innovation

Harsh economic times call for harsh cost cuts. What is on offer to aid tighter belts?

By Robert Sanzalone

If Japanese consumers don’t even really want TV on their cellphones, why has it been such a hit?

Tadatoshi SenooBy Anna Kitanaka

Freshly launched in October, Maneo.jp is Japan’s first social lending site, providing an online auction platform for borrowers and lenders to create their own customized loans.

By Michael Condon

J@pan Inc takes a look at some of Tokyo’s most exciting Internet innovators:

Kristopher Tate, Eric Young, Andrew Smith Lewis, Taisuke Fukuno, Marc Wesseling, Michael Sheetal

By Chris Salzberg

The massacre on June 8 in Akihabara ended with seven killed, more than a dozen injured, and an entire country in a state of shock. It also signaled a profound change in the way people receive their news, and in how they create it.

By Ed Thompson -- The future of office spaces could well be creative environments that stimulate the senses. -- In the office of the future, smart-rooms that automatically respond to voice, motion, and other cues promise to boost productivity and encourage new forms of communication. For IT solutions provider Kayac Co., Ltd., that future is now. The company has teamed up with digital communications researchers from the Keio University Inakage Lab to develop a speech recognition-capable brainstorming room designed to enhance group creativity by monitoring the conversation of its occupants, identifying keywords in their speech, and feeding them a stream of related images and text retrieved from online search engines.

By Scott Cavanaugh -- What are Japanese companies doing to change the earth? -- When the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997, Japan instantly became one of the leaders in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. During that time, the Japanese government, along with many Japanese corporations, publicized sweeping changes that would be enacted to counter the negative effects of the previous 150 years of industrial activity. The idea was that Japan, with its eco-friendly ideas, would become the envy of the other industrialized nations. But this has not become reality.

By Gavin Blair -- Innovative new device to help with language barriers -- Every foreigner in Japan has encountered the same brick wall at some time or another—the unknown kanji character. It could be a key word in a newspaper article, an important phrase in a business document or an instruction on a form, but the snag of even a few small kanji may render an entire sentence or paragraph unintelligible.

With fuel still at record-high prices, Japan's innovative and forward thinking agencies are continually looking for new power sources. Although Japan has a distinct lack of natural resources, one gas it does have - Methane Hydrate - could be the answer to a new alternative energy source. But how viable is it really looking to move forward with it's extraction and usage?

Takeo SugiuraBy Darius Jones -- New technology brings affordable nutrients to the table -- Dotting the landscape in almost any countryside setting, the artificial environments created by greenhouses are the living quarters for an increasing number of the foods we consume. While this affords us the luxury of tomatoes and kiwis during the frosty winter months, severe flaws in technology cause temperature fluctuations and an over-reliance on chemical fertilizers that lower the efficiency of production as well as adversely affecting the conditions in which the produce is grown.