• When is it inappropriate to use your iPhone - a romance flowchart;
• All hail the iPod touch; isn't it kinda amusing that one of the most popular mobile devices is completely disconnected from any traditional mobile network? Kinda says something about the telecomms industry I think;
• Is modern web design too like print design: "It feels like we’ve lost the “webness” of web design over an incredibly short period". Absolutely agree. We seem to have falled into a bit of a rut as far as our expectations of web design go...
• Very interesting report of the post-mortem for a large iPhone project;
• Node.js, an asynchronous framework for web applications. Can't decide if this is really cute (performance suggests so), or insanely evil (in that it seems to be retrofitting the WWW with select() calls)...
• If you're a fluent Japanese speaker, perhaps you could tell me what I'm talking about here? It's one of the interviews from my week in Japan...
• Simple and gorgeous - PhotoCard for the iPhone, an app to send email or physical postcards.
• I Blame The Designer: "Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.". Bravo!

• The worlds largest multi-touch wall: "34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers"
• Twitter beard!: "just insert your face"
• Why your friends have more friends than you do: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends"
• Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk: "my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40"
• Opera Face Gestures: "lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures"
• Interesting post on design decisions behind Skype Chat, the best IM out there I reckon
• Differentiated presence on GMail chat status, nice touch: "when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages"
• How rich are you? Humbling.
• Square looks cute - the use of the headphone jack is particularly lovely, and I could see it getting uptake from smartphone owners (particularly if the customer hardware becomes fashionable or desirable), but I wonder how they plan to get the merchant side of the infrastructure rolled out to the extent that it's worthwhile.
• Via Dom, Appvent Calendar - a free iPhone game every day. Cute.
• The two use-cases of mobile - amen;

It's gone quickly. Micro-updates for the last couple of days:

• I actually made it over to Hombu dojo and trained with Kuribayashi sensei. Really good fun, very friendly class (about 25% Westerners as far as I could tell), not as austere as I'd feared. Hombu mats are unusually hard and *really* slippery. I found the class very tough to follow, not speaking a word of Japanese - but everyone was very friendly and I partnered with a succession of grinning yudansha who took pity on me. Sensei came over and used me for uke at one point, commenting that was I too focused on one thing. I'll try and work that one out...
• Kiddyland has eaten my wallet - thanks for dumping that one on me, Julie... it's basically the worlds best toy shop, 7 floors of really cool shit. I particularly enjoyed the Star Wars and Ghibli floors on each of my visits.
• After moving hotel (from the Grand Prince Akasaka to the Diamond) I popped over to Ueno zoological gardens yesterday and meandered around the zoo itself. The giant panda is gone (relatively recently, judging by all the signs apologising for the lack of a giant panda) but there's a good selection of bears (polar and grizzly), a dead cute red panda (think panda/raccoon cross but twice as cute), gorillas and some fun otters.
• Woke up at 3:30am this morning (again) and took advantage of the early start to head down to the fish market at Tsukiji and grab some breakfast. I missed the famous tuna auction, but had a delicious plate of fresh fishness at a little street-side cafe type thing which has set me up nicely for the day. One thing I've noticed on this trip is how much more relaxing it is to wander around an unfamiliar town with a GPS-enabled map... I've had close-to-zero worry of getting lost which makes the whole experience much smoother...

Today's my last day in Tokyo - I have an extremely early start tomorrow, and haven't quite worked out how to make it to Narita airport on time. But chuffing me currently is that I've managed to get back in contact with an old Brighton chum who I last saw on my last visit to Tokyo, 9 years ago. So hopefully beers to follow there...

5 hours into sleepytime, and I started awake at 3:30am on the day of the presentation. I'd not exercised in a few days, so dragged shorts and trainers on, and went for a run - up to the palace, around the moat, getting a little bit lost, thanking my lucky stars I had my phone with me, and carefully navigating back to the hotel. What is it about Tokyo which inevitably involves my getting lost at some point...?

I broke fast, suited myself up, and met Mr Hughes in the lobby to wander over to the embassy - which it turns out is just 10 minutes walk away, and around the edge of the Imperial Moat again. Even by embassy standards, it's really rather nice: once you're through the security there's lots of open space and gardens - though cameras are banned in these areas so you'll just have to take my word for it (I did get a few photos of the rather plush interior of the Ambassador's Residence though).

First things first, we met our interpreters for the day - two extremely helpful Japanese ladies who sat us down and ran through our presentations - to clarify the meaning of certain key phrases and the pronunciation of brand names which may never have been enunced in Japanese before. I was pleasantly surprised at how knowledgeable they were about telecomms in general, and founded myself needing to explain very little.

From there, I was taken to the garden room of the embassy for the two interviews: the first with Yasutaka Yuno and Shuichi Morita of K-tai Watch, a popular telecomms web site over here. Clearly mobile enthusiasts, they quizzed me on the types of Japanese content which might work over in the UK. I was a bit lost really - I don't know very much about what's popular in Japan right now - and could only suggest that one thing we'd *not* seen cross over to the UK was the Japanese practice of writing books on keitai. That seemed to keep Shuichi - and anyone else who asked me the same question that day - happy. The resulting article on K-tai watch can be found here (and a Google translated version here, not sure what "Future home of the president's Purattofomuzu" means tho)).

Another interview followed with Yumiko Egami of the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, a business newspaper; this time around the topics were more general and less focused on the detail of mobile. Both interviews were carried out through my interpreter, who very ably managed to convert my lengthy gabbled ramblings into Japanese.

A relaxing lunch followed in one of the rooms off the embassy gardens with some of the UKTI staff, 50% Brits who were doing a few years posting in Japan, and 50% locals who'd spent some time in England (and not only spoke perfect English but also seemed to have internalised the sense of humour and/or sarcasm very well).

And then we were into the afternoons talks, with headsets on to give us a live translation feed from our interpreters, who were now housed in a glass cage at the back of the room. After an introduction from the ambassador, Takamasa Kishihara of the Mobile Contents Forum gave a general introduction to the Japanese mobile content industry. I took a few notes from this one:

• >100m subscribers, driven by the arrival of 3G and flat rate (seen as being vital for allowing rich media to be consumed at a reasonable cost);
• Japan is generally seen as 5 years ahead of the UK;
• Areas of content break down into mCommerce, digital content sold via operator billing, advertisment/ad-response and social networking;
• Mobile content industry in Japan grew, even during the recession;
• MIDI ringtone industry peaked in 2005 at 100m yen revenue, now at 50m yen;
• 1/4 of the Japanese music market is music delivered to handsets;
• Takamasa spoke about a new frame-by-frame film format which sounded interesting, a cross between films and comics;
• Social networking services ere mentioned as being either ad-driven or supported by gifting;
• Japanese acceptance of the subscription billing model is seen as key to the growth of the mobile market, and many of the content providers there were also keen on this;
• Problems exporting to the UK have included regulatory/commercial issues, the web-based nature of Japanese content, and the language barrier;

Tony Hughes of UKTI then gave his talk. I'll see if I can get permission to upload his slides - it was a fantastic examination of the communications, mobile and digital landscape in the UK.

I followed up with a few case studies of content providers in the UK: Flirtomatic, MobileIQ (particularly their service for The Guardian) and Puzzler. I'd done interviews with the first two companies to prepare me for the talk - you can see slides and notes online here. It was interesting to hear a few familiar themes show themselves between these two, and I'm very thankful to Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic and Shaun Barriball of MobileIQ to the time they graciously gave for these conversations.

Q&A followed, and happily the audience seemed very keen to talk. We had some great questions on differences between the UK and China, the general approach to billing and content provision, and the relative importance of operators. After about half an hour, the questions were drawn to a close and we had a pleasant hour or so networking with attendees and UKTI staff, before heading off for a delicious Japanese meal with a few UKTI folk. Well, the bits *I* ate were delicious, the squidney and fish sperm were less appealing...

A really fun day; I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself, and found the crowd (both organisers and attendees) really enthusiastic, friendly and interesting. Fingers crossed this is not the last time I head to Japan for business, but the first of many...

So, the journey over here was extremely pleasant. The drive from home to Heathrow appeared to violate the laws of physics by taking around an hour without visibly breaking any speed limits or involving any acrobatics, and this gave me half an hour in the departure lounge. One observation: the only newspapers available here were fairly right-wing ones (Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday). I guess there aren't too many lefties round those parts...

After breakfast in the departure lounge we boarded and departed on time. The journey went quickly, thanks to a laptop full of presentation notes and ideas, and an excellent in-flight entertainment system. The latter - which I'm convinced is imprinted with the visual style of the Vexed team - gave me a chance to catch 500 Days of Summer and State of Play, both of which were thoroughly enjoyable. Despite a seemingly endless supply of a rather lovely Portuguese wine, I experienced a massive sleep fail on the flight. A stagger through customs and the journey to the hotel followed. By complete coincidence, I'm staying in the place I would've been at had I gotten my shit together and come to Japan with Julie and chums a couple of years ago; the advance party had told me good things, and I wasn't disappointed.

"An hours power nap", I thought, "then I'll get on with the presentation". Four hours later I crawled out of bed and - panicking slightly - cracked on, finishing around midnight and pausing only for a brief wander around Akasaka, the area I'm staying in. It's really rather nice, combining (as Tokyo seems to) greenery with skyscrapers and bustle - and seeing it by night for the first time was quite breathtaking. Within easy walking distance of the hotel are the Imperial Palace, a bevy of shops and restaurants, and seemingly hundreds of tube stations.

I slept, for fewer hours than I hoped, and then it was up to breakfast on the 40th floor. Peach jam - nyum nyum nyum.

What else have I noticed so far? There's lots of folks wearing masks, particularly in the airport but all around the streets too; I noticed that at immigration when we arrived they had heat-sensitive cameras designed to spot travellers with high temperatures, so I'm guessing there's a general disease-consciousness here (related to swine flu, no doubt).

All I know about architecture I learned in a 90 minute boat trip round Chicago earlier this year; whilst looking out of the hotel window I can't see much in the way of reference between buildings, but there's definitely an aesthetic in the layout of the whole city which I want to think about some more. Christmas is already here, chiefly testified to in neon.

Today, I plan to rehearse the presentation for tomorrow several times, and do some research into the questions I'll be getting in the media interviews. But first I'm going to wander down to the gardens of the Imperial Palace and work out a decent route for a daily run; and this afternoon it'll be time get the tube over to Hombu Dojo and go train. Looking at the latest timetable it seems I'll not get a chance to see Kobayashi during my time here after all, which is a bit sad... but I'm spoilt for choice when it comes to other instructors :)

Tonight will be an early night to keep me fresh for tomorrow, hopefully after I can drag my UKTI handler, Tony Hughes, off to the Ninja Restaurant round the corner...