It’s a year of Dragon; it should be going up, up and up: your company’s profit, a stock market, your exam score, a balance of your bank account and perhaps inflation too. (We need to reverse a deflation mode.)

Chinese says that a dragon is wise, benevolent and brings good fortune.

Let’s hope that the Dragon will make this year a better one for us all.

I am still in shock at the devastation in Japan after the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear power meltdown. Many people including the Japanese communities in the East Midlands wanted to help but didn’t know how to do so. I found myself in the same position.

There have been already many fundraising activities all over in UK. My fellow Japanese people are working very hard to do what we can do. For my part, I decided to make myself useful to help people particularly young people and children in the most affected areas. I have set up a charity account ‘Ganbare Japan, UK-Japan Tsunami School Fund’.

The money raised by the charity will be used to give direct support to the areas without going through the Government or other big charitable organisations. This is going to be grass root activities by normal people like me, who want to stand up and do something to make a difference for the future of the areas. がんばれ日本　 がんばれJapan Go Japan Go!

Kiyoko Naish

p.s. The logo ‘Ganbare Japan’ was made by Paul Stayner, who loves Japan and quiclky responded to my appeal. Do use this logo to help us raise funds.

Well it is a cousin of the ubiquitous bar code that we seen on every consumer product. Like the bar code, when scanned it gives you additional information about the item you are looking at. But rather than just telling you exactly what the product is, it opens the door to a whole array of e-content.

Unless you have very good pattern-recognition skills, you won’t be able to decifer it without a QR scanner on a smartphone. If you have an Android or a Symbian phone you may already have the necessary app pre-loaded, otherwise download it from your favourite app store, then all you need to do is launch it and scan the code using the phone’s camera. What happens next is the clever bit: it can take you to a website or a place on a map, launch an email to a specified address, send a SMS text message to a mobile phone number or even take you to the latest cool app in an app store.

QR codes, or Quick Response codes, have been used in Japan for years due to their much earlier adoption of smartphone technology. It is very common to see them in adverts in train or tube stations and magazine adverts. It is a way of taking you from the real world to the internet work without trying to write down some impossibly long web address or email. So some people call it a ‘hardlink’ or even a ‘physical world hyperlink’.

It has all sorts of potential uses. Clearly using them in magazines, newspapers and adverts is a great way to convert your physical world content into e-content and possibly make it go viral, as people share the link/address/app with all their friends on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Combining it with a mobile payment system would be the killer application; bored commuters could actually purchase the advertised product right there and then, with delivery of a physical product to their physical world address.

It could also be used in the tourism industry by instantly giving you web content on a whatever you are looking at, be that the Grand Canyon or Big Ben.

In education it could be included in textbooks so students could read about a topic and then be taken to an online simulation where they get to apply that knowledge in an example real world scenario. For organisations, it could be a way of taking employees  from a blanket email or some desktop-based e-learning to some interactive e-content that they can access on their smartphones. So you can extend the message from outside the work environment onto their personal devices. For people working remotely, it is a very effective way of encouraging mobile learning using people’s smartphone.

I have just started following very interesting, inspirational and up-to-date blogs about Japan by HM Ambassador to Japan, David Warren. He has been an Ambassador since 2008. He has already shown his passion and his commitments to strengthen the relationship between UK and Japan. I met him (not really personally) at the event to support business in the East Midlands in March. He made a very inspirational speech there.

Here’s his blogs!

Enjoy it!

* The top page photo is from http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/warren/.

The training day was very successfull despite of the M1 closure on the way to the venue.  The delegates were very enthusiastic about their forthcoming visits to Japan.  Theyvery much enjoyed the cultural activities: tea ceremony, origami and calligraphy.  Through each activity, the participants truly understood the reasons behind Japanese people’s cultural values including the silence, the smile, the patience and the attention to detail.  I used some case studies to show the ‘to do’s’ and ‘not to do’s’ to be successfull or well-accepted in the Japanese corporate world.  The case studies included Nissan, Boots, NGS, Fentimans, Aflec and Orla Kiely.

The training course will be run again on 28th January 2011 in Nottingham.

See more details on:

http://www.embusinesssupport.co.uk/lz/lz.aspx?p1=051571S1302&CC=&p=54&cID=0&cValue=1