TC50: The bizarre world of the Tonchidot iPhone

A touch of the weird and wonderful – absent so far from TechCrunch 50 – has just descended on the conference hall. It came in the form of Takahito Iguchi and Tonchidot, a Japanese company with a mission to "create a world of wit parallel to the real world" with a device called the sekai camera. In practice, this seemed to mean cataloguing everything that exists, feeding details about each item into some kind of database, and then presenting relevant, location-specific information to users via their iPhone screens.

The demo video showed people walking into a Tokyo street, seeing bubbles pop up on their iPhone screens to reveal the English translation of the name of each shop, details of what it sold and information about its opening times. Walk into a mobile phone shop, point the iPhone at a rack of handsets and see their specs and prices on the screen immediately. In the audience we lapped it up, but there was a big question looming: where do all the data come from?

"We build it," Mr Iguchi insisted in a loud, high-pitched yell.

Tim O’Reilly, the man behind the O'Reilly tech conferences and books, was alarmed. "Are you going to build it for the whole world?" he asked. "It’s a whole new internet. It’s like building the internet from scratch again."

The Tonchidot team, with their limited English and limitless enthusiasm, were unfazed. Exhorting the panellists to trust their imaginations, to "look up, not down", they parried practical questions with baffling non sequiturs and utter confidence. What happens when the store changes the layout of its mobile phone display?

"We have a patent!"

Huge cheers. The question is repeated: what happens when the world changes?

"Join us!"

More cheers. The TechCrunch audience had joined them already.

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Comments

[Stuart]

So is the "Enlgish translation" similar to English, or is the new world going to actually be printed in Enlgish?

[Jomark Osabel]

A nice concept but it would definitely take years to gather the data to make it practical.

[reddogg]

This is great news. I expect that not too far in the future we'll be able to wear glasses that provided contextual information about our environment. I'm thinking Ghost In the Shell...

[Robert Knight]

How ironically embarrassing that in the sentence, "The Tonchidot team, with their limited English and limitless enthusiasm, were unphased" -- THE AUTHOR MIS-SPELLED THE WORD "UNFAZED"!

[Embarrassing indeed. Thanks for pointing out this slip, which has now been corrected - HF]

[Cavindude]

...........RFID...........

[John Wilson]

No. What he meant was that they were not being beamed up by the Starship Enterprise.

Follow along, please.

[Jonathan Peden]

Oh you crazy guys! So you have finally come up with the solution to the Brit Abroad (where we visit other lands and communicate by pointing and talking VERY LOUDLY in our own language) Is this the universal translator so beloved of Trekkies or just the result of people with too much time on their hands?

[Rocketman]

Robert Night must be an American. I'm unphased about his rant because Americans don't speak English.

[Danny]

It would be a daunting task to make all the data needed for such a device. An even more daunting task to keep it updated with all the world's changes. Perhaps it could be done, though, with a wikipedia style approach - everyone provides the extra information that they know, and clean out information that's irrelevant.

But then, how do you filter information between what's important and what's not? So many questions left with this device...

[iambacon]

Great idea! If they don't have a name for the product, they should call it "Hai, SPAM!"

Apple will lock their idea out of the iPhone if Apple doesn't get the kind of royalties Apple wants.

Now don't get me wrong about Apple. I am writing this from my tricked out Mac Pro. I just know how fierce they can be about collecting their monies from me and anyone else who wants to use their products.

When I lived in the Windows world, the OS was practically free and just about every app was cracked and available for free download.

Now that I live in the Apple world, everything, I mean EVERYTHING is pay to play. The one time I did download torrents of mac warez, they didn't work. To add insult to injury I got a nasty FU letter in the mail from my ISPs lawyer stating that I downloaded illegal mac software on said date at said time and stated the files I was guilty of. Since then, Apple and anyone working with them get all my monies. They will either shoot guys like these down before they ever get off the ground OR find a way to make them pay to play.

Night night everyone. I'm taking my iPhone to bed with me now so I can surf the internet on my back.

[SINGH]

Well I'm Indian and we rule the world with our use of English. We along with the Americans pronounce English correctly. Water for example, not Wataaa

[Chris]

Singh - you've obviously not had to use an India based call centre! Mind you, I'm Scottish and don't say 'wataaa' either......

[paul]

Robert Knight, how ironic that someone who has commented on the English needs a lesson himself

1. Ironically is not a word

2. the correct spelling in English of Phased is not Phazed (that would be an americanism) as in color and colour

[fletch]

SINGH. You have a very narrow perception of people from the UK. It's only a small group of the English who use that pronounciation and the rest of us pronounce it with the 'r' on the end.
What's wrong with their pronounciation anyway, it makes the world more interesting having so many different dialects and accents.

Fletch, Cornwall

[Rob in Brooklyn]

Oh, you smug Brits. The word is "unfazed". Look it up. Or let me. I'll Google it. What's this? Third result (after two online dictionaries) is a link from BBC Sport, headline, "Ferguson unfazed by Man City cash".

Seriously, this is why we needed to drive you out of our country. So sure of yourselves, so wrong.

(That said, Alan Partridge is the greatest thing ever.)

[Rob in Brooklyn]

Paul said: "2. the correct spelling in English of Phased is not Phazed (that would be an americanism) as in color and colour"

'Phazed' is not an Americanism: it's a typo that YOU made.

[DEEPANKAR]

YES

[Dai in Wales]

Just to point out (and although I'm welsh I'm still a native Britain), Where did English originate... If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't America, and I'm sure it wasn't India... Oh yes.. England, how amusing. (We still don't like the English, but we admit when something is theirs (such as English)).

[Chris Grayson - GigantiCo]

How about an RFID reader?

You embed the chip with transmitter in any product you want (hey, most already have one. What do you know!).

They read what's around you through your phone picking up the signal.

http://tinyurl.com/34fhle

[Chris Grayson - GigantiCo]

Or, without further hardware enhancement, you could just have a software barcode reader built into the phone that it could read with the phone's camera.

http://tinyurl.com/262rqb

But there's already a half dozen iPhone apps that can already do that.

[Dan]

You can buy almost 100 songs for the price of one Windows or Vista. Which platform costs?

[Olden Atwoody]

Chris the Scot. I'm surprised you know what wa-taaaa is.