My friend Chris is giving Mogi a spin. I'm sure he'll enjoy it. There are plenty of new features recently like enhanced trading system, new items to collect that you can wear (the hairstyle collection with hats and afro...), new collections (samourai emblems) and new creatures you can summon and race against in the city to win flags and more points. The national map is now also available on the web interface (try it with test/test)! The whole of Japan is covered! whouuuuu! Read more here.

Is AU going data flat-rate crazy with new phones believed to be coming in June?
The W11H (Hitachi), W11K (Kyocera) and W21H (Hitachi) could soon be joined by WIN models from Casio, Sanyo, Kyocera, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba.
Some details about the W25S, W11CA, W21K, W11T and W11SA have started to surface on the internet and the specs are quite exciting.
Well, not exciting per se, the AU 3G phones have had those features for a few months now, but a data flat-rate phone with a 2 megapixel camera would be the first real killer moblogging-machine. (and what about a 3.2MP camera phone, the Casio A5406CA?)
It looks to me like AU is trying to replicate all their 3G phones to their new flat-rate high speed data phones. Looks like AU are set to widen the gap they made in front of NTT and Vodafone...

[Engadget] The big E3 video game expo is this week, and the first few announcements are starting to dribble out, like this one about a GPS navigation attachment for the Game Boy Advance from RedSky Mobile. Besides being able to tell you where you are, there are also plans for multi-player games that take advantage of the GPS, though it doesn’t sound like any are actually in the works yet.

[RPTT] When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games. NetAttack "is a new type of indoor/outdoor Augmented Reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself." In this game, two teams are fighting to destroy the central database of a virtual big company. Both teams have indoor players, who control the game from their laptop computers, and outdoor players, equipped with GPS receivers, trackers, sensors and video cameras.

[BusinessWeek] Twenty-five million, or 60%, of DoCoMo customers have camera phones; 20 million have phones compatible with infrared data-access capability; 5 million have phones with two-dimensional bar-code readers; 41 million are using i-mode-compatible phones.

[Wired] Paul Baron used to love riding his bicycle around the back streets of Tokyo with his GPS camera phone, hunting down pictures of what he calls the real Japan. But now he's spending a lot of his time navigating the city and hunting down something a little more ephemeral.

Mum, I was in Tokyo and now I'm on Wired.com and...

[wired.co.jp] ポール・バロン氏はこれまで、GPS対応のカメラ付き携帯電話を持って自転車で東京の裏通りを走り回り、本当の日本と思われる風景を追い求めて写真を撮るのを楽しんできた。しかし今は多くの時間をかけて東京の街を巡り、もう少しとらえどころのないものを追い求めている。 少し前に、バロン氏は『モギィ・アイテムハント』という携帯電話を使ったゲームを友人から紹介された。プレイヤーが実際に東京のあちこちを巡り、携帯電話に内蔵されたGPS機能を使ってバーチャルな宝物を探すゲーム(写真)だ。

[Jikukan-Poemer] We aim to provide a social information space for local communities or towns. Users can annotate not only text notes but also photos to physical spaces by sending photos and GPS information from their mobile phones. Any users using such mobile phones can annotate information to physical spaces when and where they want to do it and act as content providers. (Noriyuki Ueda, Yasuto Nakanishi, Shohei Matsukawa and Masashige Motoe at the 4th International Workshop on Smart Appliances and Wearable Computing at the Tokyo University of Technology on the 23th of March 2004)

I saw their work during the Japan Media Arts Festival at the Tokyo Museum of Photography last month and was really excited. It has many common points with Marcos Weskamp's Habitat Perspectives project which I sorta beta tested last year. I really liked the way the Poemer project's pictures were pulsating on the city map, you could feel the heart beats of the people who took the pictures. Too bad there isn't an online version. And I am curious to see what they are working on next. I'd love to see those people meet at the 2IMC, if there was one...

[(area)code] (area)code is an sms mapping system which reveals personal memories and the hidden histories behind 5 key sites in Manchester city centre. It is one of the first systems to use sms and the ubiquitous mobile phone to locate information in specific places. (area)code invites you to collect and reflect upon your immediate environment, and enables new forms of engagement and information exchange between person and place. Developed for Future Sonic (area)code aims to inspire comments about the affect of urban regeneration in the city. Manchester has been an important trade centre since the Industrial Revolution through to today’s manifestation as a retail and leisure boomtown. How do such changes affect our lives? Do we feel involved in the decision making process or do you find your life has to alter to fit these new urban spaces? [via]

[Kyodo News] The percentage of Internet users in Japan topped 60% for the first time in 2003, with the number of such people in their 40s and 50s notably growing, a government report showed Wednesday.
The total number of Japanese Internet users came to an estimated 77.3 million as of Dec 31, or 60.6% of the total Japanese population, the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications said in the report.

[TheFeature] A new study shows Japanese aren't moblogging, but they still send snapshots to other handsets. If carriers want people to moblog more, we look at some interface improvement suggestions from around the web.

This kind of somewhat shallow and rushed article makes me wanna speak like Andrew Orlowski. I mean, the title is misleading and the content doesn't deliver. Is Eric Lin really surprised that the moblogging uptake is weak? Even in Japan? I co-organised the First International Moblogging Conference (1IMC) in Tokyo last year and I am NOT surprised. Continue reading entry...

Updated Since Dec 2003, I have been playing a java mobile phone game called Mogi, Item hunt from French company Newt Games. It uses the GPS functions of the KDDI AU phones and allows you to pick up virtual items spread on the whole of Japan.

[dottocomu] Japanese firms Index and Jicoux have developed a navigation system application that runs on 3G GPS phones with digital compasses (which, at the moment, means KDDI's AU service in Japan). It includes the ability to show a "radar display" of the location of nearby friends, places of interest, or bus and train stations useful in getting to your destination.

I have been getting a few enquiries recently about how my AU KDDI mobile phone with its gpsOne chip can locate itself in the urban canyons of Tokyo when communication with satellites might not be possible. Well, this .pdf presentation should clarify a few points, if not all.

A new navigation service called PhotoNavi offers to get you to your destination by showing a mix of maps and photos on their mobile site. They claim it is a more natural and easier way to orientate yourself.
From what I understand, they offer you a selection of spots in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Kyoto. You can send the page to your friends to arrange a meeting. Could be usefull to Docomo and Vodafone's users without a GPS phone (99%)... but pretty useless to AU's lucky users. [Via]

One wonders why it wasn't done earlier but Navitime has finally made it easy to take the map of your destination, searched for on your computer's browser, with you on your mobile phone, not on a print-out.

NEPRO JAPAN published in January 2004 the results of a study into people's useage of their mobile phones' GPS function in Japan.
At the moment, AU has more than 15 GPS-enabled models, Docomo has 2, none for Vodafone.

Below are outlined the results of the survey.

[CNN.com] A GameBoy Advance title "Boktai" uses sunlight as an essential part of the game. The amount of light determines the amount of power your hero has to defeat his enemies.

The content of the game changes according to time:
- the Undead come out at night and stay in dungeons during the day

and according to sunlight:
- Solar Gun power is charged by sunlight.
- Puddles dry up if exposed to sunlight continuously.
- The stronger the sunlight, the stronger the wind in certain areas.
- There are enemies that reveal themselves when the sunlight is weak.
- There are enemies that slow down when the sunlight is weak.
- The Pile Driver becomes more powerful.

[TagandScan] Now the city is alive with the past. It's layered with public grids of information. You see reviews of the local establishments, tags about history, and virtual art galleries.

Japanese mapping company Alps Corporation will launch on the 16th of January a collection of small street atlas for the Tokyo, Fukushima, Niigata, and Nagano prefectures. Their particularity will be to host a QR code on some of its "area close-up" pages.

My next phone, the KDDI AU A5403CA will sport a 2 megapixel autofocus camera. It is also one of the 3 phones offered by AU with the MS GPS ship that enables direct communication with GPS satellites.

After 4 years spent in London, I know some of the best things the city has to offer, as well as some of the worst. The London Underground fits in the latter. "Transport for London Real-time Map" shows you the line conditions on the subway network, in real time and they even provide a RSS feed. I wish I'd had that when I was there...

The next Kyocera mobile phone A5502K sold by AU in Japan will include Brew, GPS and electronic compass functions, a Xenon flash (not a crappy LED), a rotating clamshell design, a 1 megapixel camera, the new Navi-walk service (GPS navigation service for pedestrians - more details here) and a 2D barcode (QR code) scanner and reader (a first for AU phones).

"Amodal Suspension" is a large-scale interactive installation developed for the opening of the new Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. From the 1st to the 24th of November people can use this website to send short text messages to each other using a cell phone or web browser.

[Guardian Unlimited] Ivan A. Getting, a Cold War scientist who conceived the Global Positioning Satellite system that enables smart bombs, hikers and motorists to reach their destinations with pinpoint accuracy, has died at 91.

Habitat Perspectives by Marcos Weskamp is one of the 2 best shots at trying to link place and space with the participation of people. SuperFuture being the other one.

AU KDDI will offer its EZ Navi walk service for pedestrians GPS-assisted city navigation from next month when it releases its new A55xx series.

The best moblog I have seen: Visualog.
Up there with yours Carsten of course.

Would that guy release the code of his moblog for world stardom?

[TheFeature :: It's All About The Mobile Internet] Then we can only hope that our embarrassing moments will be lost in an overwhelming torrent of digital images.

Hilarious moblog post of a guy who's just been bitten by a mosquito. He added a GPS map link of where he was at that instant.

Just had an interesting discussion on the JapanBloggers mailing list about GPS locations embedded in blog entries or photo galleries. We got some good ideas coming.

A lesson in Augmented Reality by Andy Hook at the o'reilly ETCON geobof.

Not less then 18 cooltown research / white papers. Will I ever get enough free time for that?

[Dav] This place is pretty cool, it lets anyone add waypoints and associated information to their dataset and the default visualization for the search tool is the applet: GPSter: Waypoint search.

So I managed (with the help of Raphael and Beckett) to have my gallery check if there are GPS coordinates in my captions.

[MobileTracker] Allen Smith wrote to us with a link to his unique Java application for Motorola i88 mobile phones. The phone has a built in GPS which the application uses to post coordinates to a Perl script running on his webserver that logs his location (this happens every two minutes).

[Guardian] A location-enhanced web will get people out of the house and give them new ways to interact with the world around them. The net might be a tool for localisation as much as for globalisation. That's the dream.

[HowStuffWorks] A GPS receiver uses signals from satellites to pinpoint its exact location on Earth, any time, anywhere. It's the biggest thing in navigation since the compass! A GPS receiver can tell you where you are, where you've been, where you're going and what time you'll get there.

Looking for a way to attach geographical metadata to my pictures, I have found out about 3 efforts to try to bind the data available on the internet into a new layer searchable by location. If I am looking for infos on Tokyo, I would find posts, articles or pics that are dealing with Tokyo and posted from anywhere (and not data posted from Tokyo regarding somewhere else).
1- The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) advocates the use of the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN).
2- Andrew Daviel proposes his Geo Tags for HTML headers.
3- The Open Gis Consortium develops geoprocessing specifications known as Geography Markup Language (GML).

And for those who still don't get it, Headmap will settle it.

So which one should I go for?

So I bought a Handy GPS from Garmin 3 weeks ago that I received last week. Turned out the reception in Tokyo is pretty bad *thanks* to the high buildings. The plan was to record all the GPS coordinates of the pictures I take.

WiFinder World wide hot spot search engine!
FreeHotSpot (Eng) and their incontinent logo.
FreeSpot maps (Eng)
HotSpot
Tokaido Shinkansen Wireless LAN trial
JR East
DDI Air-H
List compiled thanks to Gary Garner and the Japan Times.

I bought an air-H card on Sunday and I can finally update my blog on the move as well as check email and internet and many more things!! I can actually load the movabletype interface on the Clie Browser called NetFront which is in its version 3.0
This is how I posted this entry today. Sugoiiiiiiiiii
More details soon.

Mie from Tokyo Tidbits had a drink yesterday with Adam Greenfield. She was moblogging the meeting and invited us readers to join them at the bar. Right, nobody showed up and I swear that it's only because I was already out with a friend of mine and didn't know what was going on.

Gotta try some of that once I get mine.