In Japan, smartphone apps time spring’s cherry blossoms

For centuries in Japan, poets have both lamented and extolled the fleeting beauty of cherry tree blossoms, the quintessential symbol of spring.

Today, people are turning to apps instead of verses to enjoy the blooming, which can be as brief as a week. One way to celebrate the blossoms is through “hanami,” which means “flower viewing.” It refers to picnicking under the blossoms, often with copious amounts of alcohol. It’s a national pastime.

Such is the country’s passion for cherry blossoms, known as “sakura,” that the state-run Japan Meteorological Agency once deployed a supercomputer that crunched temperature, elevation and other data to predict when and where they begin and peak. Articles still discuss the agency’s mathematical equations to predict the pink explosions.

The agency provided cherry blossom forecasts for over half a century, based on sample trees and historical records, but stopped in 2009 to focus on other services. Since then, companies have stepped in with forecasts of their own and now compete to produce the best smartphone apps for timing hanami.

One of the latest is a crowdsourced feature called Sakura Channel, part of the popular Weathernews Touch app for iOS and Android, which has been downloaded 13 million times. It provides forecasts, based on user reports, for when cherry blossoms will bloom at 700 famous viewing locations across Japan. Users can see hanami calendars and get alerts about when their favorite groves of cherry trees will burst into pink-white flowers.

They can also choose from preferences such as public parks, cherry-lined roads and spots known for nighttime revelry under the boughs. A “sakura simulator” shows a low-res view of pink petals gradually taking over cities such as Tokyo as users click through the calendar from late March through early April, the usual season for sakura.

The app was developed by Weathernews, a climate information company that has also distributed about 1,000 spherical “pollen robot” sensors that can detect airborne pollen, useful for forecasting the hay fever season.

“Our app is special in that it uses information from ordinary people. About 8 million users are sending us photos and weather reports of every sort,” a Weathernews spokeswoman said.

“Some other developers simply tell you whether trees are blooming or not in each prefecture, but about 11,200 users across the country are sending us information about local cherry trees and we take advantage of that input.”

Weathernews has also introduced a “virtual hanami” feature showcasing time-lapse photos taken with smartphones and panoramic videos of cherry blossoms captured with Ricoh’s 360-degree Theta m15 camera.

Not to be outdone, Navitime Japan is offering twice-daily cherry blossom updates for more than 1,000 sites across the country. It has added the information to its popular smartphone and feature phone apps, which help Japanese navigate subway and train connections as well as roads and highways. They also provide location-specific info such as the availability of parking spots, and of course travel directions.

Japanese websites, meanwhile, abound with information on where to see blossoms, from timetables of current predictions compared to average flowering dates to lists of live cams trained on petals.

For instance, Weather Map, which began issuing predictions in 2010, has PC and mobile sites with detailed information including temperature charts, blooming graphs and a map of Japan showing the front of cherry blossoms moving up the archipelago from south to north. It uses observations of about 50 sample trees to make predictions, according to a Weather Map spokeswoman.

It also has a cherry blossom outlook and maps for most cities. The site predicts the flowers will be at full bloom in Tokyo on March 31 after opening three days earlier than the average date. The traditional cherry “weathervane” for the capital is a grove of old cherry trees at Yasukuni Shrine, a politically controversial Shinto sanctuary that honors soldiers killed in past wars.

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Samsung, SKT to demonstrate 7.5Gbps wireless data next week

Samsung Electronics and South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom plan to demonstrate next week research into future “5G” wireless and data transmission at 7.55Gbps.

The two companies, which formed a research and development agreement on 5G wireless in October last year, will show off the technology at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona. The annual event, the biggest in the wireless telecommunications industry, begins on Monday.

The transmission will use millimeter wave frequencies, which are generally considered to be those over 6GHz. That’s higher than current mobile phone and Wi-Fi frequencies and something that brings advantages and disadvantages.

Among the advantages is the high speed that is possible but the disadvantages include poor propagation. Millimeter wave signals generally require an unobstructed transmission path, which means walls, windows and other objects can easily interfere or cut off communications. This is seen in direct-to-home satellite TV systems, which also utilize millimeter waves at around 11GHz and where the dish needs a clear view of the satellite in the sky.

To help realize the high-speed data, the two companies are employing “3D beamforming” — a technique that involves sensing the location of a smartphone and directing a narrow pencil-like transmission beam towards it. A cellular base station usually transmits signals over a wide area, but with more intelligent antenna systems in 5G wireless that could change.

Cellular carriers and equipment makers are looking at millimeter wave frequency bands to help alleviate crowding in lower frequencies and better serve users in crowded cities. Because millimeter waves are easily attenuated by objects, the same frequencies can be reused in areas close to each other, perhaps separated by a building, without fear of interference. That leads to more efficient use of spectrum.

Samsung and SK Telecom’s research into 5G wireless is being driven in part by a desire to launch the world’s first commercial 5G network. The two companies are currently hoping they will be able to realize that in South Korea in 2020, two years after Japan’s NTT DoCoMo is targeting the launch of a demonstration network in Tokyo. The Japanese network is timed to go on-air with the 2018 Tokyo Olympic Games.

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Police suspect fraud took most of Mt. Gox’s missing bitcoins

Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe.

Of the 650,000 bitcoins unaccounted for — worth about US$208 million today — only about 7,000 appear to have been purloined by hackers, the newspaper reported on New Year’s Day, adding that investigators have yet to identify who was responsible.

That conflicts with the explanation by Mt. Gox, which blamed a bug in the Bitcoin system when it filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 28.

“We believe that there is a high probability that these bitcoins were stolen as a result of an abuse of this bug,” Mt. Gox said in a statement on its website that day, which suggested “a variety of causes including hacking by third parties.”

“There’s not much I can say at this point, except the fact that I will continue investigating in order to find what really happened,” former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles said via email on Thursday. While Mt. Gox is being liquidated under the direction of a trustee, Karpeles is still CEO of parent company Tibanne, a small IT firm based in Tokyo.

In an interview with IDG News Service in November, Karpeles said security at Mt. Gox was not what it should have been. In 2013, the startup began taking in millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and tens of thousands of new customers per month, peaking at about 1.2 million customers in total.

The disclosure follows months of investigations by police and others into the tangled mess surrounding the disappearance of the 650,000 bitcoins.

Police investigators analyzed Internet connection records for various transactions on the exchange. It found that bitcoins were being pooled by unknown parties and the pools did not correlate to customer accounts, according to the Yomiuri newspaper.

In November, Bitcoin exchange Kraken was enlisted to help investigate the missing bitcoins as part of the liquidation of Mt. Gox.

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IBM pushes hard into the enterprise cloud

IBM is building out its global computing network in a bid to focus on the enterprise cloud market.

The company announced today that it is adding cloud centers in 11 new locations.

In a $1.2 billion investment, IBM has built cloud centers in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo. The other eight new locations come to IBM through a partnership with Equinix Inc., which operates data centers across the globe.

The partnership will give IBM access to data centers in Australia, France, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands and the U.S., boosting IBM’s cloud network to a total of 48 cloud centers.

That growth is aimed at helping IBM grow its hybrid cloud business for enterprise clients.

“IBM recognizes that businesses and governments need the cloud to help them innovate, grow and operate more efficiently in concert with their existing IT investments,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM’s software & cloud solutions group, in a statement. “Just as we helped major organizations transform in each preceding era of IT, IBM now serves as the cloud platform for the enterprise.”

This is a good move for a company that wants to court the enterprise, which is increasingly moving to the cloud, said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, Inc.

“Lots of people are wondering if IBM is entering the market too late. I disagree with that,” King told Computerworld. “I think the market for cloud is not as mature as some people seem to think it is. There’s a lot of headroom in the hybrid cloud, in particular. As the market has become increasingly competitive, there’s going to be some interesting shakeouts in the months ahead.”

That shakeout should see major cloud players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM grappling for marketshare, though King didn’t dare to guess where those top players will be a year from now.

He’s confident that IBM will continue to be a major cloud player with traditional business clients.

“You can see the other cloud players, including Amazon, making a pitch that their own services are ready for the enterprise,” said King. “IBM, though, is very well-positioned for that market right now. Markets evolve and mature in sometimes curious ways, so it will be interesting to see how IBM bears up as other companies try to invade the enterprise cloud space.”

Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said IBM is putting some muscle into the game with what had to be a sizable investment in these new cloud centers.

“The cloud market is crowded and highly competitive,” Olds said. “IBM is trying to differentiate themselves through providing a higher level of service and support, along with giving customers the ability to negotiate their own service levels for their IBM clouds. Other competitors will do this as well, of course, but IBM’s experience in providing these types of services for decades through their outsourcing/hosting services arm should give them an advantage with these customers.”

Having an IBM cloud center located in their country will also give some customers the ability to use cloud computing for likely the first time, he added.

Many businesses and government organizations are not allowed to use cloud services that host their data outside their country.

“This could give these types of customers a chance to dip their toes into the cloud and see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be,” said Olds. “So, really, the key part of this announcement is the geographic spread of IBM’s cloud centers.”

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