Willgolater: a location based app that allows you to search and list venues of your interest and have it ping you when you pass nearby. I use it to track restaurants that are shown on Japanese TV, and are enticing, so I can have the app ping me when I’m close by to any of them.

A must have for people who just aren’t patient enough to file them in the address book each and every time… like me.

iPhone 4S and HTC Desire Z (Android)

There are a growing number in Japan, now that they’ve got around to understanding that smartphones are the way to go (and feature phones are the downward trend).

Kayac, the Japanese company behind Willgolater, is not exactly a startup anymore but they keep on cranking out interesting stuff so they’re definitely guys to look out for. They also had an iPhone app out an year ago that became the #1 in Kuwait…

Colopl, another Japanese company that develops a location based app by the same name, is another one thats interesting. They’ve mashed up SIM City with Foursquare. The player plants resources on a grid which feeds a growing population. Users design a civilization and fend off attacks from incoming meteors. Rather than using the player’s location to log a visit to a store or serve up local information, Colopl awards virtual currency based on the real-world distance between two check-ins. That virtual currency is used to buy resources and maintain the civilization. Interesting? We have a full fledged English report for that.

Location based stuff.

Remote control apps.

Food related projects.

NFC related consulting stuff.

Outbound and inbound tours.

Handset testing.

Presentations for conferences in Sweden and Saint Petersburg.

Perfect rhythm to put my 3 month boy to sleep. This may be the most challenging!

Check-in.

It won’t just be “location” anymore that you “check in” to.Waiting to see who gets it “right” first.

NFC.

Japan’s version of NFC called FeliCa has been used in the country for 10 years now. All the possibilities that people dream of, like swiping a FeliCa card to get on a train, board a plane, make a purchase at a vending machine, access a hotel room, are all done in reality here in Japan. E-money transactions via these cards (and on mobile) just exceeded US11 billion for April-September this year. Isn’t it time we throw away our calf skin wallets?

The late Steve Jobs, without a doubt.

Tomi Ahonen, without a doubt. I can’t name a third, because there are so many rockstars that I’ve been influenced by

Lucent Technologies, selling ADM’s and DWDM’s for backbone / backhaul networks for companies like Enron, MCI Worldcom…No wonder I left…

My boss at Panasonic. He taught me how to be Japanese, like how to speak politely, how to eat sushi properly and how to bow to superiors at 135 degrees.

Christopher Billich – Head of Mobile Advertisement at Deutsche Telekom Good friend, ex-colleague and an expert on “mobile” altogether.