Jailbreak into your car with the first car-key/mobile phone hybrid device

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We’ve seen the phone/oyster card hybrid, and the barcode scanner/phone hybrid, and we’ve long had mp3 cameras and cameras built into our phones. Enough? Not for Japan. Their attitude is “let’s see what else we can cram in there!”. They’ve put your car key into your mobile. At the moment it only works with Nissan vehicles, but it can remotely lock or unlock your car, as well as starting or stopping the engine. It’s not on the market yet, but they’ll be demonstrating it at the CEATAC conference in Tokyo on Sept 30th.

Japan set to cross another invention off Arthur C. Clarke's list – sets aside £5bn for "space elevator"

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A mere 30 years after Arthur C. Clarke first mooted the idea of running super-thin, lightweight cables into space and tethering them to a satellite in his book The Fountains of Paradise, Japanese scientists reckon they’re ready to bring all the parts together and make it happen.

For a relatively low in space travel terms bill of £5bn, the boffins think they’re close to solving the carbon nanotube technology issue that could make the existence of 22,000 mile-long cables possible. That amount of rope or even Ethernet cable…

Banish stinky suits with the Farago Aircool suit: only in Japan?

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For the man with overactive sweat glands comes the Farago Aircool suit, designed to neutralise the nasty niffs associated with stale sweat before they develop and ensure that you’re the only person in every meeting you attend.

Available in Japan, the suit has special “antimicrobial silver ions power” sewn into the lining, which helps to deodorise the material and the wearer…

Sony saving us money for once – adds local garage petrol prices to its satnav displays

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With it now costing more to drive to the shops than you spend on food when you get there, this little GPS innovation from Sony could be the answer to saving literally several pence a month.

Sony’s taken its Japanese PetaMap system and added support for local petrol price data – which can then be viewed on your Sony GPS system, letting users shave fractions of a yen off the price of each litre – just like the UK-based…

gCubik: put a virtual 3D person in a box

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How would you like to put your girlfriend in a box? Hmm, that doesn’t sound quite right, but Japanese researchers have developed a prototype which could allow you to do just that — at least, with a virtual representation of your girlfriend.

gCubik would allow people to hold a 3D image of a person in their hand. “Suppose you have a picture of your girlfriend smiling on your desk. She could be smiling as a 3D image in a cube,” said Shunsuke Yoshida from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology…