Dr. Serkan Toto is an independent consultant and advisor focusing on Japan’s web, mobile and social gaming industries. Based in Tokyo, he works together with financial institutions and startups worldwide.
Serkan has been the Japan contributor for TechCrunch.com since 2008.
He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics.
The 3DS sure had a bumpy start, but it seems Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata’s hunch that sales will pick up (we reported last week) is right. According to Japan’s biggest video game magazine Famitsu, the 3DS sold a solid 378,114 units between December 5 and 11. Nintendo reported 371,326 units sold in the first two days after launch in Japan, but the last week was the most successful one for big N… → Read More
Honda caused quite a splash a while back with the introduction of the U3-X, a personal mobility robot that’s basically a motorized unicycle (and that our own John Biggs was “impressed” with after taking it for a test drive last year). And now, at the Tokyo Motor Show 2011, Honda took the wraps of a pretty similar robot, the so-called Uni-Cub.
In fact, Honda says it has been working on mobility… → Read More
At the Tokyo Motor Show 2011, Mitsubishi took the wraps off EMIRAI, a near-future concept that will become reality in about 10 years (if the company is to be believed). The core element is a large-sized, curved dashboard that combines rear-projection to display various operations with touch control support.
The steering wheel features shape-changing buttons that only raise when the system… → Read More
I took part in the Infinity Ventures Summit Fall 2011 (IVS) in Kyoto/Japan last week, a two-day web industry event organized twice a year by Japanese VC firm Infinity Venture Partners. Like at every IVS, a few hours of the schedule were reserved for a total of 13 local startups to demo their services onstage to a panel of judges and an international crowd of 550 people.
Here is a rundown of all… → Read More
Japan-based Kowa Tmsuk may just be ten months old and just have five employees (it’s a joint venture between two larger companies), but it seems the company is set to build cool things. Their electric vehicle concept, dubbed KOBOT, looks very promising – especially for a first product.
The KOBOT is essentially a mix between a robot and an electric mini car that can make itself smaller than it… → Read More
It took them quite a while, but as reported, Panasonic is finally ready to re-enter the global market for cell phones. After 2005, Big P has been selling handsets almost exclusively in Japan. The company today announced [JP] it will start expanding its mobile business to Europe in March 2012, starting with a yet to be named Android device.
Technical details are scarce at this point, but it… → Read More
The winner of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011, group buying platform OrderWithMe, today announced it has raised a US$3 million A round. The fresh money comes from Japan- and China-based Infinity Venture Partners as the lead investor and existing (seed) investor SOSventures, barely a month after the China-based startup walked away with the Disrupt Beijing Cup and a… → Read More
Do you remember that 55-inch monster of a naked-eye 3D TV Toshiba unveiled back in October? The company now announced [JP] a date (December 10) and confirmed the final price (US$11,700) for the device. But there’s a drawback: Toshiba has still to decide if they will release the TV outside Japan, too.
To recap, the TV features 3,840×2,160 pixels resolution in 2D mode (that’s four times the… → Read More
Nintendo caused a huge splash in the video gaming world earlier this year, when it announced a drastic price cut for the 3DS (which was meant to be an answer to disappointing sales). But it looks like pushing down the price from 25,000 to 15,000 Yen helped, at least in Nintendo’s home market of Japan.
According to big N’s president Satoru Iwata, the 3DS has sold a solid 3 million times so far… → Read More
It’s not the first of its kind (Michelin already showed a prototype), but it looks like the airless tire Bridgestone has developed is the most advanced we’ve seen so far. The Japanese company’s main goal here is to do away with the risk of flats.
The tire has a diameter of 25 centimeters, uses thermoplastic resin instead of air to support the weight of a car and has been successfully… → Read More
Japanese mobile social gaming giant and Openfeint owner GREE has outlined today its previously announced plan to launch a mobile social gaming network for the global market next year. Details are (relatively) scarce at this point, but the publicly traded company (current market cap: US$7.5 billion) seems to be serious in positioning itself against Facebook Mobile as a gaming platform for… → Read More
No doubt, Japan is on its way to becoming Android country. The newest alternative for the 100+ million mobile subscribers in the country is Fujitsu-Toshiba’s ARROWS ES IS12F, which was announced [JP] by major telco KDDI au today. Their biggest selling point is that the handset is just 6.7mm thick.
Fujitsu-Toshiba is still a bit slow on bringing their (mostly) awesome Android phones to North… → Read More
They aren’t as hip as those curly cables we’ve shown you a few days ago, but Roboden [JP], the world’s first elastic electrical cable, is way more useful. Its maker, major Japanese chemical company Asahi Kasei, says the cable stretches by a factor of 1.5 – like the human skin.
In the video embedded below, Asahi Kasei mainly talks about robot applications. The cable could, for example, do its… → Read More
Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo has announced [JP] it will start offering the Medias PP N-01D on December 9, the latest Android phone in NEC’s Medias smartphone series. And if NEC ever gets its act together regarding its internationalization plans, this pretty cool device might hit the US and other markets soon, too.
NEC is especially proud of the 1,700mmAH battery that’s built into the… → Read More
Sleep apnea can be a big problem for people affected by the disorder, but there is help from Japan on the way. A team of researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have developed a robot pillow that monitors the sleep of patients and helps them by touching the face or neck whenever it detects irregularities in the sleep cycle.
The pillow, which is dubbed Jukusui-kun, is shaped like a teddy bear. → Read More
TechCrunch Japan organized TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 [JP] on Tuesday, a one-day event that attracted a total of 600 people (and will hopefully be organized next year again, possibly as TechCrunch Disrupt Tokyo). The crowd was a mix of people from the local web and mobile industry, Asia, and the US (including TechCrunch’s very own Erick Schonfeld who came to Japan for the first time in ten… → Read More
Smartphones are soon to become thinner: Sharp has developed a 1/3.2-inch CMOS camera module that’s just 5.47mm high, making it the thinnest module out there. The so-called RJ63YC100 features 12.1MP resolution, optical image stabilization and is specifically designed for use in handsets.
Sharp says it used “proprietary high-density packaging technology” to make the back-illuminated module as… → Read More
We’re getting closer and closer to the Robocalypse: Osaka-based industrial equipment maker Muscle Corporation and a few other Japanese companies have developed a humanoid that can climb up (and down) ladders all by itself. Considering how hard it still is to create robots that can walk smoothly, this is quite an accomplishment.
The so-called “Dream Robo” was actually showcased last year during… → Read More
We’re one step closer to the Robocalypse: Japan-based Kawada Industries has developed a humanoid robot that’s specifically designed to work alongside human beings. The so-called Nextage is certainly not the first robot of its kind, but his specs are pretty impressive, and he’s already commercialized, too.
Nextage is equipped with a high-speed stereo-camera and two arms that have 12 joints each… → Read More
In the post-iPhone era, a lot of things changed in Japan, once the most admired country in the mobile world. The number of cell phone manufacturers, for example, has fallen from 13 to five after massive consolidation and re-organization, and all of the remaining players fight with a shrinking and rapidly greying domestic market.
That’s one of the reasons why Nippon’s cell phone makers have been… → Read More
We have covered the one or the other Hello Kitty gadget in the past, but it’s been a while since the last notebook featuring the popular cartoon cat. But now Japan’s Mouse Computer is selling the so-called LuvBook S, [JP], an 11.6-inch laptop with Hello Kitty all over it. It has been co-developed with Hello Kitty maker Sanrio and luxury goods maker Swarovski.
Swarovski designed the body of the… → Read More
Simroid, a super-realistic dental training robot developed in Japan, caused quite a splash in news outlets worldwide when it made its debut in 2007. The level of realism was pretty high back then, but it’s even higher in the new version that was showcased in Tokyo a few days ago.
The basic idea is that Simroid simulates a human patient during a dental check-up by moving and speaking as… → Read More
If full HD resolution isn’t enough for you, then how about 16 times the resolution of full HD? Japan’s national public broadcasting organization NHK has been working on so-called Ultra HD technology for years, and now it’s ready for the first big test in public.
NHK is planning public screenings of some events at the London Olympics next year in Ultra HD resolution (7,680×4,320 pixels) – not… → Read More
It’s not the first cell phone that has been designed specifically for women, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting, as far as features and specs are concerned. Fujitsu’s so-called ARROWS Kiss F-03D for the Japanese market runs on Android 2.3, is targeted at women aged between 20 and 30, and comes with “elegant and glimmering jewelry design”.
The area around the “gem-cut” buttons on the… → Read More
It looks like we can expect faster wireless connections in the near future: Japanese electronic parts maker Rohm yesterday announced [JP] it has developed a chip that reached a wireless data transmission speed of 1.5 gigabits per second in experiments, the highest level ever. And according to the company, even 30Gbps will be possible in the future.
The semi conductor device uses terahertz… → Read More
We’ve shown you many Kinect-based hacks and applications over the past months, and here is a new one from Japan: major robot maker Yaskawa has developed a humanoid that can be remote-controlled using a Kinect interface. Dubbed SmartPal VII, the telepresence robot can be used to communicate with other people over a distance or even help them cleaning up rooms, for example (by controlling the… → Read More
Would you like to be able to turn your pizza box into a computer interface or use a banana as an alternative to your phone? Invoked Computing, a concept developed at the Ishikawa-Oku lab at Tokyo University, makes that possible via “ubiquitous” augmented reality (video and sound).
The idea here is to project screens, keyboards and other elements on everyday objects so users ideally wouldn’t… → Read More
Small OLED screens are being used in millions of devices already (like in Samsung’s Galaxy S phones or Sony’s upcoming portable console Vita), but we’re still waiting for large-sized models to hit the mainstream. It’s been four years since Sony offered the XEL-1 (a mini OLED TV) in stores, but the industry has been innovating on LCD screens, for example with LED backlight or 3D, since.
One of… → Read More
Last weekend, I attended Myojo-Waraku 2011 [JP] in Fukuoka/Southern Japan, a three-day tech and creative festival highly inspired by SXSW. Much like the event in the US, the idea for the counterpart in Japan (the first ever) is to bring together people from different fields, namely movies, music, games and interactive. More information about Myojo-Waraku 2011 can be found here.
In the… → Read More
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