Otorevo brings the noise… and a record contract

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Matt Romaine, lead developer over at Columbia’s Otorevo here in Japan just wrote on his blog that the Otorevo platform has just announced its first album release.

Otorevo (”Sound Revolution”) is Columbia Japan’s attempt to get on to the social bandwagon, giving the public the power to select which artists get the record deal. First of all, Otorevo is a platform for young music artists to show off their music to the world, then through a social voting process the most popular artists were narrowed down to a short list and finally the first winner and record deal was given to a band called Good Crew with their album, nippon ha:ski!. Amazon Japan is now taking pre-orders.

Its an admirable effort from Columbia and I have a feeling there might have been a lot of hard work behind the scenes to even get the project off the ground. The use of video to display performances was a very nice and I imagine we will see more of that as the Youtube generation gets a hold of more music focussed platforms like this one.

One thing the project does not really address seriously is the changing nature of the music industry. At the end of the day, they are offering the winner, of what is basically a popularity contest, a standard record deal and are selling a regular CD release album. Granted Japan trails most of the world it moving to digital format music sales, but it seems a missed opportunity to redefine itself in the new emerging music economy. Columbia takes all the cost benefit of social media but then fails to pass that benefit on in cost savings to the consumers.

It is hard work making something that changes the model significantly from inside one of the big labels, so big ups to Matt and the other developers for getting as far as they did with this project.

The biggest innovations in music right now are coming from outside the big labels for a reason. If Otorevo shows some success, maybe Columbia and other labels will be ready for the next step.

Posted in Digital Media | No Comments »

Fresh website time.

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Today we put the finishing touches on the new version of the UltraSuperNew website and hit the big red LAUNCH button. It has been a long time coming and I am very happy to have it finally out there. Basically we got sick of people asking us what we do, so we squeezed a few extra hours out of each day for the past weeks to get the update out there.

Some important new features of the new site are the project listing and schedule pages … now you can actually see what why we are always saying we are so busy. The lists will be filled out a little more over time so we also provided RSS feeds on just about everything so you can keep up.

Another change from the old site is that we are breaking off the UltraSuperTube party page to a site of its own. We are still in the process of finalizing that, but I will post again when it is done.

In the mean time, please check out the new site at : http://ultrasupernew.com

Posted in UltraSuperNew | No Comments »

Interesting and Surprising keywords at Flightclub … top 10

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Since we launched the Flightclub website last year we have been watching the odd sources of traffic that make it to the site. One of the things we noticed early on is that we started to rank high in google and yahoo search results for some strange terms.

With the new version launch in January, we added a few tweaks to the system to try to help more of these odd search results come up more often. We are early in the process of reaping the benefits of those tweaks (some semantic tweaks to the html code and also some house secrets) but I can share a few of the interesting and surprising top search terms that we have hit so far.

This is my top 10 list with the obvious terms, such as “KLM” and “Flightclub”, removed. Because most of the results are Japanese search terms I am also including a rough translation in brackets after the word where appropriate.

Here we go :

1. グラスゴ 地図 (Glasgow map) … this was one of the first unexpected keywords to get. We started getting results on this even before we had any articles on Glasgow.
2. サンタマリアノッベラ (Santa Maria Novella) … Italian perfume also gets a lot of attention.
3. シェパーズパイ (Shepard’s Pie) … everyone loves food, looks like this popular English dish is high on the list for many.
4. レオニダス チョコ (Leonidas Chocolate) … this top Belgian chocolate brand, must be high on the shopping lists for Japanese travellers.
5. ロンドン gallery (London gallery) … we were very happy to start getting good results here. London galleries are great and it is a very competitive search term.
6. アムステルダム ムール貝 (Amsterdam mussels) … the first Dutch entry in the list, but mussels?
7. キールナ (Kiruna) … searches for the town of Kiruna in Sweden seem to be focused on the Ice Hotel that the town is famous for.
8. コルソコモ (Corso Como) … The Italian brand, Corso Como, from Milan proved popular early on.
9. デュッセルドルフ 匠 (Düsseldorf workman) … ok, that is a kind of simple translation, but the search gets you this Japanese noodle shop in Düsseldorf. Who’d have thunk it.
10. ランゲン 美術館 (Langen art gallery) … This is the second German entry and another tip of the hat to the art world.

That completes the list.

We have learned a lot already but looking at the results and numbers, but one of our main goals, getting a good spread of coverage in Europe, was achieved very well. The results are really all over Europe. A few trends to notice… fashion and food seem to be the most popular and that trend goes through to the posts on the site as well. Art is also well represented.

Next I try to follow up with a post about my favorite posts from Flightclub. There have been some great ones so far, so I hope to share them with you soon.

Posted in Flightclub | No Comments »

How to enjoy Livedoor post-Horiemon … by using Fon

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Today Fon Japan and Livedoor, one of Japan’s biggest ISPs, announced they would start a partnership to connect their free Wifi access points across Japan.

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

Posted in Digital Media, Japan Tech, The Next Web | 1 Comment »

Flightclub, new year, new look, new code!

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Today we released the new version of one of our big projects from last year, Flightclub. The project was built for KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) and in its young life has already become an authority on many interesting topics related (and not so related) to travel in Europe for the Japanese market.

We were very proud of the site we released last year, but we kept wanting to get in there and make it even better. Eventually KLM gave us a little budget to go back and develop what is actually quite a substantial upgrade. It ended up taking a lot more hours than originally planned due to us getting the taste for improvements.

First thing you will notice is that the look is completely new. The great new design by Jerome, who joined the team recently. He refined the look and made the site a lot cleaner and easy to navigate as well as just getting it looking damn fine.

We have also made some serious updates to the backend underlying the site, and lead programmer, Alban, has been working tirelessly to set up a great structure and refine many of the things learned in the first build.

Other key updates

• Country level navigation
• Complete restructure of all the forms
• Extra fields in the writing pages for location name, address/info, URL
• Expansion of social features, such as friend feeds and comment feeds
• RSS feeds available on just about any content search

The site is currently only in Japanese, but if you tell KLM you really want it in other languages they might give us a budget to fast-track the multilingual roll-out.

Check out Flightclub V2 and enjoy!

Posted in Flightclub, UltraSuperNew | 2 Comments »

REVIEW : Steal This Film II

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I recently checked out the documentary film “Steal This Film II“. It is a film put together by the League of Noble Peers, a group of file sharing evangelists who got together for the purpose of communicating about the realities of digital media sharing.

The documentary itself was released over the bit-torrent network as a free piece of work with the instruction to freely transfer the film to others. The League of Noble Peers actually went to the effort of copyrighting the film as the only legal way they could ensure that they could dictate that the film was free to share and transfer for anyone who wanted it.

[to watch the film, click the link on the left and choose the download your preferred format with your favorite bittorrent client : my fav for OSX is Transmission]

Content-wise the film does a good job of painting the picture of the way that digital media is shared and the reasons that people do it. It also does a very good job at pointing out how weak the position of the record labels and film producers is, even though the law is still largely supports them.

The main points made in the film is that the cost of redistributing digital content is virtually nothing, the technology exists already to make the content accessible to a large percentage of people (breaking down several economic and social barriers as it does so), and society feels it should be allowed to redistribute content freely. The combined strength of this wave seems to be leading to the inevitable change in the social acceptance of the practice and eventually the social structures that govern that, ie. the law.

The converse position is covered to some extend, although to be fair, this film doesn’t exactly have a balanced agenda. Media artist, Sebastian Lütgert, quoted Mark Getty (one of the largest intellectual property owners in the world) taking the anti sharing stance with “Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century.” - meaning that basically the intellectual property owners will fight for their media just as countries have fought for oil. A strong and powerful analogy.

Making appearances in the film are quite a few well known names from the larger file sharing sites around the web. The eloquent discussion from representatives of piratebay.org and mininova.org was very interesting to see considering these powerhouses usually stay largely anonymous thumbing their noses at the establishment.

Overall a great film for getting informed about the arguments for file sharing and the free distribution of media and ideas.

I had a bit more to say about this in an earlier article about keeping control of your digital media.

 [ EXTRA : I forgot to mention some the great interviews with Vague Blur, who is a character to represent everyone in their anonymity, everyone and no-one … check it out ]

Posted in Digital Media, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Getting in to ReacTable

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Spanish open source project ReacTable has been in my ear a lot recently.

First it was integrated in an invitation to an event I went along to recently. After arriving at the event and you were able to use the invitation card (about the size and thickness of a credit card with an ReacTable style amoeba shape on it) to see your fortune for the year up on a screen while moving the card about on the sensor table.

Then Ernst-Jan Pfauth from The Next Web (which I am also occasionally writing for) included a small note on it in his report on the European Music Revolution.

Basically it is based on a piece of software called ReacTIVision which is “…an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking.” It can track unique amoeba shaped images on objects via a camera and then pass on information about position, rotation and which object is being recorded on to another application.

After seeing the invitation system and then being wowed by the very cool music application linked to by Earnst-Jan …

… I had to learn some more.

After a bit of experimentation and playing about I got the system working sending data to a Flash application and manipulating that display with a visual interface. The data itself is very interesting and I am already looking at plenty of fun and interesting applications to use it for.

If anyone wants to add something extra to an event or interactive space, let me know. This is fun, exciting and impressive technology.

Posted in Digital Media, UltraSuperNew | No Comments »

Don’t Hurt the Web!

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

I found a very nice little campaign today from the good people at the Mozilla Developer Center. They are pushing the open standards movement and have made a very nice little banner to help the effort. At UltraSuperNew Inc. we are big supporters and users of open standards, so I want to pass on the nice campaign and share the love a little.

This is a pretty open stab at Microsoft and their still market dominant (but waning) Internet Explorer which is famous for breaking web standards. Being responsible for putting together a lot of websites with my team, I have to say the lack of support for web standards in all flavours of IE is one of the biggest annoyances of our work.

On a related note, I recently spoke with Michael Smith from the HTML5 working group at the W3C (I also had him along to Tokyo2point0 recently, an event I co-organise to promote web development in Tokyo). He brought up a few interesting things about where the next web standards are heading from the W3C point of view. Over the past few years the trend with web developers has been to go towards the strict standards of XHTML where you have to be perfect for your code to validate. This movement is not quite working with about 95%, yes 95%!, of websites failing to validate. That includes HTML and XHTML sites, and the XHTML ones are just not a realistic goal for most developers.

The new movement at the W3C is to push developers towards to upcoming HTML5 standard which will be much more accepting and allow a lot more legacy code and make many of these old pages and old code structures work again. What they are also doing is clearly defining the way browsers should render the syntax, making life much easier for a browser that has any desire at all to meet standards.

The rollout of HTML5 is not going to be quick, but we can at least look forward to more easily obtainable standards in the future.

For now, the goal should be to understand that standard you are attempting to meet, use a validator to check your code, and stop using syntax that doesn’t work as specified on all browsers wherever possible.

We can all lament the mess that is IE and scheme for new ways to encourage users to get rid of it in favour of a browser that works properly such as Firefox or Opera. Perhaps this effort by the Mozilla Developer Center will help.

Posted in Tokyo2point0, Web Standards | No Comments »

HOW TO : Register for Nico Nico Douga

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

When writing a recent article about the biggest internet stories in Japan for 2007, I wrote about probably the biggest story of the year, hot-shot video site Nico Nico Douga. This site is uniquely Japanese and has some truly strange and bizarre content. By using time referenced text chat on top of the video feeds, the site manages to create a unique social landscape that western sites have yet to match.

This is the 7th most popular site in Japan after just 1 year of existence. Many of the funny jokes and comments are in Japanese, but I have still had a lot of people asking me to show them how to access the site.

When navigating a foreign language site you always have a few challenges but you can usually get by with a few guesses and some lucky clicking. For Nico Nico Douga, this is a bit more difficult than usual because you need to register first before you can see anything.

So, in order to help more people understand what this phenomenon is, I have put together this handy guide to registering and getting to the fun stuff so you can all benefit from my 6 years of clicking through Japanese websites.

1) Getting to the Register Form

The first thing is actually knowing you need to register to see something, but I have implied that, so lets get started.

From the home page, click the Registration button as marked in the screen shot below.

2) Registering

Registering becomes a lot easier when you know what all the fields are. I have tried to give a basic breakdown of all the important parts of the registration form. Follow the following screen shot for a guide on what to enter and where.

Fill out all the fields, because in typical Japanese style, EVERYTHING is a required field.

If it sends you back to the same page after you submit, that means you had an error somewhere. The most likely error is someone has chosen the same username, so the first thing to do is try a very obscure username. If you still have troubles, go through each field and double check you don’t have too many or too few characters (I have included limitations in the translations) and also make sure your age is something believable (ie. not this year).

3) Confirm Registration Details

The registration confirmation page is much easier than it looks. If you got this far, you have passed the main tests, so all you need to do is pass the human check and hit submit.

The human check is the common read the text in the image trick. It is all in western characters, so you shouldn’t have any problems. If for any reason you can’t read what is in the image, click the button next to it and you will get a fresh image.

The submit bottom is underneath there, but note, it is not the bottom button (that one will take you back to edit your details). Refer to the image for locations of where to press.

You should now see a message telling you that an email has been sent to your registered email address and you should click the confirmation link inside within 24 hours to complete your registration.

4) Check your email

You should now receive an email with the confirmation link. The mail will come from “info” and have a Japanese title.

There is only one link in the mail so not much to get confused with. Click it!

And you should get to a confirmation page like this…

You can now start to explore. The Nico Nico Douga link on that page will get you to the start with the latest news page, and you can then start clicking through the tabs on the page to check out what recent videos are available.

5) You are in!

Now that you are in you will need to explore a bit by yourself. I will give you one more screen shot as a guide, but it is up to you. It is a site where the adventurous will be rewarded.

enjoy!

Posted in HOW TOs, The Next Web | 4 Comments »

Pecha Kucha Night’s new website launched

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

I am very happy to announce that on Friday we (ie. the UltraSuperNew Inc. team) finally put the new website for Pecha Kucha Night live. We have been fans, audience members and presenters at Pecha Kucha Night since its inception in 2003, so this is a special project for us to be working on.

We have been busily working with our friends at Klein-Dytham Architects to get the site ready through the latter part of last year, so it is great to hit the new year running and be able to get the site launched so soon in 2008.

Pecha Kucha Night is a great concept, originally conceived by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein as an architecture showcase to stimulate business at their bar in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo, called Super-Deluxe. The night has now grown to about 100 cities globally and provides a platform for people all over the world to tell their stories in 20 slides for 20 seconds per slide.

The new site reinvents Pecha Kucha Night’s on-line presence with…

• user accounts
• more detailed subscription options to let you subscribe to your favourite cities
• archiving functionality for events
• image galleries integrated from Flickr for each city
• tools to help city organisers manage their events
• map based search view for events
• more…

We have a lot of new functionalities and announcements to come this year as well, much of which will be shaped by the way you and other users are using and wanting to use the site.

First thing I would love to hear from everyone is which calendering systems you are using that you would like integrated into the site. Are you using Facebook, Google Calender, iCal, upcoming.org or another website or desktop application that can integrate with dynamic content?

Visit the new site, check your city and get along to the next event!

Posted in Pecha Kucha Night | 2 Comments »