The Academy Awards were on TV last night, and the many retrospective montages showing 80 years of film made me want to write something about why few of those movies are available legally online today. Remember all those promises back in the late 1990s about how the Internet would soon allow people to watch [...]

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The Japanese love beer and they love automatic vending machines. So, naturally, beer can vending machines are plentiful. But what if you want draft beer? The Japanese also have that covered: This little gadget automatically tilts your beer glass to the perfect angle while dispensing beer with just the right amount [...]

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Some Chinese bloggers are questioning whether a lunar photo taken by a Chinese satellite is real. The doubters claim that the photo was copied from an old NASA shot. The Chinese government has been quick to rebut the claims, pointing out moon craters that appear only in the Chinese photo and arguing they [...]

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Unofficially crowned most bizarre gadget this year at CES, the Sony Rolly is an egg-shaped MP3 player (with stereo speakers) which also “dances” in a unique and expressive fashion, by rolling around the floor and “flapping” its… um… ears. Users can create their own “motion files” using Sony’s Motion Editor software, and then share [...]

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Many innovations seem only to appear where there is a really unusual need, warranting an unusual solution. The Kawazu-Nanadaru Loop Bridge (河津七瀧ループ橋) in Japan is one such example: How do you build a bridge along a mountainside when the grade is so steep that switchbacks aren’t practical? This double spiral brings cars up and down [...]

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According to a Washington Post article, more blogs are written in Japanese than in English, even though English-speaking web users far outnumber Japanese speaking ones.
Unlike Americans, who often times blog to stand out, the Japanese blog to fit in.
Japanese bloggers tend to write about the details of their days, products that they like, etc.; their [...]

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Ok, so you have been hearing for years that Korea’s population is the most Internet-connected in the world. And maybe you knew that Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Norway had caught up (at least in terms of penetration, if not blazing speed). And you probably knew that the United States lags many other [...]

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Some of the things Japanese can do with their mobile phones:
watch live TV channels for free, and digitally record those channels, up to 30 minutes
remotely program their DVRs
read bar codes on movie and concert posters and purchase tickets
buy train tickets and other items from vending machines without using cash
photograph and sell items (a la craigslist) [...]

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What trip to Japan would be complete without a little technolust? Even though I keep up to date on what technologies are flourishing overseas, I was still in awe of the cell phones I saw in Tokyo on my recent trip. They are full-featured broadband-connected video conferencing computers (and they double as credit/debit [...]

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