A Kitty-chan is forever

A diamond encrusted platinum Hello Kitty figurine was sold at Osaka's Mitsukoshi Department store for ¥10.5 million yen.
The Kitty trinket was produced to celebrate the cat's 30th birthday and has been exhibited around Japan before being sold
at the end of November.

Glitter kitties are gaining some popularity with jewelry retailer Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo KK using Kitty-themed items to boost sales.
Kitty's 30th birthday has been an international event with parties throughout Japan and the US, culminating in a big charity bash in LA in aid of UNICEF.

Fifty thousand Hello Kitty products were sold in 60 countries in the last financial year alone, so she is clearly a rich cat — but will she become a fat cat?

Hello Kitty Did you know?
• Kitty lives in London with her sister Mimmy.
• She is the height of five apples and the weight of three.
• She has her own theme park, Puroland, in Tokyo.

Hello Kitty products include:
• Prunes • A toaster that burns her face onto bread • Purses
• Towels • Coffee makers • Steering wheel covers • Lamps
• CD holders • Vibrators

Trust in technology

The only surprise is that it took so long to come about: we can now buy a mini hand-held lie detector on the open market.
The device comes from Seem Technologies in Israel who invented the machine to conduct instant tests at border crossings and road blocks. The company is now offering a non-military version.

The Truster, as it's called , is small enough to hold in your hand or keep in your pocket and can be used with a microphone or attached to a telephone. It is sensitive to small tell-tale traces of stress in the voice when we are less than honest.

The most recent version displays an apple on its in-built screen. While you tell the truth the apple remains whole. When you lie, a bite disappears from the apple. The Truster can also detect that the speaker is being evasive or is trying to trick the questioner. It also has a handy, non-military price of around US$100.

Great. What can we use it for? Can you imaging asking your partner “Where were you last night? And please speak into this machine.” Or perhaps you would like to use it on the boss …
Its most likely use is for dealing with salespeople and lawyers and the like. But journalists might like them for those interviews with the great and the powerful.

Foxy browser

A new browser is challenging Microsoft's near monopoly on internet software.

At the end of November the new browser, Firefox, had helped push Internet Explorer's market share to just below 90 percent from about 95 percent.

While this leaves IE still in the dominant position, it is a great advance for Firefox's makers the Mozilla Foundation who have seen their share of the of the market rise by nearly five percent this year — most of which has been achieved since the launch of the first full version of Firefox on November 9th.

Firefox is now the second most used browser with Opera taking up third position. Firefox's appeal for new users is the browser's security, which is superior to Explorer's. One of the benefits of the increased security is a reduction in the chances of the browser being hijacked by unscrupulous sites. Firefox also stops popups, which are annoying to some users.

Another popular feature is the browser's window tabbing feature. Rather than have several open windows cluttering the screen,
user's can arrange windows as tabs, which are easy to find and flip through. The new browser also has a clean, simple and intuitive interface. Firefox is an open source software and can so be modified by users who are adept at coding. Mozilla was founded by the now-defunkt Netscape, but the new browser is without the clunkiness of the last generation of Netscape browsers.
The browser war could be hotting up. Rumours are rife that the world's most popular search engine Google is creating its own browser and has apparently been recruiting coding talent from across the industry.

Firefox is available for Windows 98 through XP, Linux, and Mac OSX (bit not OS9 or earlier). Interested readers can find Firefox at www.firefox.com

If you know of any newsworthy events in the Kansai or Japan, if you are about to dive naked into a vat of hungry piranhas for a bet, be sure to let us know. mailbox@kansaiscene.com