Sekai Camera

» see sekaicamera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Tonchidot was eleven months old when it put Sekai Camera in front of TechCrunch50 in San Francisco on 9 September 2008. The company had been incorporated that August with Takahito Iguchi as chief executive, and what it had was a concept rather than a shipping product: point an iPhone at a street and see writing hanging in the air over it. The demo did not go quietly. TechCrunch's Japanese edition ended up publishing a separate piece about the noise the thing made. Being covered for the reaction rather than the product is its own kind of launch, and not always a good one.

The product arrived a year later. A commercial version went live on 17 September 2009, first inside a LOEWE store that lent iPhones to customers, and the public build hit the App Store on the 24th. It recorded a hundred thousand downloads in four days. The mechanism was GPS for position and the handset's magnetic compass for heading, which together told the app which direction you were facing so it could draw the right tags onto the camera feed. Users wrote the tags themselves. Text was the common case, though a tag could just as easily be a picture or a sound, and whatever it held got pinned to a coordinate and left there for whoever came past.

By the last day of 2009 it was available in eighty-one countries, and that number is where the problem lives. An air tag is only worth looking at if somebody already wrote one, and a hundred thousand curious downloads spread across eighty-one countries produces a world that is almost entirely blank. In Japan the blankness got filled deliberately. Everywhere else you raised your phone to a street and the street looked exactly like a street.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the tags were for ~

Gifu Prefecture is the clearest case. On 13 April 2010 it placed 3,711 official air tags across every municipality inside its borders, and by that October the count had passed seven thousand. Cities in Saga Prefecture ran tourism promotions on it, including a retrospective in Takeo for the architect Kingo Tatsuno and barrier-free guidance in Ureshino. The J.League put photographs and notes about stadium events and stadium food onto its grounds, which it claimed as a world first for a sporting body. These were governments and institutions treating an empty layer as a thing to be stocked, like shelves.

That is the honest reading of why Sekai Camera worked in Japan and nowhere I could have used it. The app was not the product. The tags were the product, and the tags were a public works project.

~ the partners and the money ~

The money arrived on the strength of the demo. DCM and Itochu Technology Ventures put in four million dollars in December 2009. KDDI followed in August 2010 with 448 million yen, and the carrier connection produced Sekai Camera ZOOM on 1 July 2010, a cut-down build that ran on au feature phones through BREW rather than on smartphones. The awards arrived too. It took the grand prize at the 15th AMD Awards in March 2010 and best network title at the CEDEC Awards that September, with a World Summit Award for mobile content at the end of the year.

Tonchidot also tried to make the layer into a platform. OpenAirAPI opened in March 2010 with Recruit, Gurunavi, Tokyu Hands and Evernote among the named partners, and a run of small apps followed that lived inside Sekai Camera itself, including an augmented reality role-playing game called Sekai Yusha. The dependencies bit back immediately. On the same day the API was announced, a problem involving PlaceEngine, the positioning service the app leaned on, got Sekai Camera pulled from the App Store. It stayed down until the 13th.

~ the day the company took the other name ~

The sub-apps went first, through 2011, in a steady line that reads like a building being emptied floor by floor. CooKoo closed on 28 February and Bakuhatsu Kaboon on 11 April. Sekai Cafe AR went on 30 September. ZOOM and Sekai Finder both stopped on 30 November, and Sekai Yusha followed on 15 December. After that the main app ran for two more years with its outbuildings demolished.

Tonchidot posted the closing notice on 17 December 2013 and shut everything on 22 January 2014. On that same date the company stopped being Tonchidot Corporation and became tab, Inc., named for the location-based curation service it had already moved its people onto. The domain is gone now. Searching for the company today gets you a software firm in Shibuya selling something else entirely, operating as the same legal person that spent five years trying to get people to write on the street.

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