Navizon & RFID Tourism in Kyoto

Navizon’s P2P positioning system: "a GPS, WiFi, and cellular peer-to-peer based mobile positioning system for Pocket PC devices."
I particularly like this illustrative diagram of the system.

Perhaps more relevant is the following article:
Tourism goes RFID in Kyoto and Shiga

"Uji and Hikone (in Kyoto and Shiga, Japan, respectively) are launching a pilot RFID-based sightseeing program as early as October, wherein interested parties (i.e. tourists) can use phones, PDAs, or other connected devices with RFID readers to get information on their surrounds (not too different sounding than the Town Pocket RFID program, if you ask us)."

Neat idea, but how many phones have RFID readers? Would it be better to just stick to cameraphones which can scan semacodes or QR codes? Or not have to require any sort of special hardware at all? I guess that's just wishful thinking, though...

Finally, Company Launch SMS Service That Understands English and Provides Movies Information. I'm linking to this because a few of my focus group participants mentioned movie listings and so forth, and this could also be easily adapted to other things, such as tourism information enquiries.

"The same technology can be easily deployed to book movie tickets, take pizza orders, make payments and take call-centre enquiries. For example, users can simply text in 'Book two tickets at 2pm' or 'Call me about my account'. The possibilities are limitless," said Mak.

It's definitely a lot better than having to learn a particular SMS method, anyway!