Nobi on VOX

I am migrating my English blog to:

ITmedia, one of the most popular news site in Japan reveals some secret of MacBook Air (reported by me ;-)  )

ITmedia: the secret of MacBook Air (the text is in Japanese, but pictures speak it all)

here are the summaries:

1. You *CAN* boot your MacBook Air via Remote Disc. The EFI on MacBook Air has been revised
   
   
2. You *CAN* use old MagSafe adapter but if you stick it to MacBook Air you *can't* put it in the middle of the table.
   You will find why, looking at this picture:
   (there are more pictures at ITmedia article)
   
   

 Yaari, an India-based social network became very well-known in japan just  in a few day; and then, it became one of the most infamous social network of all.

 Why?

 I think they have bitten the forbidden fruit.
 Using the addressbook of web mail (e.g. gmail) for solicitation is something all other social network has tried to do.
But every other service did it with permission.

 Yaari, asks you to register with your gmail account and asks for its password but if people became so open-minded and start giving out their gmail password, they can be easy targets for fraud; and that's a bad sign.

 Most of the other social network starts using this method, after they become well established.
Yaari may be well established and well-known in India but  they were unheard of here in Japan.
And because they failed with how they made their first impression , I bet they will fail here in Japan; first impression matters so much here in Japan; and failure is not an option here.
 Now people are becoming cautious and blogging to ignore all invitations from Yaari; some even say it is a virus or spams.

 I believe Yaari gave us a very good lesson in how we should not use the soliciting through web-mail method any more.

 What's next?

 I think OpenID is the way we should follow.

 No more unnecessary give-away's of e-mail address and passwords!

I think Yaari should stop using that  soliciting through web-mailimmediately and switch to OpenID; if they become they make a good example of OpenID, they may regain trust.

What a wonderful day, it was!

It has been the dream of me, Hitoshi Hokamura and Chris Stone to have people from "MAKE" magazine meet Gakken, a Japanese publisher who has been making educational toys and kits for the kids for almost four decades.

Thanks to Fumi Yamazaki of Joi Ito Lab and Saharu Kondo, we could actually make it happen today!

We brought Phillip Torrene of "MAKE" magazine and Limor Fried to Gakken's headquarter.

Phillip has known about Gakken for quite some time now. He has even been blogging about Gakken a few times:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/06/gakken_cup_phonograph_and_vacu.html
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/gakken_steam_en.html

Limor said she also fell in love with Gakken and it has been her dream to come here.

I am so glad that I could take a part in this visit.

It was almost like Steve Jobs meeting Larry Tesler at Xerox PARC or Ry Cooder visiting Buena Vista Social Club.
It was such a fun meeting and it gave so much good vibes to me.

They instantly knew what they are up to or what kind of challenges they had, etc.
They have also been stimulating each other so much. I saw sparks filling the room.

That was a one milestone meeting in the history of scientific toys.

I think it would be a start of a very good, positive, constructive relationship.

I can't wait to see that.

Here are some pictures and videos. I will be adding a few more videos at later date when I have more time.

I don't have time to read through the US publications. So I don't know how they are introduced on US publications.
But as I've expected, many Japanese publications and blogs are saying that iPod touch is an iPhone sans phone.
To be honest, I was one of them when I've posted my first (Japanese) blog entry immediately after the live chat reports of US Apple Special Event on Gizmodo and Engadget.

 As I attended the Apple Special Event in Japan and touched the real thing I've totally changed my mind.;I also got to talk to Stan Ng for brief moments.

 Not many companies can come up with product or product line-up that is this well thought out.

After all, 'iPod touch' is an 'iPod' and it is meant to be the device you'd enjoy your favorite contents on and the device that you'd carry around along with your cell phone.

 If you chose the 'IPod touch'-way you'd check e-mail, stock price, weather and use Google Map with your Blackberry Pearl or other phones of your choice; Blackberry pearl would be 'MY' choice ;-)

 By seeing what feature 'iPod touch' has, you will get a clearer picture of what 'iPod' stands for and what 'iPHONE' stands for.

 These two pictures from Jan '07 may give youeven better ideas about what this is all about:

 These are Apple's definition of IPod,  phone and mobile Internet device.

 iPhone is the sum of all three and iPod is... an iPod!
 It is true that there are slight overlaps and crossover features but the 80% of what's been said on these slides are true even after the intro of iPod touch.

 As I look through some of the Japanese articles, they seem to be confused about multi-touch screens, too.
 They tend to think, multi-touch is the premium feature you  can buy with extra $50.
 Wrong again.

 iPod Classic is not the iPod touch sans multi-touch. It is the 'Classic' iPod.
 Remember the old days? When you were grow your music collections just past the iPod and then Apple came up with bigger capacity iPods?
 iPod Classic came from that vector of revolution.
 It is your 160GB, take-all-music-with-you-anywhere iPod.

Now some people may ask why iPod classic doesn't have the multi-touch.
Well, imagine flicking through 160GB of music. I don't think I have the patience to do that.
Click-wheel is a much better interface to do it.
I think iPod Classic made clear that Click-wheel, one of the three HID method Apple has contribute, is not dead.

I think, you'll get what iPod nanos stand for and IPod shuffle stand for.

It is so amazing that each and every one of the five products, shuffles, nanos, Classics, touchs and iPhone, have such distinct characteristics.

 You have to put a good amount of thoughts to build a product lineup this good.

If you figured out how, give me a video response!

I'll post the answer on Monday, US time; if I didn't forget.

hint: the cable is for charging purpose only.

 Mac Otakara Kanteidan (Mac Treasure Tracing Club) based in Nagoya is, perhpaps, the most popular Mac news site in Japan. Back in the mid-'90s, all the Apple Japan employee checked this site first thing in the morning to find out if there is any breaking news from their own company.

Danbo-san, the head of Mac Otakara claims to have the world's first (third-party) benchmark results for the new MacBook Pro.
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=229026&doc2=198261

It certainly looks a lot faster than the previous model.

When Chris Stone of O'reilly interviewed me back in January, he asked if I would be interested in blogging for O'Reilly. My answer, of course, was  'YES'. But it took some time before I felt ready to start it.

 Now I am and I have posted two articles as the starter.

It is a blog site for Mac developers but I am aiming my articles to any sort of developers:

O'Reilly: Mac Dev Central

My posts there so far:

1. Parlais-vous Japonais?
2. How to Retire Your Software
   

I had an interesting conversation with Joseph Miller( of The Plant).
While I am busy preparing for my two-week trip to San Francisco, I will just copy/paste the conversations from my e-mail (with Josephs permission, of course).

***** I was going to do some editing before I post it, but my Firefox didn't let me edit it, I was late for a meeting, so I left my post un-edited. But now I got some time, I made SOME corrections to e-mail #2 ;-) *****

#1: Joseph to Nobi:

That's interesting that you bring up Marc Canter as well.  While he was in town I saw him present his PeopleAggregator open SNS platform at The Pink Cow.  I agree with the concept and application of open communication between platforms.  It just makes sense that you as the user should own the information that you create; it feels like the future of the web and it's probably going to win in the long term.  If we had time, we'd probably implement it ourselves :)

However, there are some unique new problems that emerge in Marc's future.  From the SNS perspective, my first fear is community moderation, since that's what I spend part of my time doing.  I've spent a fair amount of time warning and banning members (mostly men) for being web なんぱ and scaring people away from Asoboo.  I can envision a future in which an open SNS or service can become enormously popular extremely quickly, and " blog bullies" can rapidly destroy a site's community or culture.  But I'm a pessimist :)

#2: Nobi to Joseph:

That is very true. I think Marc's idea would involve many problems.
I think that kind of problems can be serious in Japan because of such community as 2 channel.
Even the well-controlled mixi occasionally has those problems.
And to be honest, I don't know if it is right or wrong.
But I still believe it is worth trying especially in Japan. If you look internationally, you see diverse mix of social networks.
But in Japan, it is mixi and others. Japan is the country of the brain-deads, so to speak.
Many Japanese don't think before choosing their service.
It is the country where Yahoo! is still more popular than Google.
So no matter how good your social network is, it doesn't matter and it remains like "mixi and others"; I spent three hours in cafe talking with a news reporter  explaining why mixi is so strong here and how other social network can be successful in Japan.
And that's how I have reached this open SNS concept.
Then, I found Marc was thinking about the same thing (but with a structure that would benefit him, of course ;-) )

Anyway, this is such an interesting discussion. With your permission, I would like to share this to my friends via Vox and ask what they would have to say.

Would it be Okay?

#3: Joseph to Nobi:
Nobi,

Sure, that sounds great.  I'd love to see how other people would solve the moderation problem.  When I asked Marc, his current solution was to either let people run free or require moderators to approve each picture before it's posted.  Neither is sufficient I think.

My article about Twitter (and Tumblr.) for ascii.jp came out just at the right moment:
-(Japanese) alpha bloggers lured by mini-blogging (the article is in Japanese)

 When I finished writing this piece, Google search for "Twitter" showed mostly US results and Technorati.jp blog search showed about a dozen Japanese articles per day but as this article get published, it became one of the hottest article on hatena bookmark (Japanese equivalent of del.icio.us) at the same time, the technorati.jp search result has been doubled or trippled.

This past week was the Twitter week for Japan; I saw more and more early adopters getting on board with Twitter.

 I also started to see the third wave of Japanese early adopters have started using Twitter around yesterday. Seeing Orkut, Gree and mixi case, this could be the most critical group of all.
 Both Orkut and Gree captured some people of this group but they couldn't keep momentum among them. This group of people are knows computers and Internet but they are not necessarily following latest trends in web technologies and services.

 This is a very colorful group and includes several big and significant clusters.  One big cluster is Mac-fanatics  in Japan. their occupations, generations and taste varies widely but they are very well connected through some extremely popular Mac web sites. They also tend to have closer relation with media, famous people, etc. thus are somewhat influential.

 if you take a look at Mixi. "Mac", "Apple" and "iPod" group are some of the biggest groups there and that must be some sign; however, this is not necessarily the evidence that is tied to stronger Mac sales in Japan. Many people in this cluster are not using the latest Mac many of them are still tied to Mac OS 9.

 Orkut failed because it didn't support Japanese characters and couldn't gain momentum among these people.
 Gree failed because it didn't display well on  Safari.

 Mixi's success is often tied to the fact that they were targeted toward younger women. And I believe that is very true. But I also see some significance in the fact that mixi was one of the few Social Network in Japan which was optimized for Safari thanks to Kobori-san who has been using iBook back then. And thanks to Kasahara-san who bought a Mac after he realized this trends; back then, he was showing up for some mac user groups meetings as well.

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