Tokyo Friendfinder
Here in Japan, Softbank Mobile - the brand Vodafone Japan transformed into last year - is about to launch a service that will surely appeal to the nation’s legendary drunken Friday-night salarymen who seem to have a habit of leaving their phones anywhere but their pockets.
The company’s new ‘Ichi Navi’ service uses the GPS chips embedded in many Softbank phones to trace missing handsets online via a PC interface. Phones have to be registered in advance and there’s a ¥210 ($1.70) monthly charge plus ¥5.25 (4c) per search, but this is bound to be a life saver many times over for the typical corporate warrior on a bender.
Search results yield either a Yahoo Map location result so the phone can be retrieved, or a message saying whatever the Japanese is for “We think it’s in the toilet, pal.”
More prosaically, Softbank is also soft selling Ichi Navi as a way for concerned parents to keep track of their kids at all times.
(Crossposted to Tech.co.uk)
08:04 PM 
J Mark Lytle •
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GPS | Household | Japan | Wireless | WTF? 
Tagged with:
lost phones
softbank
toilets
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