From the Editor

The subject wouldn't be quite as interesting if Japan (and Tokyo in particular) weren't saturated with cellphones. But the presence of a tightly packed population of keitai wielders is breeding all kinds of business ideas, coming from myriad angles and perspectives.

Take Hirotoshi Kosugi. An industrial designer by trade (see www.systemcreates.co.jp), he's applied for a business model patent on a kind of wireless P2P variation. His idea calls for placing sekigaisen -- infrared devices -- on the walls of buildings and allowing passersby to download information via the infrared ports on their mobile devices. (One advantage of infrared over Bluetooth: cheaper components.) Along with the information could come a highly localized text advertisement, creating a new venue for the advertising industry (one that resembles billboard advertising in that it catches the attention of those passing by, but different in that they're more apt to reach for their wallets).

Kosugi's is just one of the ideas floating around now. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs all over Japan -- and here from around the world -- are only beginning to recognize the opportunities in this space. We've done some of our own P2P scenario-building in a sidebar to the cover story (see page 24).

Also in this issue, we explore how the mass media in Japan is being affected by, and affecting, the Internet. Hats off to our designer for the thought-provoking illustration (see page 27). Back in our February issue, Koichi Hori (the founder of Dream Incubator) said the four cancers of Japanese society are politics, journalists, professors, and labor unions. We wanted to find out if the Net is serving as a cure for one of them.

Certainly the Net is giving the Japanese more options and information. On page 14, we profile the president of a product comparison site called Power to the People. After 10 years as a strategy consultant for Nomura Research Institute, Masayasu Ariyoshi launched a site that resembles epinions.com of the US but has innovative twists we haven't seen elsewhere. Another startup with solid experience at the helm is ipTrend (see page 66), targeting Japan's small shops with an intranet-in-a-box approach. Mahendra Negi, the COO and CFO, was formerly with Merrill Lynch and was ranked by Institutional Investor Magazine as the No. 1 Internet analyst in Japan.

A few random tidbits: