Last night at the monthly Tokyo 2.0 event, Google Mobile Product Managers  Riku Inoue & Brad Ellis from Google Japan, gave a presentation entitled Convergence and beyond.

In my opinion the most interesting part was during the Q&A session that followed, I asked if Google had plans to add people or face recognition to Google Goggles? This would be possible since: Picassa has face recognition, Flickr has added people tagging, and of course Facebook has support for tagging people in photos.

Riku and Brad’s response was Google has person recognition working in a Google internal build of Goggles, but the feature was removed in the publicly released version due to privacy concerns.

However they also said, Google hasn’t given up on the feature and are trying to find the right approach to make sure people’s privacy is taken into account. When they do, the People recognition feature will be added to the public version of Goggles.

The 14 min. Google Japan presentation can be watched below in full

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Nico Nico Douga is a very popular video site based in Japan, ranking only second to Youtube in viewership. Outside of Japan the next countries with large viewership comes from users in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

With the success of the iPhone in the Japanese market it became apparent that Nico Nico Douga should create an app.

In order too enable iPhone/iPod Touch owners to access the site when mobile they have created a free app. The controls work much the same way as the Youtube app.

When a video is playing single tap to bring up the video controls, double tap to maximize the video or minimize it if already maximized. But how good is it compared to the juggernaut video app, Youtube, that comes pre-installed on all iPhones?

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Editors Note: This is a guest post by Duncan Riley, Australian entrepreneur,respected blogger and editor of The Inquistr . We are delighted to have someone of his calibre and experience share his thoughts on the potential consequences on Australia’s Internet censorship plans.

The spectre of broadscale Internet censorship in Australia has been covered previously here on The Next Web before, but many outside Australia may wonder: why should you care if you don’t live in Australia.

If you’re not aware of what’s proposed, the short version is that Australia is proposing to introduce a compulsory firewall that filters content based on a blacklist of banned sites.

What’s going to be on that list is even now still somewhat confused. The Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy has stated that all Refused Classification content will be banned,

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Samsung today announced their first Android 2.1 smartphone in Korea called the M100S.

Similar to the HTC/Google Nexus One, the M100S has a 3.7 inch AMOLED WVGA resolution touch screen, 5 Megapixel camera with 720p video recording capability.

It also has WiFi 802.11n support, GPS, a T-DMB TV tuner, and standard 3.5 mm headset jack. In standard Samsung fashion DivX support is included in the video player.

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Have you ever wanted to create your own iPhone app but thought to yourself, ‘I don’t know how to program in Objective C and don’t want to spend the time to learn how’?

A Japanese iPhone developer named Appliya Studios might have an answer for you. They’ve created an App builder, where you can use your own photos from Flickr or if you don’t use Flickr it’s also possible to upload your photos to the app builder.

The app can be customized not only by displaying your own photos, but also choosing an icon for your app, as well as selecting screenshots and writing a brief description for the App Store.

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Bloomberg reports, with confirmation from investors Softback Corp, that live video streaming service Ustream has raised $20 million in capital.

The investment was led by Softbank Corp, Japan’s third-largest mobile-phone operator and is aimed at growing their service in south east Asia and India.

Ustream confirmed the investment in an email and says it plans to open offices in each of the countries.

“The market for live streaming is very large if you consider all the cell phones” in Asia, Chief Executive Officer John Ham said in an interview.

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Steve Jobs typically gives a nearly flawless presentation, in fact most people are hard pressed to remember any mistakes he’s made in the past several years.

But surely there must have been some flops that have slipped through the reality distortion field, and sure enough this video turned up of the MacWorld Tokyo 2001 Keynote speech at Makuhari Messe convention center.

Not sure if it was due to jetlag, or perhaps lack of preparation, or maybe he was extremely uncomfortable with his attire for that afternoon, but this keynote speech is far less smooth than any of the other keynote speeches.

The full keynote is embedded as a playlist below. Apple fans can expect some nostalgia as Steve presents OSX, Powerbook, and iTunes among others.

Some highlights to watch for:

• Attire for the keynote, full suit and tie, a big departure from the black turtleneck and jeans that we’ve come to recognize.

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There’s a lot of different music services out there ranging from Last.FM to iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, Nokia’s Music Store, and Spotify. But if you still can’t get enough music or are looking for music videos, Youtube has created a music playlist and discovery page at Youtube.com/disco that you should checkout.

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Without stealing Apple’s hard needed thunder, we’d like to point out that a Chinese hardware manufacturer made an iPad clone three months ago.

In what may be the first case of a manufacturer trying to clone a product that doesn’t even exist yet, China company Shenzhen Dragon Brother Industrial has introduced their own ‘P88′ “Apple Style” tablet last October. Now that the product is realeased, we see that the product resembles the real deal in a lot of ways.

• P88 doesn’t sound cool, neither does iPad
• It actually comes with three USB ports, so no clunking around with docks
• It supports multitasking
• It’s cheaper
• 160GB disk drive instead of a max 64GB disk
• With a little bit of hacking, it might even be able to run OSX or Android

The specs side by side

Who am I kidding, I’m probably going to buy an iPad as well, the iPad has 10 hour battery life, Apple’s UI is slick and Apple has and extensive app store. But it’s interesting to see that SDBI developed the product before Apple did, probably inspired by mockups floating around on the web. If they get better in this game, user generated designs might be the new thing, and 2010 might be a tipping point for Apple’s almighty throne. Via Shanghaiist

Eugene Lin was a typical Microsoft employee until the iPhone came out. When he heard how much money some developers were making, then Eugene decided to try his hand at iPhone app development.

It was a bumpy road of app rejection, but it eventually lead to him developing one of the top purchased apps in Japan, or in his words becoming an iPhone “Japanese porn king.”

The most recent application he developed is called Peekaboo, and as of this writing is ranked #10 of the Top Paid apps in Japan’s App Store.

Watch the video of his quick presentation (6 minutes) on the path he took to reach success in the App Store, especially in Japan.

Sources: IntoMobile and BoingBoing