Tokyo -> Amsterdam|London

Got the "official" word from my CEO this evening. Looks like I will be relocating to Amsterdam or London in a few months.

Feeding Frenzy

Ok. so I has this idea of using a Google Page Creator site to create this great mobile industry information portal. You know, nicely organized lists of links to content providers, carriers, mobile developer portals, media transcoders, keitai culture blogs, SNS, application developers, blah, blah, blah. Then I sat down and started to make it. 30 minutes later I wondered what I was thinking. A few of my neglected bookmarks are 404's now, new companies and news portals spring up (and disappear) every day, and there is no way I could maintain it without dedicating the precious little personal time I have to shuffling and updating lists of links. No thanks.

But I still wanted to do something.

So I got feed-happy. Perhaps too much so since my blog is beginning to look a little busy (and not with frequent posts). Anyhow, it was a good little research excercise. Feeds are the lazy way to keep a site animated, even if the javascript they depend upon often breaks on my keitai (especially the Technorati iframe). So got all up into del.icio.us, Technorati and Bloglines. These feed aggregators have nice browser buttons you can use to quickly add sites and feeds. We are starting to use RSS and Atom more at my work to animate mobile sites and synchronize them with standard web services, so I justified my feeding frenzy to myself as work-related research. Now if I can only get this blog's posts to propagate to my Mixi blog I will be extra-happy.

Asoboo

A friend recently introduced me to this new PC/mobile blog service by a dev house named The Plant based in Nishi-Azabu. The service looks very RoR (also evident in the URL structure), which is nice. The company I work at also develops primarily in Ruby, though not on the Rails framework. It seems to be an expat-heavy SNS geared towards living in Japan (of couse). Haven't played too much with it yet, but will be messing around with it for the next few weeks. The mobile version actually looks decent on my AU W42SA. There is some strange text wrapping and the layout is pretty basic, but it's so refreshing to see a mobile site interface in Japan that isn't needlessly cluttered.

mWorks

I recently came across MobUser, the blog of Rodney Aiglstorfer, CIO of mFoundry. He has a lot of links to useful mobile-relates resources on his blog, by the way. mFoundry makes a Java-based development platform called mWorks that apparently lets you build mobile client apps without writing actual code. It is more of a toolbox than a solution and apparently requires that you provision your applications through them, but the platform itself is available as an Eclipse plugin for download and evaluation. They also have a list of supported devices that included some useful information about many phones (MIDP Profile, heap size, network type, etc.). I just installed the Eclipse plug-in and will start playing with it this week.