Produced by publishing company Shufunotomo Co. Ltd, “ef” is a popular women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine oriented towards working women in their 30s. The magazine was once a print publication, but moved online in 2006 as the magazine “Digital ef.” For a small membership fee, readers are allowed access to the bi-monthly mag through a Flash interface, created and powered by user interface design company Yappa.

There’s more! Read the full post on the Mobile Trendpool.

Bandai Visual Co.’s “Yomban” site publishes original manga, novels and essays in mini e-book form. At any given time there are over a dozen available to read for free on the site.

While titles span genres, their latest release is a riff on the classic young woman’s magazine and manners manual—a manga called “Ready lady’s how to.” This 25 page comic tells the story of two young women looking for love, making mistakes, following advice, and inventing new strategies along the way. Bandai presumes this tale will be not only entertaining but also informative to its target audience of 20 and 30-something female readers.

To content, however, is created in part by teaming up with the popular survey site Goo Ranking. Goo posts daily questionnaires and responses that span topics from travel to anime, pets to fashion. Serious (flu-related) and fun (dating tips) Goo rankings are posted on countless blogs in Japan.

Bandai’s “Ready lady’s how to” is based on practical advice gleaned from Goo Ranking research, which is user-generated, and aims to provide not only practical advice, but popular advice gleaned from the masses.

Trend Impact: Crowdsourcing of advice is a popular web concept, but Yomban is unique in aggregating the tips and creating a mass media products (such as manga) to deliver the information in a new way.

Links:

Bandai Visual Co.

Tokyo’s Louis Vuitton Flagship store in Omotesando has undergone a complete makeover in the style of famed pop designer Takashi Murakami in the latest from their 6-year relationship.

The influence has seeped into every aspect of Vuitton, from the product design, to shop interior, to the mobile / web digital presence. Scattered throughout the shop are large-scale and miniature versions of Murakami’s plush figures and artwork. They range from large centerpieces to tiny figures playing among the items for sale in the store. 

The figures are Vuitton-inspired, but still maintain Murakami’s anime-loving sensibilities. In fact, the opening ceremony was highlighted by one of Akihabara’s (Tokyo’s geek heaven) most popular girl groups AKB48 along with the more hip productions of Fantastic Plastic Machine who produced a song for the campaign called Superflat First Love (below).

To connect consumers to the Murakami campaign, Vuitton worked with Japanese design house SET to create a unique QR code incorporating elements from both Vuitton and Murakami. The code is usable, meaning that it can be scanned with any Japanese phone and instantly brings the user to a flash-based campaign site on the mobile web. 

Trend Impact: Vuitton’s longstanding relationship with Murakami has given a pop edge to a luxury brand, while also connecting them to a segment of the population typically rejected — geeks, anime lovers, and music hipsters.

Links:

Feature on Murakami / Vuitton from Honeyee

SuiPo is used to connect mobile handsets digitally to billboard advertisements via RFID, but the technology is also being used for location-based services at train stations.

A recent development in SuiPo services is “Suipo Navita,” a map system that provides real-time information on stores and services located around a particular train station. The Navita stations are placed next to large static district maps that give good overviews, but are unable to give more specific information. 

Learn more about this trend on the Mobile Trendpool. Or, browse the demo.

Sony Studios has created perhaps the first ever Twitter-based game to promote the launch of the new Terminator Salvation PlayStation game.

As in the movie, the game features John Connor and the Resistance fighting against Skynet, the central supercomputer on a mission to wipe out the human race. In order to quickly solve incomplete messages and codes they have intercepted from Skynet, the Resistance uses Twitter to relay messages amongst Resistance fighters.

There’s more! Visit our Mobile Trendpool to learn more about this, and other, mobile trends and innovations.

SK Communications, the company behind Cyworld, lets its users exchange real-world gifts through mobile, IM, and the Internet. Users of NateOn, the most popular IM platform in Korea, can buy Giftcons through mobile payment (either Danal or Mobilians).

These Gifticons are credits for certain items, which are sent as barcodes to a friend’s phone. The recipient can bring his or her phone to a retail store, where the code will be scanned to redeem the gift.

Trend Impact: Just like T-Money, Gifticons have emerged as a new means for the younger generation to exchange gifts. However, due to the newness of the method, it has yet to see much popularity.

Links:

Gifticon

With a solar panel embedded in the top of the clamshell handset, this phone from Sharp can charge its battery during down times. While it doesn’t yet have a name or release date, the waterproof handset will come out sometime in summer or fall 2009 with mobile provider au KDDI.

Interested? Read more about this trend on the Mobile Trendpool. Or, browse the Mobile Trendpool Demo. 

A new service called Txteagle is making it possible for people in Kenya to supplement their incomes by doing simple tasks like transcriptions and translations via SMS.

The service, which was founded by a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, has partnered with a number of companies (like Nokia) who are interested in software localization. Based on the needs of these companies, Txteagle distributes tasks via SMS to participating mobile phone users in Kenya, who then complete the task and text the information back to the company.

Learn more about this trend! Subscribe to the Mobile Trendpool.

Seoul has organized the streets around Gangnam Station into what’s called “U-Street,” a zone that features 22 “Media Poles,” which allow pedestrians to search for nearby restaurants, check email, play touch-screen games, and take photos, among many other functions.

Read more about this trend on the Mobile Trendpool. 

In preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Asia Preliminary, Adidas has created a campaign combining mobile and PC websites as well as in-store marketing with digital signage to link the brand tighter with the massively popular national soccer team.

Called the “Show Your Resolution!” Project, Adidas describes the goal of the campaign as one to “unify players and fans in the fight towards victory in the World Cup.” By visiting the campaign’s mobile site, which can be accessed through a QR code displayed on the Adidas PC site, soccer fans surrender their email addresses in order to post supportive and encouraging comments for the national team, as well as have a mobile phone wallpaper with the team’s emblem, a three-legged bird, displayed on it. The user-contributed comments, or “resolutions” as termed by the campaign, are displayed as animations on the Adidas PC site, as well as presumably sent to the players.

After registering with the site, fans will periodically get animated graphics sent to their phones with “resolutions” supposedly sent by the national team players. Starting at the end of May, fans who registered and received the campaign mobile phone wallpaper can visit one of several participating Adidas stores nationwide and experience the second half of the campaign through a “campaign monitor” or digital signage display. By touching a mobile phone with the three-legged bird emblem displayed, users can make fan-contributed resolutions appear and animate on the screen.

The campaign runs until the end of the 2010 World Cup Asia Preliminaries on June 17.