The article is fun-spirited and declares me as a silicon valley “American Otaku” who went from Yahoo! to Sony in Japan. The article chronicles various steps of my life and career as a geek including how I used to run a BBS in high school, loved playing Street Fighter II, came up with the original idea for Kick.com while listening to RHCP on one of the first MP3 players in 1999, and more relevant to my current position — how I look at building globally viable Internet services.

The end result is this article which was posted on Monday. My name in Japanese katakana characters is マシュー スカルム. You can also see the poorly translated version from Google here.

“American Otaku (geek)”

“Mac Geek, Mr. Skyrm, says he spends 75% of his time with either his Mac or mobile phone”

As this was my first real news article in Japan, I was curious to see the reaction. ITmedia doesn’t offer commenting but I found a few comments elsewhere. To my surprise, they were quite positive.

A delicious user, futa23, posted a note basically saying he would like more people like me to come to Japan.

And a newsing comment page (thanks to my friend Toshi@Yahoo! for finding this) also had some positive vibes from their community with ’sergio’ saying he didn’t know much about eyeVio but felt I have something good to say.

UPDATE 6/23/08:

My very kind friend Jed Schmidt, founder of Langwidget, translated the article into English. Going from English -> Japanese translation -> Journalist -> Article -> English makes for a good game of telephone and lots of stuff ends up a little bit “off”, but overall the high level ideas are all there.

“Not much reason to be in Silicon Valley” – An American “geek”, from Yahoo to Sony

American and self-proclaimed geek Matthew Skyrm recently left Yahoo in Silicon Valley, venturing here to Japan to run Sony’s “eyeVio” video sharing site, with a desire “to create a world-class Internet service.”

“I want to create a world-class Internet service,” says 33-year-old (note: I am actually 32) American Matthew Skyrm, who left his employer Yahoo last year, venturing here to Japan. He has been in charge of Sony’s “eyeVio” video sharing site since last march. Having started his own company in Silicon Valley, Skyrm has returned to work in Japan after a two-year hiatus. “It was very important to leave my home country and get a different perspective, so that I could create a service embraced by millions of people,” cites Skyrm, regarding his venture out of Silicon Valley.

Once a computer and gaming geek

Skyrm was a computer and gaming geek in his teens. As a high school student, he set up a BBS that attracted more than a hundred geek friends from countries around the world, including Russia, Germany, and Israel.

His favorite game was Street Fighter II. At 19-years-old in 1994, Skyrm worked part-time to help run an ecommerce site at a company that imported and sold games from Japan, saying that most of his income ended up being spent on games. In 1996, he dropped out of college to work at an Internet marketing company, and in 1999, he moved to a Web site design and consulting
company, where he was responsible for setting Web sites for clients such as the American Automobile Association.

Starting a company in Silicon Valley

“I was fascinated by the Internet even more than computers and gaming,” says Skyrm, who launched kick.com in Silicon Valley in 1999. Kick.com was a music site that allowed users to share playlists and artist information for the music they listened to.

Back then, he liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to listen to them often on the first MP3 player on the market, sold by Diamond Multimedia. He started kick.com as a convenient way for busy people to find information about concerts and new CDs.

Skyrm thought that once listening to music on an MP3 player became mainstream, so would the combination of computers and music to share music information over the Internet. He raised about $7M from several companies who shared his vision, reaching over 500,000 unique users per month.

Unfortunately, profits did not follow. He put ads on the site, and moved to a model where kick.com earned revenue by providing its functionality on other sites, but now recognizes that “the iPod hadn’t even gone on sale yet. We were too early, and weren’t well understood by advertisers.” He eventually decided to sell kick.com.

“I heard iMode is awesome”

After shopping kick.com around to multiple companies, Skyrm decided in 2002 to sell to the highest bidder, Sony America, and entered the company soon after. He then realized that he wanted to work in Sony Japan, after hearing about NTT Docomo’s iMode.

“iMode was famous in Silicon Valley for being an awesome Japanese service. After looking into iMode myself, I got the feeling that it could change everything,” says Skyrm.

But as for Japanese Internet services at the time, Skyrm said he “didn’t know much aside from other American services that had been localized, such as Yahoo Japan.”

In 2004, Skyrm moved from Sony America to Sony Japan. Using ideas from kick.com, he worked on Utatomo, a mobile site that allowed users to recommend music and swap playlists with others.

After having a child, Skyrm returned to Silicon Valley in 2005. He started work at Yahoo as the manager of Yahoo Messenger, focusing on the direction of the service, including its functionality, design, and localization.

“Not much reason to be in Silicon Valley”

But even while at Yahoo, he started thinking that he “wanted to get more international work experience.” Says Skyrm, “Silicon Valley is a place where people gather from all over the world, and my background is being raised in a multi-national family with a French mother and American father.”

He also started feeling that “there is less and less reason for being in Silicon Valley,” since the spread of communication tools such as blogging, social networking services, and messaging, meant that information could be shared anywhere.

Around that time, he received another invitation from Sony to work on an Internet service. He had other choices, such as starting another company in Silicon Valley or staying at Yahoo and being posted in another country, but he decided on Japan.

“Our challenge is to build a world-class service. Think of things like Yahoo and the iPod, which are embraced by millions of people. To create such a service, it was very important to leave my home country and get a different perspective. And I missed Japan,” said Skyrm, adding “Sony has a lot of overseas revenue, and is an international company with a foreign president. I thought returning to Sony would be the best choice for getting international experience.”

“Niconico video comments are smart”

Skyrm returned to Sony last year, and in March took charge of the “eyeVio” video sharing service, with 1M unique users and 15M page views per month. Says Skyrm, “I want to take advantage of Sony’s assets, to differentiate from YouTube and Niconico video.”

He believes he can use video quality to differentiate from competing sites, noting that “eyeVio’s motto is ‘my life, your emotion,’ and an important part of sharing emotion is video quality.” He plans to add functionality to upload HiVision-quality movies.

Skyrm feels that Japanese Internet services “are built with a great understanding of their users, adding “Niconico video comments are being used in a very smart way.”

Says Skyrm, “since producers and consumers overlap, allowing services created for personal benefit to reach users. Niconico video is the same way. But that’s not enough to remove barriers against user growth. We’re going to design eyeVio from the perspective of many different kinds of users.”

Klaus Gresbrand from Creative Commons Japan interviewed me about my current project at Sony (eyeVio.jp) and the mp3, in English, is now available. Overall the interview was a bit contrived and I hate hearing my own voice — but I did enjoy meeting and talking to Klaus about CC.

While I just took over eyeVio in March, and didn’t make the decision myself to put CC licenses as an option in eyeVio, I definitely would have done so — I’m a big believer in CC and I hope that comes across in the interview.

Do you lament for the pre-September 11th days of air travel? Rarely did you find long security lines, you didn’t have to take off your shoes, you could carry-on whatever liquids you wanted, and had to only show your ID once at the airport…

Well, come on over to Japan for some security-relaxed domestic air travel.

During the past 6 months I’ve taken two domestic trips via airplane — one to Miyazaki for the Fall 2007 Infinity Ventures Summit and just this past week to Okinawa’s (Tokashiki) Tokashiku Island for a family vacation at the beach. Both departed from Tokyo’s convenient Haneda Airport.

I used to believe that Japanese people often prefer domestic travel because of language/culture barriers — now, I’m rather convinced it is at least partly because of the relatively delightful experience.

Here were my observations regarding security:

• Never once had my ID checked by JAL, ANA, and Skymark (which is a new budget airline and was excellent, will definitely use them again).
• Brought multiple drinks on the plane with me. Once a security person did ask politely if he could put a bottle through a fancy bottle checking machine which took about 5 seconds.
• No mention or need to put liquids into a ziplock bag.
• Laptop did have to come out at security check-point but was allowed to stay in neoprene case.

I never once felt unsafe, but I rarely feel unsafe in Japan (touch wood)… I’m not saying that the US (or UK, etc.) are doing anything wrong. I actually have often found security personnel worldover to be acceptably polite and reasonable.

But — overall the domestic air travel experience here is just better with more relaxed security and these “nice things”:

• If you like, you can check-in with your (Sony) Felica-based frequent-flyer account (which can be run as an application on your mobile telephone so no need for a card at all). Many people seem to use this.
• JAL used a nice/huge 747-400 (doubledecker) used for a < 2.5 hour domestic flight from Haneda (Tokyo) to Naha (Okinawa).
• The airports I visited had a wide variety of rather decent (dare I say “very good”) restaurants at very fair prices.
• The politeness/friendliness of domestic flight attendants and check-in staff is just as good as the (high quality) international staff. This includes Skymark, which has been described to me as the “JetBlue” of Japan but I couldn’t really tell a difference between Skymark and ANA/JAL.

Wired’s Gadget Lab seems to think it will look like this:

They also say:

“The MacBook Air may also dispense with a wired Ethernet port, according to rumor. “

My friend Graeme suggested that Apple will need to provide a USB to Ethernet adapter. So I figured that just in case they don’t and I’m left fending for myself, I better do a quick Y! search to see what options exist out there.

It turns out that Sustainable Softworks has some nice open source drivers for a couple of popular USB to Ethernet chipsets. But on this page I found something peculiar:

“We’ve seen some reports of AX88772 based adaptors being recognized on Leopard without needing to install any drivers. The system.log reports the device is being matched by AppleUSBEthernet. We’ve also had some problem reports of not getting a DHCP Lease. If you’re experiencing difficulty, please check the system.log to see which driver is actually being used. I understand from Apple that the presense of this driver may be inadvertent and does not imply support for generic USB-to-Ethernet adaptors.“

So Apple is inadvertently including drivers for USB to Ethernet adapters? I surmise that in roughly 12 hours Apple will start offering a USB to Ethernet adapter based on the AX88772 chipset either as part of the MacBook Air package or as an additional accessory.

We’ll all know shortly.

P.S. — It is all about Mac OS X and consistent design. Sony (my employer here in Tokyo) has been making beautiful super-slims from exotic materials and novel features for years now. They all run Windows.

P.P.S. — I still think Cinema displays with USB Video Class cameras built-in are coming…

In the press release it says “The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.”

After reading this, I first thought “wow! something is finally going to use my GPU for decoding!”. Unfortunately upon further investigation I discovered that the only hardware acceleration going on is for scaling. That’s definitely better than the software scaling flash was doing before (which is why those full-screen flash videos had so much tearing and lagginess) but not what I was hoping for.

I write this from my first-generation MacBook Pro which has an ATI Radeon X1600 GPU. This particular GPU is capable of doing hardware decoding of H.264 video. From ATI’s web site:

“Free your CPU to devote more processing power to other applications with Avivo’s hardware accelerated processing of new HD video formats, including H.264.”

Then there is a link to Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 6 expansion pack page where you are presented with the option to pay another $24.95 for a Windows-only package that will presumably use the “Avivo” hardware acceleration. Upon further searching, it seems that Nero, Elecard, and others are able to do hardware accelerated decoding as well.

As such, whether I use Mac OS X or Windows (without paying more money) I appear to be stuck with software decoding. I am not aware of any free software for Windows or any software at all for Mac OS X that can use my GPU’s H.264 decoder. That includes Quicktime Pro and the new Flash.

There’s more bad news. The new Flash does support “True HD” up to 1920×1080p but according to the system requirements page I would need a much faster Mac to be able to decode 1080p video as my 2 GHz Core Duo doesn’t pass the test. I can accept this in a vacuum but two major facts make this totally unacceptable:

1. My GPU could be doing it without a second thought and leaving my CPU for more important things.

2. If I were running Windows or Linux, it would be no problem at all! Have a look at the requirements table below.

Notice that 1080p can be decoded with a 1.8 GHz Core Duo on Windows and Linux but jumps up to a whopping 2.66 GHz on the Mac! Also notice that Adobe seems to have access to some kind of bizarre prototype Macintosh with a 1.33 GHz Core Duo for doing 480p decoding tests. wtf is that?

Of course, I would prefer Flash figure out how to do hardware-accelerated decoding. But if a software solution is the only choice, can’t they just buy these guys or at least license their decoder like Joost did? Just to give an idea of what can really be done in software, take a look at the requirements for the CoreAVC decoder:

As they say on their web site…

“The efficiency of CoreAVC in ’software’ is often compared to be faster than other solutions that try to rely on ‘hardware’ to increase playback performance of H.264 video.”

So in conclusion, a single core CPU released in August 2002 running an OS from 2001 with CoreAVC’s $7.95 H.264 decoder is able to blow the doors right off a brand new $2800 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro running Apple’s latest operating system and yesterday’s brand new version of Flash.

Please Adobe, go buy CoreAVC or get some ATI/Nvidia/Intel engineers parked at your offices for a couple months to sort this out. Please?

But, it’s not all bad news. Not only do we get nice hardware scaling which has existed in “regular” media players for many years but Flash now supports a whole load of great containers — MP4, M4A, MOV, MP4V, 3GP and 3G2. They can all be embedded right into your SWF’s with fancy overlays and all kinds of good stuff. This is very good news indeed. With the super-fast adoption of new versions of Flash we can look forward to much better web-based video very soon.

And now this…

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/Careers/culture/index.html

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/Careers/life/index.html

Captcha used in fc2.com

Basically the image is spelling out a series of numbers that the user has to type in. Luckily it is in Hiragana (which I can read) and it is all numbers. This one reads 807355. On the one hand, I find this approach rather novel as it poses yet another strong obstacle against evil sign-up bots and their masters, on the other hand it is yet another example of something that is totally specific to the Japanese market and can’t be used anywhere else without modification.

153,600 pixels of love

So, it was reasonable for me to assume an even better experience from my new Toshiba 911T, one of the only full-featured phones available in Japan to have both English T9 and a 3-inch “WVGA” display which is a whopping 800×480 resolution. That’s 384,000 pixels — well over twice the iPhone’s resolution.

384,000 wasted pixels

Well, you know what happens when you assume. Yes, the 800×480 display is insanely crisp when viewing photos — that can’t be debated. However, everything else — text, video, one-seg TV, menu graphics, etcetera, just lack the smoothness and crispness which seems so effortless on the iPhone. As is often the case with hardware these days — it all comes down to great software.

The iPhone is scaling and smoothing its beautiful fonts while the Toshiba looks pixelated and sometimes even worse than the older QVGA (320×240) displays that were once the standard in Japan. Further, there are no high resolution icons or other aspects of the interface to take advantage of this magnificent display. Even the “PC Browser” — a browser for viewing web sites which were designed for PC web browsers — is inferior to iPhone’s Safari in terms of font readability. Besides the great quality when viewing photos, about the only positive thing I can say is that if I did want to view super tiny and almost unreadable text on a mobile phone I would have the option available to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I really like this phone. It’s got UMTS HSDPA, FeliCa RFID, a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, takes great videos, has English T9 input, one-seg TV, a micro-SD port, syncs with iSync (Thanks to the gods at Reudo!) and a lot more — even Bluetooth A2DP (though rather useless without MP3 playback). But, it’s no iPhone.

Once the iPhone comes out in Japan, I wonder if the average Japanese customer will even care about this issue. I have shown Japanese Windows users the amazing quality of the Japanese fonts on my Mac many times and most seem to be either oblivious or ambivalent. I can’t explain it. See for yourself:

Windows - Hurts my eyes


Mac OS X - Feels so much better

I’m looking forward to enjoying great readability here in Japan once the iPhone arrives or someone else picks up the torch — hopefully Sony Ericsson.

I am a big fan of the country of Turkey. My family and I truly enjoy our Turkish friends, food, beaches, and summer weather. I am also a big fan of mobile phones and staying connected whenever possible. Therefore, on our second summer vacation in two years to the Bodrum area I set out to not only get a Turkcell SIM card but to also (with the help of my friend Baris) document as much as possible for other English-speaking visitors to Turkey who wish to get their mobile going. The advantages are simple: Avoid both costly roaming fees and asking your Turkish friends to dial internationally to reach you right in Turkey.

Choosing Your Carrier:

Turkey has three major mobile carriers.

• Turkcell: 900 MHz GSM (Supposedly the best coverage, not often disputed)
• Vodafone: 900 MHz GSM
• Avea: 1800 MHz GSM

I chose Turkcell.

Turkcell Hazir Kart SIMPlus Prepaid Sim Card Package

Whereas most western European carriers are on a combination of 900/1800 MHz, Turkey’s carriers have either 900 MHz or 1800 MHz but not both. What that means is that even if you have an unlocked mobile phone (which is required to use a Turkcell SIM card), you’ll need to have one with 900 MHz to use Turkcell.

All quad-band mobile phones (850/900/1800/1900) such as the popular Motorola V3 RAZR will work fine as they all have 900 MHz. If your phone is a European model, you are also in good shape. All single band (900), dual-band (900/1800), and tri-band (900/1800/1900) European mobile phones have the required 900 MHz.

Where things get a little sticky is if you have a US non-quad-band mobile phone. Cheap dual-band models (850/1900) won’t work at all as they don’t have 900 MHz. US tri-band models such as T-Mobile/Samsung’s SGH-T509 with 850/1800/1900 will indeed work with most western european carriers on the 1800 MHz band but won’t work at all with Turkcell as it lacks the required 900 MHz band. If you have a US Tri-band model you can only choose Avea as your Turkish carrier and I have no experience to offer you. To see which bands your phone supports try looking up your model number on GSM Arena or Mobiledia.

One of Many Independent Mobile Shops

Collection of Turkcell, Vodafone, and Avea Sim Card Packages

Buying Your SIM Card and Credits:

You will have no problem finding an independent mobile phone shop to sell you a SIM card. Be prepared to show your passport and have a photocopy taken when purchasing a SIM card. While the prices/packages can vary from shop to shop, they are all rather competitive (except for the one at Istanbul airport which is a complete rip-off at about 3x market price). Here’s a typical sample:

• Turkcell: 23 YTL (New Turkish Lira) for SIM + 100 Kounters (Credits)
• Vodafone: 17 YTL for SIM + 100
• Avea: 18 YTL for SIM + 100

Typically, the Turkcell package is labeled “Hazir Kart” which means “Ready Card”.

Make sure the place you buy it from activates it. I ended up having to wait 24 hours for the guy to get around to activating my card.
Additional Kounters are even more ubiquitous and available at most food stores, convenience stores, gas stations, etc. A 100 Kounters card costs about 15 YTL.

About Phone Registration:

Turkey has a rather unique policy in which the government requires all mobile phones to be registered. If you don’t register your phone after a certain period of time, the carrier (e.g. Turkcell) will refuse to register your phone on their network and you won’t be able to make/recieve phone calls or SMS messages at all. Exactly why they do this is a bit of a mystery to me but I think it has something to do with controlling the market for stolen mobile phones.

To be 100% sure you don’t run into this problem you will need to find an “official” Turkcell shop to register your phone. These are not always easy to find and can be a rather long distance from where you are staying in Turkey. In my case the nearest was in the main city of Bodrum which was a 30+ minute drive away. Each phone has a unique identifier (the IMEI number) that is used to register your phone.

You can risk not registering and hope that your service isn’t temporarily shut off until after you leave Turkey. If you do that, it is likely the next time you return to Turkey you will not be able to use the same phone without registering it. Anecdotally, it can take 2-3 weeks before you get your warning message. Look for an SMS starting with “Cihaz kayit eisi…..” and then look for the date in the text. The date is when that particular phone (not the SIM card) will stop working if you don’t register it.

Card Expiration

As is usually the case with prepaid SIM cards around the world, inactivity will cause your credits and eventually your card/phone number to expire.

With Turkcell you must add credits every 90 days to keep everything working. Regardless of your credit balance, not adding additional credits for 90 days will you cause all of your credits to expire and stop outbound calling from working at all. You will get an additional 90 days in which only inbound calls are supported. After that, you have another 30 days in which the phone doesn’t work at all but your number is reserved for you in case you do decide to add more credits and start the clock all over again. After the full 90+90+30=210 days passes your card is useless and should be discarded.

Therefore, if you buy 100 credits (15 YTL) every 90 days, you will need to be spending about 60 YTL per year to keep your card completely working. Not too bad compared to T-Mobile US, one of the better prepaid deals in the world, which requires a $100 credit in order to stay valid for 1 year.

Collection of Prepaid Credit Re-up Cards Being Sold by a Street Vendor

Turkcell 100 Credit Prepaid Re-up Card

Using Your Card and Turkcell Services

The card will come with a nice booklet with easy to follow instructions on how to use Turkcell’s services. Unfortunately it is written entirely in Turkish. Here’s an English translation of the instructions for all the key services (Thanks again Baris!):

Getting started: Dial 8090 to start things off, follow the instructions (press 2 for English). Your card will start working and you’ll get confirmation of your 100 credits. On some phones you will also get a new menu added. On my Motorola K1 KRZR it was added under “Tools/SIM Tools”. The menu was all in Turkish and therefore not much use to me.

Adding credits from an additional Kontor Karti that you bought: Dial 8090 which will now be in English or just dial *122*NUMBER-FROM-THE-KONTOR-KARTI-CARD#

Checking your credit balance: *123#

Account access for additional features: Send an SMS with the word “SIFRE” to short code 2222

Get MMS settings automatically added to your phone: Send an SMS with the words “MMS YOUR-PHONE-MODEL” to 2222. So for example, if you have a Nokia 6600 you would send “MMS 6600″ to 2222. I needed to send “MMS V3″ which is a RAZR to get my KRZR working. The settings are the same. YMMV on this one if you don’t have a phone in their database.

Get GPRS settings automatically added to your phone: Send an SMS with the words “WAP YOUR-PHONE-MODEL” to 2222. So for example, if you have a Nokia 6600 you would send “WAP 6600″ to 2222. I tried V3 again but it sent a message back in Turkish saying it wasn’t possible to do this on my phone automatically and to manually do it with instructions from the Turkcell web site.

Setup voicemail: Set your phone to forward unanswered calls to 7532. Your default password will be 1234. I didn’t try this feature. There is another interesting option which loosely translates to “Who called me?” in which you forward to 7585 and then when you turn off the forwarding you’ll get an SMS with the list of callers. The example given is that you go to the theater and want to know who called while you were unavailable.

Collect calls: dial *135*53XXXXXXXX# where XXXXXXXX is the number you want to call. The “53″ seems to indicate that you can only call Turkcell numbers collect but perhaps it is worth trying others.

Transfer credits to another prepaid card: Send an SMS to 2277 with the number you want to send the credits to followed by the quantity of credits. For example “535XXXXXXX 25″ sent to 2277 would send 25 credits to 535XXXXXXX. To confirm that it went through successfully send an SMS to 2064 with the word “EVET”. You can only transfer between 5 and 70 credits at a time with a maximum of 250 monthly. You can check how much you have transferred in the given month by sending an SMS to 2277 with the word “KONTOR”.

For Help services (in Turkish): Dial *133#

Good Luck

I do hope this guide is helpful and that you have a safe and enjoyable trip to Turkey!

Hello, again!

Apologies to my readers for the lack of activity recently. I had a death in my immediate family in July that naturally put the blog on low priority. I now have some major updates to share…

After a fantastic nearly 2 years I have decided to leave Yahoo! and will no longer be running the Y! Messenger client products. I am returning to Tokyo to work at Sony alongside my great friend Takeshi Honma. We’ve got plenty of things planned that I will post about here at a later date.

In between jobs I am vacationing again in Turkey and will also be stopping by France and Germany for a week to see family and friends. My very close friend Baris and his family are hosting us here in Turkey.

I’m writing this from my trusty 12″ PowerBook G4 connected to a Turk Telekom 1 megabit ADSL line which Speakeasy to SF seems to think gets about 200 kbps down and 81 kbps up, however I was able to achieve over 800 kbps down on a download from Europe. I’ve also got another Turkcell SIM card which I’ll be posting a definitive guide to later on.

Which makes this news very cool indeed — according to an article on QJ.net, Capcom is bringing Super Street Fighter II Turbo to both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in HIGH DEFINITION. I have to admit, this may be what it takes for me to plunk down the cash for a PS3, though I am a little concerned that the only people I’d end up playing against would kick my ass and take the fun away…

T.Hawk “Before” and “After” from Capcom’s upcoming SSF2T HD

While my favorite is still SF2T (Hyper Fighting), SSF2T and I have a long history together…

I first played it in the arcades when it came out, then bought the nearly perfect arcade port (with CD audio) for the 3DO along with an extremely rare SNES->3DO controller adapter in order to use my very authentic arcade controller (which now has been converted to a PS2 controller for improved cross-platform compatibility). Some years later I ended up buying a Japanese sit-down Neo Geo MVS arcade cabinet that happened to have a working US CPS2 SSF2T JAMMA board in it.

Old School Arcade-style Fighting Stick with PS2 Guts Inside

Japanese “Candy” Neo Geo MVS Arcade Cabinet with SSF2T

According to my bro Takashi, Windows 95 was profoundly important in spurring personal computer adoption in Japan. So I’m really glad the article covered the importance of Windows 95 in Japan.

Many homes in Japan didn’t have a PC at the time. They relied instead on dedicated word processing machines that fell somewhere between electric typewriters and laptop computers. But the launch of Windows 95 helped expand the PC market in Japan, in part by offering an interface more friendly to Japanese users.

While they got the Vaio 505 for its thin and elegant design, the MPEG encoder card in the first desktops, and the inclusion of iLink (i.e. Firewire i.e. IEEE 1394) — they neglected to mention the first integration of a webcam into a notebook, the inclusion of a memory stick reader in most models, and other things now common in competitors’ models.

Sony VAIO PCG-C1VN PictureBook — Circa 2001

I don’t quite get why the Mac OS X integration is so abnormal. Synchronization only in iTunes? A checkbox for Y! Address Book synchronization in iTunes? No Bluetooth integration with Address Book? No way to use the iPhone as a modem to get on the EDGE network with your Mac?

iTunes with iPhone on the left. iSync with no iPhone on the right.

This preference is in iTunes and nowhere else. Certainly I understand this for Windows, but Mac?

Here’s Address Book. That handy Bluetooth button does exactly nothing with the iPhone.

As expected, tons of nerds with laptops camping out with the obligatory local news van outside.

I was surprised by a few things: Around half of the laptops I saw were not Macs and I am about 92.5% sure that the guy first in line is actually a local homeless/semi-homeless guy. Perhaps somebody is paying him to hold the spot.

I did take a bunch of photos with my production sample Cingular branded Nokia N80 (which DOES have UMTS/WCDMA 3G on the AT&T network, unlike the iPhone) but unfortunately something was buggy and none of the photos were saved to the MiniSD card.

I may stop by tomorrow before 6PM to snap some more photos. If so, I’ll post here.

Update: Graeme and I just stopped by the Apple store again around 6:05PM and it was total mayhem. Steve Jobs himself was inside (see 7th photo of inside of Apple store with the back of a guy with black shirt and light colored hat — that was SJ.) We then went to University Cafe for a drink and saw some Japanese people taking photos of their iPhones.

Here are the photos taken with Graeme’s N95.

Steve Jobs^^^^

Update 2: Looks like someone managed to catch a video of Steve Jobs at the Apple Store at the same time I was there eagerly snapping photos of his back. Check out the video here.

Also, Andrea kindly took some photos for me of the nerds waiting in line during the day on Friday since my N80 flaked out the night before. Obligatory guy with white beard and lawn chair present, of course.

Apple to release new Cinema Displays with built-in iSight cameras that work on Mac and Windows out of the box!

Let me explain…

The other day I was checking out Apple’s Leopard site and came across something interesting on the Photo Booth page….

Let’s look closely at the text:

USB Camera eh? Apple doesn’t sell those! Well, let’s remember in the Mac OS X 10.4.9 release notes some months back there was mention of “…iChat support for USB Video Class webcams.” While Yahoo! Messenger and Skype have had support for non-Apple USB webcams on the Mac for ages, iChat has always been basically an iSight-only affair (let’s not count the other Firewire cameras…)

So the iSight standalone firewire camera has not been sold since last year. Obviously Mac Mini and Mac Pro owners need something… So which USB camera is Apple talking about?

Let’s dig a little deeper…

Apple is now supporting “USB Video Class” or UVC cameras in iChat and Photo Booth. This is a big deal because in order to receive the full Windows Vista logo on the box, USB webcams have to support UVC and that basically means all new webcams will be UVC. That means Windows XP sp2, Vista, Linux, and now Mac OS X support right out of the box with no driver necessary for all new webcams!

So, will Apple start selling cameras from Creative Labs and Logitech at their stores? I doubt it. They just don’t aesthetically fit.

I believe Apple has gone through this trouble so that when the Cinema Displays with iSight come out, the built-in iSight will be UVC and thus will work right-out-of-the-box-plug-and-play-no-drivers-necessary with Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Windows XP sp2, and Linux!

Step 1: Get everybody in my family on a Mac running iPhoto 6. — Check

Step 2: Upload photos of my son to my expensive .Mac Flickr Pro account. — Check

Step 3: Get Flickr’s RSS feed URL and send out with instructions to use as a Photocast. — Check

Step 4: Everybody is happy. — Not so much….

The Flickr RSS feeds only had the most recent 10 or 20 photos in a pathetically low resolution that looked pixelated and disappointing when running a nice iPhoto slideshow on my mom’s 17″ C2D iMac or my father-in-law’s BlackBook.

Enter: photocastr

Thankfully the good folks at Flickr have a powerful API that QuantumFoam put to good use to make photocastr.

Simply put, photocastr creates a perfect Photocast/RSS feed of up to 250 of your most recent high resolution Flickr photos. It has a lot more great ways to tweak your feed (or photos from others) but the basics were more than enough to make me and my family happy campers. Thanks QuantumFoam!

Update: I found a pretty major flaw in that photocastr and iPhoto strictly limit the photos in the photocast to the most recent 250. If you have 250 and then upload another 10 to flickr, your iPhoto subscribers won’t have 260, they’ll lose the oldest 10 photos.

Quick 2 year recap: Moved back to California. Had baby. Took job running product development for Yahoo! Messenger client products.

I plan to be much more active this time around.

My great friend Rich has moved everything to Wordpress… I’m still using ecto 2 and still hoping for ecto 3 to show up some day year soon…

Sony Ericsson V802SE

So, I continue to keep a second mobile phone for when I travel outside of Japan. It’s an older Sony Ericsson T68i. I’ve got a T-Mobile prepaid SIM card for the US, and since I got it unlocked back in San Francisco, I’m able to use any SIM cards from any carrier I like in any country that supports GSM 1800/1900/900. Most countries do. The T68i also includes bluetooth support and works quite well with Apple’s iSync.

Sony Ericsson T68i and T-Mobile SIM Card

Last month my wife and I vacationed in Turkey for two weeks and I was able to buy a Turkcell prepaid SIM card at the airport upon arrival for about US$50 that included enough credit for my entire trip, including several short calls to the United States. I wanted to have my phone working shortly after landing in Istanbul so I could more easily meet up with my friend who was picking us up at the Bodrum airport after another connecting flight. I wasn’t sure if there would be a shop at the airport and even considered buying one in advance and having it shipped to Japan before I left. Unfortunately, the service needed to be activated and while I had the activation code, the instructions were spoken only in Turkish. Even so, it was so incredibly convenient and inexpensive to have my own telephone number and mobile phone for the entire trip.
Next time, I want to figure out if the prepaid card supports GPRS Internet connectivity and give it a try.

Turkcell SIM Card

Now, I’m just waiting for KDDI’s AU line-up to include a phone with everything their current 3G line-up supports, plus English T9 text input, iSync over bluetooth, unlocked GSM 1800/1900/900, and a form factor that doesn’t create too large a bulge in my pocket. Something tells me I’ll be holding onto my little T68i for a long time.

However, Dragon Computer is a physical shop that carries mod chips for both the Xbox and PS2. That’s not to say I believe the only reason to buy a mod chip is for piracy purposes (legit uses include playing personal game backups or running homebrew software) but usually pirated games and tools that enable piracy (i.e. mod chips) can be found in the same place. Dragon Computer doesn’t appear to be selling any games, just chips. I haven’t bought anything from Dragon Computer and can’t vouch for them in any way.

The way it works is as follows — I hardcode the name of each Podcast’s Playlist (iPodder Lemon creates a playlists for each Podcast), then I further hardcode the new Genre/Artist/Album for each Podcast I subscribe to. Lastly, I take the existing Song Name, Album, and Artist and concatenate that all together and replace the Song Name with the result. I use an unused field in the ID3 tag to indicate whether a file has been “cleaned” and check it first so I don’t “clean” the same file twice.

Due to all the hardcoding, I have to edit the AppleScript every time I subscribe to a new Podcast or a Podcast changes its name. Other than that, it’s pretty seamless. I simply run Podcast Cleaner each morning before I synchronize my iPod with the latest Podcasts.

See the screenshot below of my nice clean iTunes Library.

Click this link Podcast Cleaner.zip to download my personal version of Podcast Cleaner. To use it, you’ll firstly need a Macintosh; Windows doesn’t support AppleScript. Secondly, edit the file to suit your particular list of Podcasts (should be self explanatory and obviously amateur to anyone that has taken a basic programming class) and place into “/Users/username/Library/Scripts” without the quotes and substituting username with your username. You may need to create the Scripts folder yourself.

I am not sure how iTunes 4.9 will handle Podcasts, but I’m hoping I won’t need Podcast Cleaner anymore.