Bill:

I can only guess about Japan next year, but related to the medium term value of Japanese equities and future market penetrations is "cell phone" culture. It's likely to increase their capacity and give them (and Korea) entry into new uminagined markets.

The following article gives a glimpse of some of the technologies they are starting to emply and also some sense of the degree it's become a totem of the young and not so young.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4306834/

This industry is evolving faster than any in history. Worldwide there are more cellphones than televisions. The net is coming to the pockets and purses of the world. This is Captain Kirks communicator except it's already doing stuff that the Star Trek writers couldn't imagine.

In the next few years Japan and Korea are likely to hit us with a technology in the way we hit the world with the PC and net. And with this comes a youth culture. Think of anime and hello kitty to show that influence is 2 ways. So in addition to hard tech we may be hit with something equivalent to rock and roll.

This video gives one view:

http://zed.cbc.ca/go.ZeD?POS=6&CONTENT_ID=52824&page=content

Here is a personal perspective on relationships betwee parents and children and the cellphone:

http://www.japanmediareview.org/japan/wireless/1043770157.php

And think of the economic effects of a technology that's going to let you put in your grocery list, then check the prices in the grocery stores near by, maybe even negotiate with them, it's already the case that restaurants will offer specials to nearby customers in off hours.

Think of the reorganization of work possible when everyone is carrying around a "multi modal" (sound, including voice recognition -> symbol (some of these people approach 100 wpm using 4 or 5 character systems) <- writing recognition <- photo/video) with all kinds of "bots" to organize things.

We are basically creating this extension which allows a blind person (symbol turned into sound) to communicate with a deaf person (symbol possibly from crude voice recognition) turned into sight and possibly in another language (crude computer translation or a human translator somewhere down the phone lines.) These people can be walking down the street from each other or 10,000 miles away.

And in this country we have "experts" who don't even know how effectively people can use t9 (you'll have this on your phone, it uses a dictionary to figure out words typed in a number pad,) while even our kids are instant messaging all over the place.

- David Bennett