Joe Trippi in Vote 4 Me

"People are moving away from just television to blogs and text messaging, and I'll experiment with all of that. The party that doesn't master these techniques over time is going to falter."

Via SmartMobs

That we have SMS and Email and the Japanese have Sky and Long Mail is probably more than a coincidence. But then we have the Blackberry phenomena and now Nokia's push email solution? But maybe the latter two only work because they are used for business related stuff.

The Light-touch Japanese Experience

Japan has never had SMS, as DoCoMo was intelligent enough to see the similarity between email and shorter text messages early on. However, it does have a seperate type of e-mail it seems, which blurs the line a bit. Most Japanese will have two email addresses. One for their computer (i.e. gmail or hotmail) and one for their phone, and frequently they don't check the computer one often. My pre-paid phone has two options when you send a mail "sky mail" and "long mail". The first is similar to SMS. It has a 128 character limit and can include smileys. I think it is cheap or free to send these short messages to other japan mobile addresses. This is what most friends use to chat, gossip and meet up. This only works for other japanese mobile phones I think. There is also the option of long mail, where you plug in a normal e-mail address and have the full length options. This is more expensive, but not prohibitvely so.

Weblink

Sadly the japanese characters do not work with my phone. Does anyone know how to get the japanese characterset on a 6630?

Via Bill Pellowe's Word Document

See also:
ELT Calendar (www.eltcalendar.com)
ELT Podcast (www.eltpodcast.com)
JALT National Online Calendar (jalt.org/calendar)

Cool ideas about how to use QR Codes are popping up:) There was Leu's QR Code Rally, QR Codes in the classrooms and now there is Stephen's mobile game download. Well I guess I just have to buy the Flash Lite 2.0 player.

Game Download through QR Code:



Directly downloads "Journey of Jin mobisode 2 v1.6", a revised version of Stephen Erin Dinehart's thesis project, to a Flash Lite 2. 0 web enabled mobile device.

Introduction to Animation in Flash Lite 1.1 by Mobile and Devices Developer Center, Adobe

Although the Flash Lite 1.1 player has been out for a while to developers, it's now starting to make an impact in the marketplace by being preinstalled on many new models of handsets being released in 2006. It's an exciting time for those of us working in the space, and we hope that more and more Flash developers will look at getting into mobile content.

This article is based on the Flash Lite 1.1: Mobile Application Development instructor-led training course we developed. It shows you the type of content contained within the training curriculum. It is aimed squarely at mobile developers who have little experience with Flash as well as existing Flash developers who wish to make the leap to developing mobile content.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Transportation
has been putting QR codes on bus stops around the city and will launch
a new QR code based travel information service on August 10th.

The service provides timetables for buses that visit the bus stop and also has tracking capabilities, informing the passenger how far away the next bus is. The service is also available for phones that don’t support QR codes. Each bus stop has a unique number which passengers can enter manually into the mobile site to receive the same travel information.

In my last post, I just talked about short codes, now I read the above. Again short codes can also be used this way.

Kaywa also thinks similarly as we also will provide an SMS service which reuses these shortcodes for other stuff. If you happen to live in Switzerland, you can for example send an SMS to 202 with QR 2020400102 and see what happens. You probably can guess it already.

If you want to see other examples of our upcoming SMS blog service, you can go to http://jerome.bleublog.ch, scroll down and find the SMS Blog Services button. I'll soon report more about this new service which includes SMS publishing, SMS alerts and SMS chat.

Via Wireless World Japan: QR code travel information service launched in Tokyo

QR Codes can be used with URL's, Telephone Numbers, SMS, Text, E-Mail etc. (for an illustration, see the QR Code Generator). Now the question is, why use short codes as well?

There are several answers to this, but let's first explain how short codes work:
Short codes is a number translated on the server to an URL. Short codes look like that: 2020400102 for this blog. If you want to address a singular post - this one for example - it would be 2020400102501.

They can be directly input in the Kaywa Reader and you will get the same result as with a QR Code. Just open your Kaywa Reader, click Options and "Enter short code" 2020400102 and you will get to this blog.

PS: Short codes can be shorter if needed.

Why?

1. In print where space is scarce, you can imagine the following scenario. A lot of small classifieds in a newspaper can have one general QR Code and then for every individual classified a short code number. This way you can give an easy access to very small items (in a normal newspaper you can find items with a size of 0.5x3.9 cm)
2. In print this scenario is already in use, think about NZZimmo (Search with code from NZZ ad) for example, where you have next to every real estate ad in the newspaper a number which on the web you can type in to find more information about the object. With a short codes in your Kaywa Reader, you could now access this same information more quickly and easily without using a desktop computer.
3. As we haven't got yet the macro camera phones which are commonplace in Japan, we cannot go as small as 0.9 cm yet. With the short codes however we can provide a QR Code that is at the same time small and always of the same size.

So, how neat is that;)

Tokyo, July 20, 2006 (JCN) - MediaSeek has introduce barcode decoder software NW-7 Reader for camera phones. The NW-7 is a barcode used for applications including parcel delivery, library card and membership card management, and blood management for blood banks.

Since camera phones are portable, they enable users to use them for other applications including tracing products and accessing campaign sites without having to enter URLs.

Via Scott's: Mediaseek introduces Barcode Reader

Two slides out of QR Codes and Mobile Language Learning





Via Doug Belshaw