I am not sure about you, but now that it is getting colder outside here in the Philadelphia area – the first thing I do in the morning is check the weather. I was recently searching the net and found an interesting trend emerging on the other side of the world in Japan. According to research by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), about 20 percent of Japanese check forecasts on their new or refurbished smartphones. The thing is the people of Japan are not only looking up the weather, but they are now voting on it. Several weather services are competing via the official portals of cell- phone companies: DoCoMo’s i-mode iMenu, KDDI au’s EZweb and SoftBank Mobile’s Yahoo! Keitai. All of those services, provide basic information, such as today and tomorrow’s weather predictions, but the majority of the sites mentioned have a pay-for-service as well. Continue reading »