When I went on holiday recently I encouraged my friends (and you, my dear blog readers) to keep up with what I was doing via my posts to Twitter and photo uploads to Flickr, both of which were most easily followable on FriendFeed.  While I was glad that I could let people know what I was experiencing in Japan, a worry niggled at the back of my mind - burglars.  It’s a problem I’d forgotten about since getting back, until Tom Beardshaw reminded me today.

Now, if you’ve ever been away from home for more than a couple of days you’ve probably worried about people breaking into your house.   Until recently though, it’s unlikely that your location (and the likely emptiness of your house) has been broadcast publicly.  Many people in the ‘early adopter set’ have been happily posting frequent online updates about their current activities for a good year or so.  Now with the increase in adoption of location-aware technologies thanks to GPS in mobile phones those statuses can  include location data too.

Now, you might think you’ve got nothing to fear - after all, you never publish your home address online!  Think again.  Do you own a domain name?  Are you on the electoral roll?  Are you in the phone book?  All these things things make tracking down your address easy.

I’ve written about The Naked 21st Century before.  We can’t expect privacy as we used to, especially if we participate in online communities and share anything about ourselves.  As fun as location-aware social networking is, in the near future you might need a few accessories to enjoy it fully.  I think that a good burlgar alarm, some lights on timers and making friends with the neighbours might be a good start!

My post on Sunday about Apple cutting its customers’ legs off was written as a result of my frustration at not being able to do a simple thing - burn a DVD of a film purchased from iTunes. In the end I decided to rent the film instead and watch it on my iPhone. In the post I made a point of how the experience of buying music on iTunes was much better. Burning a CD of purchased music is no problem. Sure, there’s a limit on how many times you can burn a CD but there are easy ways round that.

Overall, I’m very happy with buying music from iTunes, Play.com, eMusic or any of their competitors. But what if I don’t want to buy music? What if I just want to listen online? Once you go beyond plain old-fashioned retail, the music industry’s digital strategy is a million miles off the mark.

Many gigabytes have been written online about the music industry’s problems at adapting to the online world. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira’s guest post on The Inquisitr today is one of the latest additions to this collective character assasination of an entire industry’s online strategy. Inspired by the near-death status of Pandora and the (supposedly temporary) closure of Muxtape, Cyndy predicts that the USA will become a wasteland of piracy if American music industry body the RIAA doesn’t change its attitude to online use of music.

Of course if you look at it entirely from a tech-centric point of view, it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the startups and their users that are losing out at present. Unless you’re a music industry fat-cat or a big-name musician it’s very hard to do more than scrape by in a career in the music world today. That’s mainly down to decreased sales as a result of file sharing and other forms of piracy.

How does the music industry react to a decline in business? The current strategy seems muddled at best:

- They’re actively working to stamp out piracy through a mixture of ‘Good Cop’ tactics (education campaigns, getting ISPs to send out warning letters to offenders) and ‘Nasty Evil Cop’ tactics (cosying up to the police a little to closely and suing old ladies). Which tactic individual file sharers end up on the end of seems entirely down to chance. Some get a gentle letter of warning, others end up fighting lengthy court cases. This leads to consumers developing a hatred for the industry and feeling like they have a moral defence for their piracy.

- They’re happy to license music to the Pandoras of this world, but only if they pay hefty fees. Now, I’m all for people paying to use music but it’s clear that the fees at present are so high that startups can’t afford to license music and end up either in a legal grey area (like Muxtape) or close to ruin (like Pandora). The music industry would argue that “if you can’t pay the fees don’t use the music”, but if these new avenues of catalogue exploitation aren’t being explored then who’s going to pay for the musicians (and the fat-cats) to eat? Those record sales aren’t getting any higher.

Surely it’s time for the industry as a whole to take a whole new approach, one that goes something like this:

- Fight low-level piracy by customers in a unified way. Some people being sued while others are getting polite letters asking them to stop is confusing and causes resentment amongst the customer base. Surely a combination of education, polite letters and (oh, I don’t know) giving consumers what they want might be the best approach.

- What is it that customers want? Besides those who will genuinely only download music because it’s free, they want to be able to download a vast catalogue of music that can be used on any device they choose. DRM is already on the way out, but kill it tomorrow and the world will be a better place.

- They want services like Pandora that introduce them to new music. Guess what? They blame the music industry when they get shut down! These services not only allow new music to be found, they also allow it to be easily bought through a simple link to an online store. It’s the kind of marketing that consumers love - they’re in control of it and it’s directly focussed on their needs. Set licensing at a level that these services can afford. Licenses can always be renegotiated in the future. For now, let these services grow - they might be your biggest customers in the future.

There we go - just three ways the music industry could change itself for the better. There are undoubtedly many more ideas they can try that don’t result in stifled innovation and annoyed customers. Let’s hope they see the light before it’s too late and the whole world becomes that ‘wasteland of piracy’.

I’m not the world’s most ardent Apple supporter.  I didn’t unquestioningly buy into the iPhone, for example, I held off until it had GPS and installable apps, two things any decent smartphone should have in 2008.  That said, I do appreciate their high-quality products with a usually problem-free hardware-software interface.  My MacBook, iPhone 3G and old 30GB iPod are all fantastic and I love using them.

Recently though I’ve found myself feeling like Apple’s holding me back.  They’re letting me crawl along in dumb luxury when I should be able to run with their products.  They have indeed cut my legs off.  Of course, Steve Jobs hasn’t been round to see me with a sword and mutilated the bottom half of my body, but sometimes it feels like he has.  I feel like this in two distinct ways that actually contradict each other.

1. There are things I can’t do with Apple products that I really should be able to.

- Why can’t I send an MMS from my iPhone?  Why can’t I even receive an MMS?  Come on Apple, the public has been crying out for this basic feature since the first iPhone over a year ago.  It’s not even like it’s a difficult thing to implement!  They’re cutting my legs off.

- Why can’t I capture video with my iPhone when the camera and operating system can easily handle it?  Qik and Flixwagon for jailbroken iPhones show its easy if you just allow developers access to the right bits of the phone.  They’re crippling their own product and cutting my legs off!

- If I buy an album on iTunes I can burn it to CD without a problem.  How come I can’t burn a film bought on iTunes onto DVD?  The only way of watching a film bought on iTunes on your TV is by spending £200 on an AppleTV box.  That’ll only work with an HD-ready TV so that’s another £400-ish in order to watch a film on TV.  Apple have therefore cut my legs off.  It is of course the MPAA and other stuck-in-that-past rights-holding organisations that stop Apple offer DVD burning (even though DRM could easily limit the number of DVD burns and even stop the DVD itself being copied afterwards).  Still, by making the only solution a £200 set-top box (that doesn’t even work with all TVs) they’re cutting my legs off, spitting on me and laughing in my face.

2. Once you’re with Apple it’s hard to leave.

In the examples above, Apple have made it difficult to truly ‘run’ with a device’s true capabilities.  On the other side of the coin, Apple are also cutting off their users’ legs by making the Apple ecosystem so good (problems I’ve mentioned aside).  Very few people who try OSX ever want to go back to Windows.  That’s simply because it makes many tasks a lot easier and more fun.  Try an everyday task like burning a data DVD natively in Windows and you’ll tear your hair out until you buy a 3rd party product.  Compare that to how simple it is in OSX.  Then there’s the iPhone 3G, the best web browsing and email-handling device I’ve ever used despite its drawbacks.  In this case Apple have cut my legs off and I’ve willingly laid back and thought of England until the hacking was complete.

So, if you’re an Apple user you have no legs - whether you’re happy about it or not depends on your point of view.

[Image credit: Atomicshark on Flickr]

The one thing you notice when you spend time in Japan, especially Tokyo, is that everyone seems to use their mobile phones almost constantly.  In the UK the heavy phone users are mainly the perpetual texters and annoying kids listening to music through their tinny phone speakers on the bus.  Most other people keep their phones in the their pockets until they need them .

Compare that to Japan where almost everyone is a heavy phone user.  The thing is that compared to us, they have so many things to do on their phones.  Mobile phones are so interwoven with their culture that they’re an indispensable part of their daily lives in many different ways.

Here’s an example.  While in Tokyo I went to the biggest fireworks display of the Japanese calendar.  It happens by the river in the Asakusa district of the city and in the run-up to the start of the display a huge queue formed down the road that leads up to the main bridge in the area.  In order to give everyone a chance at seeing the fireworks, the police started a rolling blockade to move the crowd forward slowly, meaning people kept moving and everyone got see some of the display.

While the people around me were waiting to get to the area where the fireworks were visible they weren’t complaining of the delay, oh no, they were using their phones to watch the fireworks being broadcast live on TV!  Then, when they could see the fireworks themselves, they switched their phones to camera mode to take pictures and video.  Once past the fireworks they switched back to TV.  I dare say when these people made their way home on the Tokyo Metro they used their phones to pay for the journey.  The Japanese can actually have their Suica pass (their equivalent to London’s Oyster Card) built into their mobile phone!  They just swipe their phones over the reader at the turnstile and they’re in!

So why is mobile culture so prevalent over there while in the UK most people don’t even read their emails on their phones?  It’s partly due to the history of the mobile web in Japan (see this recent post on Techcrunch for more background) but right now it seems like Japan is staying ahead because their phone networks innovate.  Pick up this month’s catalogue from any UK operator and you’ll find the key ‘innovation’ they’re pushing is mobile web access.  The main thing they compete on is price and the number of minutes and texts they give you.

In Japan they seem to compete on innovation.  While I was in Japan here’s some of the things I saw being promoted by the networks:

- Softbank were promoting waterproof phones.  They even had a TV ad featuring Cameron Diaz stood in a sinking rowboat to promote them.

- AU By KDDI had a range of phones for children in their catalogue.  They included features like a cord on the back that children could pull to immediately phone their parents (’Pull To Talk’, if you like!) and GPS tracking so that parents can track their kids’ whereabouts.  Interestingly, this tracking feature was also marketed as being useful to married couples!

- NTT DoCoMo had a voice recognition system that not only converted speech to text but also translated Japanese to English and vice-versa.  Imagine Spinvox crossed with Babelfish.

- One-Seg, the main mobile TV service in Japan, is available on various networks and not only allows watching TV but recording it too.

With all this to do with their phones, it’s no wonder the Japanese spend so long using them.  Here in the UK our first phone with TV reception, the Nokia N96, is launching on the 1st of October.  The thing is, it’ll take a good long while yet before this technology hits the mainstream.  Even then, we’ll still be hopelessly behind the latest Japanese innovations.

It’s a sad thing to say but we might never catch up.  If there was a market for it we could have all this technology right now.  We’re on a par with Japan when it comes to things like HDTV and games consoles but they won’t sell us their new phones because they’re just too advanced for our tastes.  It’s our attitude to mobile technology that needs to improve before we have any hope of reaching any kind of parity with Japan’s mobile lifestyle.

Gordon Brown may come across as a bit of a dour, stern and boring man but his backstage staff certainly know a thing or two about creating engaging web content. Having run a successful Twitter feed about the Prime Minister for several months, they’ve now gone one step further and relaunched Number10.gov.uk as an all-singing, all-dancing web2.0 operation.

It features everything a 2008 homepage should have - Flickr, Youtube and Twitter feeds down the side, all the latest Prime Minister-related news in the main column and even a video message from the man himself. Another section, Number 10 TV, gives users a selection of videos of Prime Ministerial action: visting young offenders, rescuing kestrels - it’s all in a day’s work for Gordon! At the top of the screen there’s even a label saying ‘Beta’ to show they really are in there with the Web 2.0 cliches (they stop short of calling the site ‘Nmbr10′ though).

Where it gets really interesting, though, is the ‘Communicate’ section. Here, users are invited to submit video-based questions in order to receive replies via video from Gordon Brown. Something tells me he won’t be replying to every single message. If Brown starts turning up late for important Commons debates with the excuse “Sorry, I was talking to people on my webcam” I can’t see him staying in the job long. Actually, I can’t see him staying in the job long anyway, but that’s another story.

Selective replies aside, is this E-Democracy in action? Is this a way for the electorate to directly engage with the most powerful man in the country? I honestly worry that this is a gimmick, put together to show off the government’s web credentials and that it’ll be wound down quietly in a few months time.

It’d be a shame for that to happen, but it certainly hasn’t started off well. Visiting ‘Ask the PM’ we are told that answers will be given in September. Politics is an ever-changing beast. If I ask a question now, how relevant will it be by the time an answer rolls around? Fair enough, you might expect delays after a while, when time gets tight in a crisis, maybe, but on launch day why isn’t the prime minister standing by to answer questions today? He could at least be answering weekly. If a week is a long time in politics, a month is an eternity.

So, trendy web feeds aside, Number 10’s new website has failed already in my eyes. Their big ‘Ask the PM’ feature should be a hit but it hasn’t grasped the immediacy of the web. No-one expects the Prime Minister to answer questions every day, but to wait a month? That’s far too long. If the press were demanding answers from the PM on an important topic he’d be expected to make a statement quickly. By not treating the public the same way it shows that this is an opportunity (and the point) missed.

If you run a big retail chain, chances are at some point someone will come to you and suggest you set up an in-store radio station.  You can see why it’s tempting to do so.  Companies like TeamTalk will transmit a radio station tailor-made for your chain to all your stores.  You get a wide variety of music as well as all your latest promotions regularly plugged directly to your customers.  Fantastic!

Sometimes it can be really effective.  Supermarkets like Asda have frequently changing offers and getting Barbara the checkout supervisor to read them all out over the PA in her Scouse drawl is nowhere near as appealing as having a professional radio jock reading them out over the latest Scouting For Girls hit.  In fact in-store radio works in most shops.  Where it doesn’t work though, is banks.

Back when I was a wee nipper in the 80s I remember banks being huge, soulless halls where the sound of cheques being stamped echoed around the marble walls and the bank manager was a stern looking old man feared by all.  Banks have long since learned to put on a friendlier face with comfy chairs, bright lights and carpets.  The manger’s nicer too.

My bank has recently gone one step further - they’ve launched in-store radio.  Yes, branches now rock to the sound of MOR radio hits and cheesy DJs promoting accounts and services.  They’ve even gone and plumbed it into their phone system so that instead of the traditional hold music you get to listen to their radio station while you wait to speak to someone.

Banks, despite their friendly faces, can be scary and stressful places at times.  If I was phoning up to beg for an extension on my overdraft, or if I was visiting the branch to explain why I was behind on my mortgage payments, some chirpy chappy describing the benefits of a premium bank account really wouldn’t help me feel at ease.  Even if I was highly affluent I think in-store radio would drive me away.  While I understand banks need to promote their products, I feel the ‘nagging sell’ of in-store radio doesn’t suit the financial sector.

Banks should, in my opinion, regain some of their austere air of old.  While I can understand that they want to be ‘customer-facing’ in order to appeal to as many people as possible, I think people would actually like their banks to be a bit more serious.  Who would you prefer to entrust your savings with; a bank that plays pop music and has an in-branch coffee bar or one with a stern face, a pinstripe suit and a firm handshake?

Like most people in the West, my main knowledge of Japanese TV in the past has come from “gosh aren’t those foreigners odd”-type programmes that show clips from gameshows in which contestants have to swim through vats of rotting fish and the losing side willingly commits ritual suicide. If you think that’s all there is to Japanese TV then read on as Japanese TV is certainly quirky, but its massively lovable for those quirks.

What’s below are the notes I made while watching Japanese TV over the past two weeks while I was there. Some things are good, some are bad and some are strange…

• One of the annoying things about TV ads in the UK is not knowing what song is playing in the background, especially if it’s a really good one and the online resources for identifying ad music haven’t included it yet. There’s no need to turn to Shazam in Japan, though. Japanese ads have the name of the song they use shown briefly at the bottom of the screen. This is really useful and should be replicated around the world.

• In the west we think anime is all giant robots jumping 80 feet up in the air, or school girls with superpowers and talking cats for best friends. There’s more to it than that though. D. Gray Man, for example, features lots of interestingly-haired people sitting round a table and talking dramatically for 30 minutes. Nothing else happens! Okay, that may have just been the episode I watched (maybe it was a ‘character development’ type thing) but I certainly can’t imagine a primetime cartoon in the UK being so bold as to include no action for so long. Youtube link.

• In fact, sitting around talking seems to make up a good 75% of Japanese TV. A lot of programmes seem to consist of nothing but conversation. The master of this appears to be a presenter by the name of Akeshiya Sanma. With his big horsey grin and hoarse laugh he presents programmes like Much Ado About Love, in which Japanese women talk to him about relationships while he falls about the studio laughing. In fact, all his shows feature him falling about the studio laughing. It’s his ‘thing’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a clip of him doing the laugh, but here he is interviewing the woman who voices Pikachu from Pokemon on his show Sanma Palace: Youtube link.

• The Japanese have an equivalent to S Club 7 called Shuuchishin. They dance, they sing and they have a TV show in which they couple the popstar life with being detectives (an obvious career combination). It’s like Miami 7 would have been if it had featured guns and dead bodies. Very odd, but not on Youtube. Bah. Shuuchishin also make up half of Aladdin, a J-pop supergroup currently flying high in the Japanese charts with this ultra-catchy monstrosity: Youtube link.

• Jump cuts seem to be a feature of many Japanese programmes. Rather than cover up edits in interviews with cutaways, they simply show the ugly cuts. There’s not a lot I can say about this other than to say how annoying it looks. As a video editor myself, I know how easy it is to cover up these cuts in no time at all. Not doing so just looks lazy.

All the above taken into account, I still miss Japanese TV now I’m back in the UK. Even though I understand very little of what’s going on in the programmes, their bright colours and lack of cynicism compared to often-drab British TV was refreshing. When’s the next flight back?

Yes, I’m back from Japan.  I had a fantastic break and now I have some posts inspired by the land of the rising sun that I’ll be publishing over the next few days.

In the meantime, here’s the funniest picture I took while over there.  The island of Miyajima, near Hiroshima, has a huge population of wild deer that wander around trying to eat tourists’ maps.  They’ve already eaten all the grass in the village and some of them appear to be too lazy to walk up to the greener mountain area.

So, when the tourists go home at night what do the deer eat?  How about the rubbish from the ferry terminal?  They look like giant antlered rats!

I’m watching Sky News and they’ve just announced the second major earthquake in Japan in the space of a week.  Hopefully I’ll be okay as I’m heading there tomorrow for two weeks of traveling round the main island.  As per what I wrote in this post, look out for daily Twitter and Flickr updates (internet connection allowing) via my FriendFeed page.  There might be some video too.

While I’m there posts on this blog will take a backseat and will be either short or non-existent.  Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks.  See you then!

...unless you're an existing customer!

I’m a big fan of Truphone’s VoIP solution.  I’ve got it installed on my Nokia E61i and it’s useful to have around if I want to make a call when abroad.  A few pence per minute is a lot better than the 60p per minute, or whatever, my normal network will charge me.  Unfortunately when I was in Turkey last year I didn’t find anywhere with wifi for the full two weeks so I didn’t get to use it!  This year, in Japan, I don’t think finding wifi will such be a problem.  Being so far from home it’ll definitely be good to have Truphone for staying in touch.

So being all prepared, I installed Truphone’s iPhone app.  Entering my account details I expected it to recognise I already had an account and simply log me in.  Instead I got the message back “Account already exists.  Please contact support”.

What? You mean I can’t log in because I already have an account?  Where’s the logic there?

The solution, it appears, is to contact Truphone support and ask them to close your existing account so they can open a new one for you.  That all sounds like a lot of bother to me - and it’s taking them a long time to get back to people who are requesting this, thanks to the popularity of the iPhone service.

Why didn’t they just make their app compatible with existing accounts?  We may never know, but I hope they sort it before I touch down in Tokyo on Friday morning!