CEO uses code to make life more colorful

Date: November 1, 2006
Author & Copyright: Mark Rockwell, WirelessWeek
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For Satoshi Nakajima, chief executive of UIEvolution, it's not about what's obvious. It's what's beneath the surface that he finds most fascinating. Nakajima's company develops software platforms that allow wireless carriers to better manage interactive content in games, photos and other elements across media. But software platforms are only the outward expression of a deeper, more instinctive human need, he says.

Nakajima lives and breathes coding, but not in the hide-in-the-basement, anti-social way that you might imagine some computer code writers. He does it because he's trying to make things more "human."

Nakajima's company makes software platforms that allow telecommunications carriers, including wireless carriers, to provide seamless media transmission. It allows users to seamlessly send images such as baby photos, video or content from personal computers to wireless phones and other wireless handheld devices.

"I love writing code. I write code as a hobby," he says. It's a familiar refrain from computer-minded people the world over, and is usually interpreted as a certain unwillingness to communicate with other people. In Nakajima's case, however, just the opposite is true. "I'm fascinated by people's behavior," he says. The combination leads to a unique hybrid of thinking.

Nakajima says he writes code because it helps people communicate, not because it is a computer scientists' pastime. "There is a close connection between work and hobbies," he notes. And he has tapped that connection in developing communications systems.

His passion for working on a personal Weblog has definitely colored his work on wireless gaming and media. For his blog, he developed a simple icon communication program that allows him to track how blog readers behave. Blog visitors can change the icon's color and have begun using it as a kind of simplified communications system as they change the icon's colors in sequences or combinations.

The system was extremely basic communications, but so are the most complicated wireless online games, he says. "Standalone wireless games are fine," he says, but "they're not the ultimate content." Gaming and other wireless or online activities are at their best when people are doing them together, sometimes in competition, according to Nakajima. With interactive games, it's basically "just keeping in touch with others," he says.

In the end, "technology isn't the issue. Devices aren't really the issue. Communications between people are the point," he says. "You have to trust human nature first. Technology is just a tool."