Consumers / patent costs

* Been working on a list of possible customers / consumers we could approach with our services. The idea is to get together with the clients and see what kind of verticals we could start working on. One possible route is luxury hotel chains and offering a prepaid, pre-arranged, customized, latest model phone to business users that are only in town for a short while and want to know where to get around in Tokyo. Adding on the NaviBlog service allows the user to not look foolish either as it has a selection of gourmet, great entertainment or clubs, latest nightlife. And using the GPS functionality of the phones, with all the areas of information the user may need. Most phones now have the functionality of car navigation-like motion, but no blog functionality... let's see what we can think up.
* Trying to call the IP lawyers we're using, they're charging us about 400,000 yen which is either really expensive (if it's just for doing up the documents I handed in) or really cheap (if it includes what comes later). I think we really have to be careful with what these people charge us, especially if they don't know what they're doing. I was told by another old hand at patent handling that if everything went smoothly, usually we would be looking at a TOTAL price of 500-600k yen. If this is just the tip of the iceberg, then we will have to look at prices elsewhere, and maybe shift there instead. I can't pay this much for mediocre service.