The internet isn’t broken, but there are cracks and a sledgehammer rests in the hands of the heads of the G8.

I started formulating this post last week as I finished the final session of the e-G8 Forum in Paris. The Forum was a platform to formulate advice to the G8 conference held directly afterwards. I found myself invited to the event as a Japanese based entrepreneur, a rather surprising honor, but I was happy to make the trip.

I am not a political person, I do not campaign for things, but I do act in favor of things I believe in. So this Forum was a real eye opener in how political lobbying finds it’s way into the edges of society.

In participating I have been able to interact and rub shoulders with some of the top Internet entrepreneurs, journalists and VCs in the world, and I am sure I wasn’t supposed to be there… but I was. We should take these opportunities without looking the gift horse in the mouth. And with this opportunity I felt I also have an obligation to share what I learned and try to make sure that the fates of our internet future don’t remain too much of a mystery to those without access.

So, what happened at this beast of a conference?

The keynote was by President Sarkozy himself, lots of security, not enough translation headsets, and a lot of smug comments about the future of the Internet like he had used email and knew what the tubes are all about. I didn’t follow everything, but the message was clearly to big business and how “they” can benefit from the next generation of internet evolution.

After this a number of panels were held on a number of very broad topics, such as Future Net : What’s Next? or The Internet & Society. A few people were invited to discuss each topic from their supposedly knowledgeable point of view and then the panel was opened for questions. In reality the panels were made of a few politicians and leaders of large companies and too often the conversation was centered around how the big businesses were going to get their money.

Interspersed were a few talks such as Rupert Murdoch talking about his pet project, the evolution of education. Less a discussion aimed at some new insight from the combined wealth of knowledge in the room than a diatribe, but at least it was for a worthy goal, to progress education so that all children can benefit from the best teaching for them no matter where they come from or where they live.

The panel discussions formed the bulk of the action though and we were treated to quick some names and a who’s who of internet business along the way.

Following each session a few statements were made as recommendations for the G8. Many of these were heavily influenced by the personal bias of the moderators and on a couple of occasions recommendations were clear misrepresentations of the opinions of the room.

My new hero is John Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who stood alone on the panel about intellectual property rights as a voice of reason and interestingly the only actual creator of the content that this discussion centered around. He sat on a panel with a bunch of dinosaurs discussing how to stop people copying things on the internet and how to punish those who do, and gave out an intelligent and reasoned argument about why the creators of content will thrive under a system that takes a more legal view of copying and sharing content. The audience was largely in support of Barlow but a biased moderator and too many words from those who are looking to lock everything down seemed to slant the end result of the panel against him.

Another favorite was Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, who I have always had a lot of respect for. He gave a short talk about the way that governments protect the incumbents in industry versus progress. I won’t try to paraphrase, but instead, just include his talk here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsJiR-CIkAc

Also of interest to me was the end of the process whereby all the points from all the panels were collected and summarized in what further diluted any truly progressive recommendations and seemed to filter down to a pre-programmed agenda.

Thankfully a number of leaders including Lessig, Jeff Jarvis (Professor in Journalism at City University New York), Susan P. Crawford (former ICANN member), Jean-François Julliard (Director of Reporter Sans Frontières), Yochai Benkler (co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet) and led by Jérémie Zimmermann (porte-parole de La Quadrature du Net) held an impromptu press conference to discuss what they felt wasn’t being discussed at the e-G8 that should have been. Check it out below.

[EN] La société civile s’en va t’en guerre à l’ e-G8 from OWNI on Vimeo.

Overall, I think I learned a lot about the political ramblings that have the potential to bring down the internet as we know it. I learned a lot about the people who like to pretend listen and be open but don’t do either. But I also learned a lot about where efforts are being made to counter those dinosaurs and protect the future.

Of all the key messages that were collected for the G8, the one of true value that at least seemed to get through was the constantly repeated one, “don’t touch” – “don’t make legislation around the internet”, “don’t block any part of the internet”, “don’t try to fix the internet” and “don’t tell people how to use the internet”. I hope the message made it all the way and sticks in the ears of those considering change.

And… yes, Paris is a beautiful city.

Yesterday news flooded the interwebs about the really crap new logo from Gap. They launched the new logo on their website and let the world know… mostly via social media.

Along with the website logo change, a website popped up that let you make your own version of the Crap Logo, and it seems despite stating the opposite at the bottom of the site, it is certainly very much related to viral agency, The Barbarian Group.

I was even sucked in to the madness and fell prey to posting my comments on Facebook, stiring up quite a conversation.

… To everyone over at the marketing department of Gap… all I can say is… hats off to you. Brilliant.

Anyone close to a Gap store, have a look… is the logo changed? My guess is no. How many international companies the size of Gap don’t make a big splash in a brand change rolling out the new look in as many key locations as possible for the big news push?

Which cheap mass produced clothing store have you discussed most over the last 24 hours?

Now they are asking for user submissions of new logos… this is a total set up… and I think its genius!

This past week has been a busy one at USN as we have launched all the activities around the Red Bull BCOne (breakdancing championship) set for Tokyo in November this year.

This is probably the biggest cross media campaign I have creative directed to date, and we are all super happy with the results, so let me list all the things out there for you.

The TVCM

We started work on this back at the end of last year and in the last week it has been on TV, in Cinema and at Shibuya’s super packed Scramble Crossing. It is even doing the rounds on 10,000 screens in Karaoke rooms across Japan.

Here is the 30 second version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDfMuU4kZj8

And the English long play 2 minute version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enjxgR3zcsI

The Japanese 2 minute version is here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmhKOQ76v5M

Red Bull BCOne website

http://redbullbcone.jp

This is one of several websites we launched today (7th Sept). Big ups to our designers and web team here who did a great job putting this together.

Red Bull Check One

This one was put together quite quickly but we are really proud of it. It came out of a simple idea to utilize location based mechanics for a small focussed area campaign around the Red Bull BC One event. Players can use their mobile phones and the GPS function to perform break moves around key locations in the Shibuya / Harajuku area of Tokyo. You can unlock different moves and the move unique moves performed in any area will give more points.

Winners of this game will get a bunch of prizes, including the hard to come by tickets for the event itself.

Convenience Store Campaign

And the last way you can get tickets for the event is in the nationwide campaign that is currently running in convenience stores around Japan. Enter the code from any one of 3,500,000 cans and you can win tickets and other prizes.

… and thats just the start.

More coming in the leadup and a lot more planned for the event itself. Our extended family team who has been working on Red Bull related activities is approaching 40 people!

Can’t wait for the event.

Red Bull BCOne Tokyo Website (Japanese)

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?

Back in January 16, 2007, me and Marc started up USN in some shared office space in Shibuya. 3 years later we have grown to a good sized team working with some great clients and getting more and more opportunities to “do our thing” from our office in Harajuku.

So, as we get kicked off into 2010 and start on a fresh year with many new opportunities and expectations, we have taken a moment to reflect on all that was achieved in 2009 (ie. Year 3) at UltraSuperNew Inc.

On our final day in the office for 2009, we spent a little time discussing our favorite projects for the year and for me, this past year was really something to be proud of. We managed to step it up to the next level this year, and even though some days it seemed like a tornado of different things all demanding attention, we managed to achieve a lot. In the end, keeping the list down to 10 projects was actually very hard, this could have been a much longer list.

So, without further ado, lets get the list going.

1. Missing Wheels (client : Red Bull)

In order to promote the call for entry for the Red Bull Box Cart Race, we bought 70 second hand bicycles, took off parts and placed them around the city with obvious signs that read “We have borrowed your wheel. We needed it to build our box cart for the Red Bull Box Cart Race and will return it to you after the race.”

We managed to create a new type of media with the bicycles, utilizing something that is in plain sight all over the place in busy shopping areas of Tokyo. Even though we had to answer some questions from the police since they were wondering why all these bicycles had no wheels, they found we were behaving completely legally and even complimented us on the idea.

The result was a lot of attention for the race, discussion online and off and in the end we managed to get about three times our goal for the number of entries for the race.

2. Crowdcast (client : Red Bull)

Red Bull Crowdcast is a new platform we developed for Red Bull to get people attending their events more involved with the brand and create a new source of media surrounding events.

Attendees at events can use a simple mobile application to upload photos of the event to a central server. The Red Bull Crowdcast website then publishes the content and provides a combined stream of images in real time back to mobile and PC users at the event or at home, as well as digital screens at the event. When watching in slideshow mode, images can take just a few seconds from submitting to appearing in the slideshow.

The images submitted are more spontaneous than the general material that is collected around events and are published much faster.

We did everything on this project from the concept to the programming to the running of the system, and have many more plans for the next year to take this to the next level in 2010.

3. Pump 20th Anniversary Party (client : Reebok)

We created a 20th anniversary party with a difference for the Reebok Pump at Mado Lounge on the 52nd floor of Roppongi Hills building in central Tokyo.

Apart from the general logistics, branding and planning, we had three key special features for the event that made this one a special one for me. The shoe display, projection screen and dance performance.

Reebok made 20 collaboration models with select specialty sneaker stores around the world, and we needed to display them in an interesting way at the event. The solution in the end was a special vacuum pack that we ended up doing by hand at the office because nobody had machinery the right size to do the sealing of the vacuum. The vacuum packed shoes were then hung on a custom built display. This one took a lot of hard work to execute, but ultimately an incredibly satisfying result that people really took notice of.

For the main space I wanted to make sure we had an interesting way to show the shoes as well, so we designed a special screen in the shape of a shoe silhouette that we then projected images of the 20 collaboration shoes on to. The footage was also programmed on a cycle with sound reactivity and some special tweak controls. The end effect was a floating shoe that pulsed to the beat sitting over the room with a backdrop of Tokyo city lights stretching out below.

Finally for entertainment, in addition to headliner Captain Funk, we had a dance performance by what I term “The ghosts of 1989″. Three guys in neon costume pulling off crazy b-boy dance moves.

We had a packed event and generated a lot of press and buzz around the 20th anniversary. By the end I was so tired from putting everything together I couldn’t even make it to the after party, but slept one of the most satisfied heavy sleeps I ever had.

4. pecha-kucha.org Renewal (client : Pecha Kucha)

This year marked the second major iteration of the Pecha Kucha online platform that we have put together in as many years, and this years version is really pushing towards the big vision. Pecha Kucha is a presentation style and an event format, Pecha Kucha Night, that is now held in over 260 cities globally, and still growing.

We have been involved with Pecha Kucha Night for a few years and have known the founders, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, since the beginning back in 2002. In 2009 our goal was to set Pecha Kucha for the expansion that it has already experienced and also what is still to come. The complete overhaul included an extensive redesign and an expansion to allow presentations to be viewed online with its own custom player via the presentations portal. It also saw a formalizing of the special event platform where one off Pecha Kucha events can be tied up with larger conferences or events and the integration of Creative Commons licensing on presentation content.

The new platform was soft-launched in late October, in time for Tokyo Design Week.

5. 100 Years of Life (client : Audi)

For Audi’s 100 year anniversary we put together two short documentaries and an exhibition at the Audi Forum Tokyo.

The documentaries featured two Japanese centenarians. Tateoka-san still plays the koto and we were able to arrange a special reunion for her family where she was able to meet her great grand-daughter (just a few months old) for the first time. 103 year old Shouchi-san still travels Japan and the world lecturing and holding workshops for both adults and children about how to live life well and stimulate your mind at both a young age and when you are in your later years.

For the exhibition we collaborated with photographer, Shouichi Ono, who specializes in photographing 100 year olds, to show the life and strength post 100years.

6. Easytone Pink Bomb (client : Reebok)

In one of our last projects of the year we put together a guerrilla campaign in bustling Ginza with the special pink Christmas edition of Reebok’s toning shoe, Easytone.

We assembled 100 women wearing the bright pink Reebok Easytone and coupled that with some promotional trucks and sample girls giving out present gift cards, all driving people to one of four stores in the area that stocked the shoes.

Even on a cold winter day, we made a lot of people take notice and managed to dominate the area with pink.

7. Pump Atmos Billboard (client : Reebok)

This is a fun, impactful billboard that we put together for the Atmos store in Harajuku for their special 20th Anniversary Reebok Pump collaboration shoe and the anniversary in general.

We wanted to make something a little tactile, so placed a great big three dimensional pump in the middle of the board and added shading on the billboard surface to make it look three dimensional.

8. Audi Live (client : Audi)

We created a live blogging platform for Audi press conferences so that a larger audience of press members could be reached.

The platform consists of a live updating page that is updated by someone at the event and a live video stream. The text portion is also directly updated to the Audi Japan Twitter account. Also on the page is a question form so reporters online can ask questions and receive a real time response, extending the press conference past the duration of the press event.

The innovative use of Twitter made news on TV Tokyo’s Morning Satelite, and featured our own Toyo Yokota.

9. Jetset UK, Claska (client : MINI)

To provide an impactful space for MINI at the Jetset UK event at Claska in Meguro, we created a massive 8m x 3.5m window sticker to make sure MINI put their stamp on this UK themed event.

To execute, we worked with a UK based photographer to get some original scenes from Mayfair (the namesake of one of the new release MINI models) in London, then put together a design utilizing the Union Jack flag and some Minis.

The design managed to dominate the main space of the event, providing a strong thematic element for the event and also present MINI well for attendees.

10. E-City (client : Expedia)

E-Cities was what we term a “passive game” that we launched all the way back in January 2009. The concept of a passive game is that the user just needs to sign up to get their page (their city in this case) and then doesn’t need to do anything other than get people to visit their page in order to play the game.

The more people that visit, the higher the population of your city and the more your city evolves and adds features and buildings. We featured Paris, New York and Honolulu as the key cities that you could grow.

We added some special giveaways as incentives to play the game. Visitors to the cities were rewarded with coupons for discounts on Expedia travel and hotels, while city owners had the chance to win the trip to their favorite city.

BONUS. New Office

Not really counting as a project, but quite significant to us for 2009 was the move to our new office in Harajuku. In our Shibuya office we were bursting at the seams, all in one room, some people even working off the meeting table. We spent more than 6 months on the lookout for new space before finally lucking out and discovering the gem of an office we have now in Harajuku.

Other than space and a great environment to work in, we are treated by working each day surrounded by the key people (young and fashionable) that we spend most of our time creating for. The only thing we have to worry about now is that we don’t fill up this office too

Other things

As I mentioned earlier, we had a lot more projects to be proud of in 2009 that couldn’t fit on the list, and for me personally, this past year of work speaks for the hard work that the whole team at USN has been putting in. As we are approaching our 3rd anniversary of the company, its incredibly satisfying to look back at the progress we have made. Especially in the face of trying times financially for the industry in general, we are very happy to have had our most successful year and have finished on an upswing.

2010 has a lot more in store and we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead.

If you want to follow updates about UltraSuperNew, you can follow us on Twitter at @ultrasupernew or just check out our website from time to time at http://ultrasupernew.com.

Say Hello to Sora Sheetal

10:11pm, Monday 4th January, 2010
3.190 kg. 51 cm tall.

That’s the birth date and key stats of my little baby girl. It was a long wait and a lot of hard work from her mother Chiho, who I now have a new found respect for after seeing first hand what it takes to bring a new human being into the world.

Both Chiho and our little baby are doing great and should be joining me back home shortly. Meanwhile I have “Dad tasks” to do such as building baby beds. I think this is some kind of right of passage. Feeling up to the challenge though.

Before you ask, no, we have not chosen a name yet. We have a few names on the shortlist but will be waiting to decide for a few more days, so for now let her just be known as the new Sheetal. I will update this post when we decide.

UPDATE : We have named her Sora, which is the Japanese word for “sky”. In Japanese kanji we write her name with a single character, 空, which I think has a nice beautiful simplicity to it. The name is to match her hazel blue eyes and it just seemed like a good feel for her once we saw her face and got to know her the last few days. It is not a particularly common name and can be used for boys or girls generally.

Its great to be able to call her by name finally!

I don’t really have much more to say other than she is about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and both me and Chiho are over-the-moon happy. She will be our half Japanese, half Australian wonder-child, we are both looking forward to the ride and I couldn’t have a better partner to do it with.

Let’s see how we go once the sleepless nights kick in.

Like any good parent of the new decade, I have already taken hundreds of photos and feel the urge to share them across multiple social platforms.

This post is a start, but still deciding how to do it without pushing the baby limit.

The first thing that is striking about this is the visual style. Its a particularly Web 2.0 style website with a friendly feel, a lot of space and nice sized fonts. Those lovely big speech bubbles and the pigeon complete a distinctly Web 2.0 looking logo to go with it.

NOTE: The kanji used for “Hato” in Hatoyama’s name is the symbol for pigeon or dove, thus the strategic placement of the bird.

The site is still light on content, one rather plain post and a few links, but I still remain interested in where this is going. This is a very fresh move for Japanese politics and is probably keeping an open mind to trying new things to stay ahead is one of the reasons Hatoyama got into power in the first place.

He does include a brief introduction on the left of what this site is which basically translates as “This is a place where you can have a direct communication with him and so he can listen to what people think and respond  … blah blah blah”, you get the picture. Nice sentiment, nicer when they follow through.

So, that bit about communication … unfortunately no comments section on his posts. The way he wants people to communicate is via Twitter, which has no direct display on this website.

To enable that, he has created a Twitter account, @hatoyamayukio, to which you should direct comments.

At the time of writing he already had almost 40,000 followers and my guess is that this number will be growing quickly. So far he is pulling an Oprah and only has one post, but at least he follows almost a thousand people.

So far this is pretty much an Obama copycat move… it worked for Obama, so I can’t fault that.

What would be very interesting to me is to see if any real listening and response goes on. We all know this isn’t actually Hatoyama that will monitor these posts, but what will happen when the multitudes start talking? Maybe they need Press Army?

I have been enjoying a little personal re-boom (that boom that comes as an after the initial boom) on Star Wars humor and culture. It seems the initial malaise and disappointment with the prequels has given way to a wealth of fresh Star Wars humor on the internet and I have been enjoying some. We have moved past the days of Troops and Star Wars Kid and have a whole new crop to check out.

For people who never grew up on Star Wars, these will be kind of wasted on you, but for the rest of us who grew up on the teat of the Empire and the Rebellion, here are some of the good ones I have found recently :

1) Star Wars Hoodies

For the street-wise Star Wars fan, these special edition hoodies from Mark Echo seem to be what you should be looking for…

2) Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review

About 70 minutes of straight for the jugular criticism of the first film of the prequels, The Phantom Menace. These even have a nice sub plot tied in … and a dry, dry , dry sense of humor. Try the first part here and see how you go. All 7 parts are in the playlist embedded below.

httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=765EDC49DF794526

3) Patton Oswalt – At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas With A Shovel

If you have your hatred for George Lucas built up from the Phantom Menace review, you are probably ready for a dose of Patton Oswalt. This dates back a year or so, but seems to be doing the rounds again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCjIjsZp_Y

4) Yoshitoku’s Darth Vader samurai display armour

Some of you probably already know that Darth Vader’s suit was originally designed based on traditional Samurai armour. We now that has come full circle, Japanese traditional doll maker, Yoshitoku, has made a special Star Wars edition of Darth Vader (and a Strom Trooper) and Samurai hybrid. The result has proved very popular and quickly sold out the limited edition collectors series. A few different versions were available at up to almost US$4000.

5) Tokyo Dance Trooper

Last but not least, the continuing adventures of Danny Choo as Tokyo Dance Trooper. Danny broke out his authentic looking Storm Trooper outfit for a few dance performances in public back in 2007 and has since turned it into a bit of a franchise, turning up at every even slightly tech or costume based event in Tokyo. The stunt never seems to cease to be fun and playful and get people smiling, so keep it up Danny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13xO12Up2UQ

check out the Youtube channel for more.

Did I miss anything? If you know any more cool Star Wars stuff made recently, let me know in the comments.

Today at USN HQ, we had a special visit from some of Reebok’s head product designers from the Boston design center. Among them, Paul Litchfield, designer of the Pump – classic icon of the 90s. He signed some shoes for us, and posed for a photo (above).

We have spent a lot of time doing some projects for Reebok recently, much of it around celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Pump. We put on a big party 52 stories up in the middle of Tokyo as the official 20th anniversary event and also featured a key store, Atmos in Harajuku, with some billboards.

More in the works for Reebok on the way.

One post on Kit Kat flavours in Japan was just not enough, so I have come back with a sequel. These are some more flavours I have come across in the last couple of months since the previous post.

Cookie Plus

OK, lets start with the simple one, Cookie Plus. It wasn’t enough for Kit Kat to have just cookie flavour like your favourite ice cream might do, they have gone with the “plus”. The main chocolate part is pretty much jam packed with cookie flavouring, so you have the cookie flavour from the soft chocolate, then you get a crunch hit from a base layer of supposed cookie pieces. My suspicion is that they are just crunch assisting particles of some kind with no relation to actual cookie.

Kinako Ohagi Flavour

This one requires some familiarity with Japanese sweets to know where they are heading. For the uninitiated kinako is a soybean flour that gets dusted over some types of Japanese sweets. Not particularly sweet itself and it really needs a kick from something else to taste any good. Ohagi is a red bean paste that is one of the more common ingredients in Japanese sweets. This one does have some sweetness to it but not too much by western standards. The result of this combination … they do a pretty decent job (but not perfect) of getting these flavours packed into a small Kit Kat.

Ginger Ale

OK, best for last. Ginger Ale in a Kit Kat. As with the Ume Soda, they managed to pack in a nice little zing to mimic the bubbles in the drink. The ginger flavour in a white chocolate I actually quite liked. This is just one of those combinations that you go back and check it out again, since its two things that just don’t belong together, but somehow work.

To see the previous flavours, check out The taste of Japan.