Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Japan will rise again

Poor Japan. With the list of dead and missing growing following a massive earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, it will be a long time before that country is truly well again.

Poor Japan. With the list of dead and missing growing following a massive earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, it will be a long time before that country is truly well again.

And the natural disaster is only the latest test for the Land of the Rising Sun; Toyota, the top auto manufacturer in the world, was only starting to recover from the impact of a series of well-publicized safety recalls when the quake disrupted production. The economy itself is expected to drop into another recession as a result of the disaster, even as some experts claim the nation never properly recovered from the asset bubble that popped in 1986 and dragged the economy down for over two decades afterwards. The Japanese stock exchange, the Nikkei 225, even hit a record low in 2009.

Through it all, the most remarkable trait of the Japanese is their resiliency. After being physically, morally and economically destroyed in WWII, the country rebounded and less than 30 years after two nuclear bombs were dropped on its leading industrial centres the country had blossomed into an industrial, technological and economic superpower.

When the water recedes, the roads fixed, and homes and factories repaired, I'm confident that Japan will rise from the ashes stronger than ever. After all, the world loves Japanese companies.

Like Nintendo. The portable 3DS game has already broken pre-sales records in the U.K. and early sales are also strong in the U.S. and Canada despite the higher price tag over the previous models. There is a chance that the quake will slow down the shipment of the devices, but that should only drive up the demand in the short term.

The device, which delivers glasses-free 3D gaming, arrived in Canadian stores on Mar. 20.

Sony is also doing better, refocusing more on their core strengths such as really nice televisions and the PS3, and less on robot dogs. Judging by the chatter online, their Xperia phone with slide-out analog joysticks is probably the most anticipated phone since the iPhone 4.

And Toyota? The company was vindicated after an investigation confirmed that poorly fitted floor mats were to blame for acceleration and braking issues, and not faulty software or mechanical design. With gas prices heading into record territory the demand for hybrids is through the roof right now.

Japan will continue to make some incredible products. While it's always best to shop local in my books, you can take solace in the fact that when you buy a Japanese television, car or phone that you're helping a nation to get back on its feet.

 

Good luck NY Times , we're all counting on you

While the Internet is awesome in so many ways, there's no question that it's been a thorn in the side of print media. In competition with each other, and suddenly in direct competition with television networks and radio stations, blogs and tweets, everybody is in a race to be the first to report a story online even if there's no profit in it. Online ads pull in a fraction as much revenue as traditional advertisements, and maintaining a website - and a staff of reporters - is expensive.

To that end the New York Times is once again going pay-to-play, creating a digital pay wall to access the paper with plans starting at $15 per month. Given that all the other papers out there are still giving away their work for free, technology pundits predict that the pay wall will, for the second time in the Time's online history, fail. Just ask the music industry and they will tell you that people won't pay for content that they can get for free.

I haven't seen much out there to contradict that opinion, but you can bet that the rest of the media industry will be watching this carefully. It is a different era of Apps and iPads, and the spread of gadgets may hold the key to making the pay wall profitable - but I have my doubts.

The reality is if the New York Times can't make money online through ads, then nobody can. And if the Times can't get people to pay for content, then nobody will succeed on that front either. Even the AOL-owned Huffington Post was a money-losing enterprise until this year, and the vast majority of bloggers posting to the site are doing it for free or peanuts.

If the NYT fails in this latest quest, then we all fail. The race to the bottom will continue.

There is an alternative, which would involve getting all of the media companies in the world to agree to stop giving their content away while letting others - like Google News and Internet Service Providers - benefit without contributing any funding back to the source. Real journalism costs money to produce and it has value, and giving it away makes no sense.

The second part of the plan is to create a micro transaction system where people could access a story for a tenth of a penny or download an entire issue of a newspaper for 25 cents. If it were dirt cheap, then people would be more willing to pay.

The other alternative that's been suggested is for ISP's to slap a content surcharge on every Internet bill (while also lowering the base cost of broadband), which would then be divided among media companies based on traffic.

I don't give any of these alternatives much hope, but clearly something's got to give. And the generation that still buys newspapers, keeping them afloat, is only getting older.