Visitors to the Japanese App Store on iTunes today were greeted with an array of character parts that an astute eye could recognise as the cartoon character, Doraemon. Yahoo Japan (who has strong connections with Softbank, the carrier who has iPhone in the Japanese market) has released a selection of Doraemon themed Apps that have managed to take out positions 1 through 16 on the top Free Apps page.

The Apps themselves range from App versions of classic Doraemon comics to utilities and games. Below you can see a couple of screenshots of two utilities. A batery utility tells you how much time you have left of use of the common functions of the phone. A simple calculator simply has a Doraemon theme.

Doraemon is one of the best known and beloved characters in Japan, with children across the country growing up on his antics for generations, so it is not such a prize that the Apps are popular. I am not sure if Yahoo were trying to achieve this, but the result is quite a coup.

All 16 top places from the one company has to be a first. Has any other country had such dominance in their App store?

Today we launched Red Bull Crowdcast, which, as far as I know, is the first time a global brand has handed over the keys of live casting an event to the audience, allowing them to show their vision of the event in real time.

The idea sprang from looking at some of the ways that we share information today, the immediacy and the ease of it. Posting to your blog can be done by email, uploading to the cloud can be achieved with a simple iPhone App. Within the last coulpe of years we have progressed from storing all our images, text and videos on computers at home or at work, to storing and interacting with most of our media in shared environments online.

Here in Japan the primary way to share information is via the mobile phone. Even in a country where iPhone has a mere 1% market share (my estimate based on what I have heard on the street), data manipulation is mature and flat rate data plans mean that sending large files, images and videos is a reality, not a dream of what will be.

Instruction card handed out at the event to show users how to use Crowdcast

Taking these keys I came up with a concept that my team at USN has been wonderful in making into a reality. Based around Red Bull events (this time Red Bull Sound Clash), you can email your images to our special event email address and they are dropped into the event stream. Email on mobile phones in Japan has been a standard feature since the beginning and often acts as the primary email address for many Japanese people. It is a natural interface to participation. The time from sending your email to appearing on the stream can be as little as 5-10 seconds, so the reward for participation is almost immediate.

You can then watch the stream via the mobile or the PC websites allowing both people at the event and people sitting at home or at the office to tune in and watch the live images of the event come in real time.

What is most interesting to me, and what is so great about having a client like Red Bull who is willing to push some conventions, is how you can let your audience or consumer carry your voice. This is a scary thing for an established brand to do. Brands spend so much time protecting their image and attempting to control their public perception, that handing over some of that control can be scary indeed for an old school marketeer.

However, this really is just the continuation of an ongoing media evolution. Remember, it was once scary for newspaper websites to start accepting non-moderated comments on their articles. Today, it is expected and normal to have a public space to voice potentially opposing opinions.

What a brand can gain by taking this step is another level of mutual trust and respect I am working with my clients to achieve. By showing trust to your consumer, by telling them that their voice matters and responding to that voice, we can build a relationship with the consumer that has the potential to be closer and much more long lasting, but we also start a conversation that helps to learn about what satisfies our consumer.

Now, our little photo stream may not look like a place for social commentary, but what people send and the way they send it can teach us wonderful things about how we do our jobs as the ones attempting to fulfil their needs and wants.

You can check out Red Bull Crowdcast’s archive for Red Bull Sound Clash online, and also we plan to use it again at the upcoming Red Bull Box Cart Race where you can try it out yourself if you are able to get there on the day. For those interested in attending, the Red Bull Box Cart Race will be held at Odaiba’s Yumei-no-Ohashi in Tokyo on October 11th from 1pm.

Perhaps partly because of the large number of personal diary blogs, the usage of entertaining blog widgets (often produced by brands for viral advertising) is probably at some of the highest levels in the world. For many its a great way to dress up what is often a very plain blog template and add a little of “this is what I like” factor.

These are my top 10…

10. Yamaha Pianica

Do you ever feel the need to play a musical instrument while browsing your friends’ blogs? This special blog widget lets you do just that.

9. Kiminchi no sauce

Bad coding joke or clever pun? You make the decision. Click the sauce bottle to see the page source.

ブログパーツで懸賞ゲット！ブログパーツの新しいカタチ FirstBuzz

8. Flipbook

For the artists we have a new outlet for your creative streaks. Flipbook gives you a web interface for you to draw successive frames of an animation and then plays them through your blog widget.

7. The Happening

This promotion for M. Night Shyamalan’s new film “The Happening” has some nice tricks to slowly deconstruct your blog piece by piece. The best way to understand what it is is to try it… click on the widget to see the effect.

6. Blog Level Up

The Japanese appetite for fantasy characters and role playing games hits the blog where this retro pixel avatar can level up on your blog. You can check your characters stats and add friends.

5. Maru Ten Ten = Star

Someone was thinking out of the box with this one. When clicked, the widget checks all of the text in the page, grabs all the dots in the text and darkens the screen to just highlight the dots. The effect is that your blog becomes like a night sky. The effect is even more powerful with Japanese text where you get varied sizes of stars from the big and small dots in the text.

NOTE : Doesn’t seem to work properly with Firefox 3.x, your text should fade out except for the dots.

4. Hoshi Toki no Toki

For the purely bizarre award, this blog widget takes the cake. Using a full page flash overlay, to display some animal characters full screen over your blog when you click on the insert. It changes animal over time and puts you in a nice mood for the blog avatar creator that it links to, KAOS.

3. Samurai Weapon

This blog widget promotion for Nintendo DS Game “Samurai Weapon”, is a bit subtle at first , but try clicking on the samurai character until he gets annoyed and be prepared to have your page killed in any number of samurai ways.

2. Uniqlock

Back in June 2007, the first release of the Uniqlock campaign for Uniqlo (Japanese casual wear clothing company) and this catchy blog widget that was at its core, managed to get the country buzzing. It is certainly one of the top of the most used blog widgets of all time. For this alone it deserves to be high on this list, but the execution with nice use of video and the rhythm of the clock was also very clean and the impact was almost universally positive. There have been a number of follow ups keeping the look evolving with new content, but basically the same concept. Music. Dance. Clock.

1. One Click Awards

This is the blog widget that got it all started for me. Made for the One Click Awards in 2007, it takes a cheeky premise of interaction with a little man who comes out of his widget and takes it to a new level by giving you a web ring tour with stops moving through video and pages alike. Come back after you are done ; )

UPDATE : Thanks Matt for reminding me about the 2kurabe blog widget… would have made the list if I had remembered it at the time. Nice website too. Select your preferred of two options… simple.

This was the second jury stage of the GameJam, with the first being back in March, when I was over in Utrecht in The Netherlands to brief the Dutch game developers on Japanese mobile gaming and see the initial round of presentations first hand. From that initial jury, four groups were chosen to continue to develop their game concepts for the final jury held on Tuesday.

The winner was Khaeon Games with their game Water Power. Khaeon Games will now have 6 months to develop the game ahead of the Tokyo Game Show later this year.

Water Power makes use of the new tilt control feature from new DoCoMo handsets to play an innovative game involving using water to control a series of puzzles with a character that needs to navigate water logged levels. I am really looking forward to seeing Erik t’ Sas and his team get the game going.

The first runner up was O!’s game Happyard, a very inventive game where players collect animals and items for their garden in a series of minigames taking advantage of a number of different interfaces possible on mobile handsets.

The final two runners up were Ronimo with Trade Joy and 3D-Flash with Mizu Maze. Each of these final four participants will receive a cash prize for their contributions.

I write about one of the methods for URL referencing in Japan. We have several interesting ways to refer toURLs here in Japan. I have written about QRCodes before, there is also a large number of advertisements in Japan that simply show the word you should search for.

In this article, I have discussed the othe common URL reference in Japan for the mobile web, menu navigation paths.

Check it out!

You can read it in today’s (March 19th) Japan Times print version or online here : http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nc20080319a1.html

Still hungry for more? I also have a new article on The Next Web today about the new interface changes from the Japanese Google top page. Check it out!

I was quite surprised today to receive my regular mail from Apple Japan touting their latest clever gadgets only to see some of the most un-Apple accessories I have ever come across. It is for a tie up with luxury brand Swarovski, who are famous for their crystal. The Swarovski brand has a good reputation here in Japan but a match for Apple to be sold off the Apple website and advertised in the Apple mailout? I don’t think so.

I can imagine these iPod accessories being very successful in certain market segments in Japan, but really, if you appreciate the simple clean Apple design, then this like a slap in the face to Apple standards.

My favorite to offend the senses is the Guilty Couture shuffle 2G with the catch line that translates to “Gorgeous and Shiny!”.

Check out the full range below…

Livedoor is coming out of some hard times after the very public and very dramatic securities fraud convictions that led to sentences for four executives in early 2007. Most notoriously, founder Takafumi Horie (aka: “Horiemon”) was famous for his brash and aggressive business style and bore the brunt of the blame for the charges brought against the company. Even so, Livedoor still has its sights on going public in 2008. The Fon deal would appear to help their expansion. Fon, launched its wireless network in Japan in late 2006 and is currently the biggest wifi network globally.

The deal lets Livedoor customers connect to Fon’s 31,000 access points around Japan (they also have 240,000 globally) and also for Fon users to connect to Livedoor’s network which is primarily centered around the inner Tokyo area and currently has about 2,200 access points. The combined service will be free until at least the 4th of August, 2008, but there are plans to continue the service as free after that time as well.

The catch for the general user is that you have to be a member of either the Fon network or Livedoor. But from my initial checking, it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to join. To become a Fon network member you need to buy a base station and share a wifi signal yourself (thus extending the network). However, the simple way to access now seems to be through Livedoor where it looks like a regular login account to the Livedoor portal should get you in.

Some useful links :

• Livedoor Registration form (Japanese)
• Livedoor Wireless page (Japanese)
• Fon in English and Japanese