Bandai just anounced a new gadget toy called ‘Pera Model‘ (ペラモデル). The name is a combination from the words ‘personal’ and ‘paramodel’ (パラモデル), which is Japanese for ‘plastic model’.
Just like our mobile service pepico (ペピコ), users can personalize the dolls with pictures taken by their own digital cameras. ‘Pera Model’ comes in four colors and with special print paper. All 16 parts of the doll can be customized with a special software, available free on the company’s website (Mac OS and Win XP SP2/Vista versions available).
BUY -> CUSTOMIZE -> PRINT -> PLAY That’s it! Simple and easy, but definitely the latest personal gadget on the Japanese market!
‘Para Model’ will be in stores from July 18th. It’s not confirmed if this little toy will also be sold outside of Japan, but if you are interested feel free to ask our friends at Japan Trend Shop.
YAHOO! Japan recently offered a new service on their weather page, allowing users to vote how the weather actually is in their area. Hourly updated ratings guarantee exact weather info. Crowd-sourcing weather! Innovations by YAHOO! Japan!
Hikaru Utada, a New-York born Japanese singer and songwriter, who is one of Japan’s all-time most successfull artists, came up with a new promotion concept for her second English album ‘This is the One’. Utalizing the Japanese Karaoke platform from Myspace, fans can upload their own video recording of Utada’s new lead single ‘Come back to me’. Utada’s Karaoke Contest is featured on the main page of Myspace Karaoke Japan till the end of the contest and Utada herself will select the winner. The grand prize will be a special karaoke party with additional 3 friends and Utada herself in Tokyo. SNS, USER-GENERATED CONTEND and LIVE CONTACT with fans: that’s what we call ‘MARKETING 2.0.’ Respect!
P.S. Unfortunately the marketing concept got a hype from the ’swine flu panic’ in Japan. In the Kanto area (Osaka) all schools were closed for weeks. “Tens of thousand bored students at home?!”, thought some smart karaoke bar owners and offered special courses for collage students. This generated a big hype and most karaoke bars had long lines of students waiting to sing. Big gatherings of students was exactly the opposite of what authorities intended. Closing school definately didn’t protect students from the virus, but might have helped to the big success of Utada’s karaoke campaign. What a coincident!
The world famous psychedelic-anime artist Takashi Murakami shocked the world in 2003, when he and Mark Jacobs designed the colorful ‘MONOCHROME MULTICOLOR’ series for Louis Vuitton. ‘SUPERFLAT MONOGRAM’, the promotion video for that series, became one of the most remarkable pieces of advertising art of the 21th century.
6 years later Takashi Murakami is starting a new revolution. Again for Louis Vuitton he created designs for the new ‘MULTICOLORE SPRING PALETTE’ spring series. Therefore Murakami created a new promo animation, called ‘SUPERFLAT FIRST LOVE’ which will be launched on Aprl 28th exclusive on Louis Vuitton’s new mobile site. Access to the site is provided through a revolutionary designed QR- code, which invites to ‘the fantasy world of Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton’.
Colored QR-codes with simple clip-arts are widely known in Japan, but this new QR-code combines high art and functionality and brings QR-code design to a new level. Amazingly also old phones we tried could read that code quick without any problem.
In the near future we can expect many imitators of this new art form and therefore project a future of even more colorful and artistic mobile advertising.
BUT WAIT!!! We actually predicted this years ago. Already in 2006 CyberMedia created QR-codes for example for the German Airline Lufthansa in the same style.
Louis Vuitton’s new campaign is themed “From Japan to the World”. Like many new lifestyle trends coming from Japan, this might also spill over to the western market soon and bring new advertising possibilities. Maybe it even revoltutionize the mobile culture of today.
The ‘AU Design Project‘ always surprises with unique and simply designed phones like the INFOBAR, INFOBAR II, talby, neon or MEDIA SKIN.
Now the first phone of their new premium mobile brand ‘iida’ is hitting the shelves. ‘iida’: stands for “innovation, imagination, design and art” and at least 3 innovative models are expected to come.
The first release is the ‘G9’ slider by Sony Ericsson. The minimalistic designed phone has all the latest phone features and is one of the view phones from AU that can be used worldwide in over 150 countries. The phone is available for 1845yen (19$) per month with payment by installment for two years, or at once 48.000yen (495%) for a basic 2year contract. The battery charger is sold separately for ecologic reasons, like on most of Japanese phones nowadays. The charger itself is held in a green ECO design with attached leaves.
The additionally available ‘Pico projector’ transforms the G9 into a mobile presenter. This mobile projector also fits to several other au models and can be bought for 50.000 (500$). As a special promotion everybody who buys the new G9, will receive an online access code to a mobile site where they can get a 60% discount for the projector. The mobile projector will then only cost 19.000yen (196$).
The next phone which will come out is going to be the ‘Misora’ clamshell phone, which was produced in stylish collaboration with Yayoi Kusama. Her typical ‘polka dots’ and a special keitai-strap, which makes the phone look like a small designer handbag, are the characteristics of this new lifestyle concept.
This summer in June AU will also introduce the solar-powered concept model bt SHARP, which was on display AS A CONCEPT PHONE during CEATEC 2008. AU claims that 80% of the battery can be charged by the solar cells on the phone. The next generation’s mobile trend is therefore obvious: ECO CHARGING and ECO LIFESTYLE.
