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Japan’s most popular SNS “Mixi” introduced new two feature deployments today, especially on so-called “footprint” feature.

You may have your own site on Mixi, and Mixi’s footprint feature allows to show you on the list when and which other Mixi users have visited your site.   With today’s system renewal, new icons are prepared for “My Mixi of My Mixi” etc., that means your friend’s friend on Mixi.   Previously the system had only an icon of “My Mixi” meaning your friend on Mixi, there was nothing marked for the visitors other than your “My Mixi”.

Mixi says, the brandnew icons make you easier to find how the relationship between you and every visitor to your site is.

Additionally, newly introduced “Footprint of My Own” shows you the nickname list of Mixi users whose sites you’ve visited.    Just in case for unintentionally you’ve visited an stranger’s site, you may remove your record from the stranger’s footprint log.

Legend of Icons prepared for Mixi’s Foorprint Feature

Sample Image of “Footprint of My Own” containing  Brandnew Icons on the Nickname List  (click to enlarge)

Tags: Japan, New Service // Add Comment »

Winny is the most popular P2P file-sharing software in Japan.

Isamu Kaneko [JP], the developer of Winny, was prosecuted by Kyoto Prosecutors Office. Kaneko was found guilty and fined 1.5 million yen ($15,000). Kaneko and the prosecuter both appealed to Osaka High Court.

4th January, 2009, Toshimitsu Dan [JP], a lawyer of the defendant, and supporters of the defendant had a meeting to share latest information about the trial. [1]

Brief summary of Winny trial:

5th June, 2002, the beta version of Winny was released in a 2channel forum. Winny gained much popularity in Japan as a file sharing software.

27th November, 2003, two Winny users were arrested by a high-tech crime squad of Kyoto Prefectural Police. They were prosecuted for an illegal uploading of copyrighted contents. They were found guilty and got a suspended jail sentence.

9th May 2004, Isamu Kaneko was arrested, and was prosecuted for abetment of copyright violation on 31th May. Kaneko was released on bail on June 1.

Right after the arrest, supporters of Isamu Kaneko formed a website ‘freekaneko.com‘ and a defense fund for him. The fund has been received 16 million yen ($160,000) donations from many anonymous people.

13th December, 2006, Kyoto district court convicted Kaneko and fined 1.5 million yen ($15,000).

October 2005, Kaneko published a book called ‘The Technology of Winny’. It describes a P2P file sharing technology which is used in Winny. [2]

[Disclosure] I am taking a leading role in supporting Isamu Kaneko. I am a creator of FreeKaneko.com and a chair of the League for Software Engineers.

1. 無印吉澤 - Winny裁判報告会に行ってきました [JP]
2. Winnyの技術, Isamu Kaneko, ASCII Publishing, 6th October, 2005 - amazon.co.jp [JP] ascii.co.jp [JP]

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan, Software // 1 Comment »

On Decemeber 24, at Chirstmas eve night, Japanese iPhone developers gathered at an old Japanese-style hotel “Houmeikan” near Tokyo universtiy.

Houmeikan

The purpose is ” to plan an event in SanFrancsico during MacWorld to promote iphone apps by Japanese developers in a group”.

Japanese iphone app market is not big as U.S. market and there’s an estimate that it’s 1/10 of U.S. market. So it is critical to promote for U.S. market to make enough beneifts.

Here is a PR movie by developers who joined the meeting.

iphone demo event - promo video

I will aslo join to this event as a developer of PokéDia, a daily diary app.

PokéDia demo in YouTube

PokéDia ver1.1 at iTunes Appstore

The promotion event will be held at certain place in San Francisco at the night of Jan. 7th. Since the space is limited, you will need invitation to join to this event.

Those of you who want to join this event, please register at the following site.

Macworld Expo: Japan iPhone App Developer Special Media Event

Tags: Announcement, Japan // Add Comment »

Bounen Kaigi, annual year-end conference considering the record of the year, was held at Yahoo! Japan office again this year. This conference was sponsored by Yahoo! Japan and the event hosts were Gen Taguchi (blog: 100shiki[J]) and Daiya Hashimoto (blog: Jyoho Kogaku Passion for The Future[J]).

This conference consisted of the followings.

• Noticeable Net Services in 2008
• Guest’s topics
• Yahoo! Japan’s 2008 trends by analyzing keywords
• Hosts’ topics
• Zentai Kaigi (everyone’s discussion)

Noticeable Net Services in 2008

This ranking is 10 noticeable net services which Taguchi/Hashimoto picked up from the list collected by their readers.

1. Dropbox
2. Evernote
3. SPYSEE - Vertical search engine of influencers
4. TechTalk.jp - Hub site for technical presentors
5. Language exchange SNS Lang-8 - Multi-lingual social network service for learning foreign lanugages
6. Auto Vocoder Box - Online vocal correction service for bad singers
7. GYOROL - Mobile & PC fishing game
8. rigureto - Miserable story sharing site
9. Shuden.jp - Last train time checking site in mobile
10. Yaruo KenBunRoku - The record of 2ch character “Yaruo”’s diverse challenges

These are not so popular in Japan now, but have a good chance to become big services. Top two services are  not from Japan, therefore this results will motivate Japanese start-ups to make more effort in 2009.

Guest’s topics

Guest was Keiya Mizuno. He is a writer of million-seller book “Yume wo kanaeru zou” ( means an elephant living out dreams). This book is so popular that it was made to TV drama and came to be the most  sold Japanese books in 2008, more than 1.7 million copies, Hashimoto said.

» MIZUNO KEIYA OFFICE Inc.[J]

Yahoo! Japan’s 2008 trends by analyzing keywords

They explained about the trends on the internet in 2008, for example, comparision between mobile and pc user of mixi or analyzing the age brackets of  newly emerging community sites, pixiv, pu-pe girl and so on.

Hosts’ topics

The hosts, Taguchi/Hashimoto, made presentations about their 2008 and new plans for 2009.

» Taguchi’s Report of Bounen Kaigi 2008 // ideaxidea.com[J]

Zentai Kaigi(everyone’s discussion)

This may be most important session, the last was Zentai Kaigi. All participants were grouped up by 6 people and discussed.

Theme was “Thinking up the new big net service in 2009″. They must fill up the following paper.

Using (_______) problem from recession in 2009 as an underhanded way, you work out a new service (_______) for (______) people. This service has a great feature that (_______), so it has very high-level repeat rate. The name of this service is “(________)”.
In addition, the government admires this service and names the year from 2009 to 2015 after it, “(________) economy”.

The winner team’s idea is that NEET check the other house through some monitors in their houses. NEET are people who have no job including part-time and will increase in number because of the recession.

This conference will be also held in 2009. If you spend your year-end vacation in Japan, why don’t you join?

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan // Add Comment »

Hiroyuki Nishibuya, founder of Japan’s biggest anonymous BBS 2ch.net (Ni-Channel), revealed that he had transferred the ownership of 2ch.net to oversea on his blog.

The FAQ on 2ch.net was modified, too.

Q Who owns 2ch?

A 2ch.net is managed and operated by PACKET MONSTER INC.

2ch.net has been at the heart of libel lawsuits in decade since it established in 1999. Those lawsuits targeted at Hiroyuki as individual, and freedom of speech on 2ch.net has been somewhat kept by his attitude to emphasis those suing people getting more and more attentions from 2ch users.

The tribuneship of 2ch is now handed to a company PACKET MONSTER INC., which looks in Singapore. I think this is to avoid farther suits by removing the existence of the service from Japan, i.e. Hiroyuki still owns the service via the paper company. The servers of 2ch is always explained to be run in USA from its beginning. Now it becomes much more complicated to take legal action to 2ch.net in Japan.

Tags: Japan, News, Singapore // Add Comment »

Lang-8 is a unique social network service started by a young entrepreneur Youyou Ki who lieves in Kyoto, Japan.

Language Exchange SNS Lang-8

It works in this way.

1.First join to the service.

2.Then write a diary in the language you’re learning.

3.Native spekers of that language who are aslo users of Lang-8 will correct your diary. This normally would not take more than 24 hours.

4. In return you will check other one’s diaries written in your mother-tongue language and correct them.

So the cycle of  good will are turning around by volunteer works of users.

Ki Youyou was born in China and when he was 4 years old he moved to Japan and grew up in Japan.  When he became a university student he visited China for a year  and there he found his Chinese was not natural as natives.

He started to write diaries in Chinese and asked his room mates to correct to imporve his language skill. This experience turned to the idea of Lang-8.

He asked to his friend to develop Lang-8 and made it by customizing OpenPNE, an open source social network service platform. They launched the service in the summer of 2006 and now more than 100 thounsands users are joining to Lang-8.

There are many free web services struggling to make benefits but Ki is quite optimistic for the future of Lang-8.

“In Lang-8, many talented users are joining.  Many of them are bilingals so if you need someone to hire who can understand and make a communication between certain languages, Lang-8 would be a good to place to seek the one.”

Tags: Community, Japan, New Service // Add Comment »

Programming language Ruby was created by a Japanese programmer, Yukihiro Matsumoto. However, Ruby was a minor hobby language until the appearance of Ruby on Rails.

After the Ruby on Rails fad reached Japan, the government people became interested in Ruby, because it is the first made-in-Japan programming language which is commonly used worldwide. Shimane prefecture, where Matsumoto lives, is trying to promote local software industry with Ruby technology.

Fukuoka is the largest city in Kyushu island which is located west of the main island of Japan. Three Ruby organizations are head-quartered in Fukuoka.

Fukuoka prefectural government launched an organization called ‘F-Ruby‘ [JP] with many software companies in Fukuoka. Ruby Business Commons [JP] is actively promoting Rails and JRuby to local developers. Also, I am an organizer of the oldest Ruby meetup group called ‘Rubyist Kyushu‘ [JP].

Fukuoka prefectural government offers 1 million yen ($10,000) award [EN] to the best Ruby application or Ruby promotion effort done in last 1 year.

We, Rubyist Kyushu organized a regional Ruby conference called ‘Kyushu Ruby Kaigi’ with over 200 attendees. We invited Koichi Sasada, a core developer of Ruby 1.9, and Akimitsu Sano, Founder and CEO of Cookpad as speakers. Also, Andy Hunt, the author of Programming Ruby, gave us a video lecture.

2008 was a Ruby year in Fukuoka.

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan // Add Comment »

A Tokyo-based robot manufacturing venture ZMP [J] (pronounced as Zett-Em-Pee) developed a new tune recommendation service jointly with Dr. Yasufumi Takama, associate professor at Faculty of System Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University.

ZMP is well-known as manufacter of “Miuro” or a small robot on two wheels that can play tunes and follow you around the house.   Refer to Tech Planet’s report for more details about Miuro.   Dr. Takama is the lead of studying recommendation engine technology in Japan.

ZMP’s recommendation service distributes to every  Miuro user the tune list that he or she prefers, which is generated based on the history of tunes he or she played ever.

ZMP’s president Hisashi Taniguchi says, he would like the company to be the music concierge by improving the service usability much more.  (quoted from Sankei Shimbun)

Tune recommendation service is not a new idea, one of the famous examples is Genius introduced on Apple’s iTunes.    In order to use the Genius feature, we are forced to turn on our Mac and launch the application, which may cause the users to feel tiresome for standing by.   ZMP’s brandnew service takes similar technology approach to that of  Genius, but the point is we need no longer have any PC or Mac to listen in favourite tunes.

ZMP plans to sell its SDK to cellphone carriers and content providers, and it will cost around USD 25,000 to 50,000.

See Also:

ZMP’s Press Release:
Tokyo Metropolitan University and ZMP jointly studied the new-generation tune-list distibution service based on Robotics and Web Intelligence technologies [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service // Add Comment »

Japan’s biggest business newspaper, the Nikkei, is reporting that around 100 Japanese companies are planning to participate in an online shopping mall to be set up on the Chinese web next month.

According to the Nikkei, major electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera, drugstore operator Matsumotokiyoshi, children’s clothing retailer Narumiya and mail order company Cecile are among the candidates.

Buy-J.com (inactive as of now) will be run by Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Card and China UnionPay. Chinese buyers will be able to pay through China UnionPay online settlement system. There are 1.8 billion China UnionPay cards circulating. China UnionPay is the only credit card company

SBI VeriTrans, which is an SBI holdings company and based out of Tokyo, will reportedly handle the website and customs procedures in China. Chinese buyers are expected to receive all goods ordered within two days via air mail delivery and distribution through China Post.

SBI VeriTrans Co. (3749) is to manage the Web site of the online mall and handle customs procedures on the Chinese side, with China Post delivering the goods in China. A specialized distribution center in Japan will enable the delivery of products by air to Chinese consumers as soon as two days after ordering.

The mall will be the biggest of its kind in China, with initially 20,000 different Japanese products listed. However, it’s also the first such attempt so that with $45 million USD, the sales target for the first year, can be called rather modest.

Via Nikkei (registration required, paid subscription)

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

Mixi launched Mixi Nengajou (Nengajou = new year greeting card), on which user can send a real(=paper) greeting card to your MaiMiku(My Mixi = online friend) WITHOUT knowing their real address. You may choose 400+ designs from 98 yen (48 yen with sponsors’ ads, more expensive designed cards are also available). Mixi works with the recently privatized nation wide postal service Japan Post.

When you order the card, Mixi will send it to the receiver. If the receiver had not registered their address on Mixi, they are asked either to give their address to Mixi, or refuse to receive the greeting card.

The service began on November 28th. At December 15th point, there were 300,000 cards ordered [J], which is not a lot when every year every Japanese people sends nearly 20 greeting cards averagely (around 3 billion in total).

However, as every year Japan Post has been losing users, especially young generation, because of e-mail, cellphone and such formality being thought uncool, it could be a good stimulus to regain this traditional custom (and their sales) for them.

See Also:

Mixi Press Release Mixi Nengajou [J]

The total number of nengajou sent on the 2007 new years day was 2.03 billion cards. [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service // Add Comment »