Asiajin

In the last few years and months, a couple of Japanese companies decided to launch web sites allowing users to create and share works of art (or trash as in my case) online.

Here is a current list of seven of the most popular Japanese web services aimed at creative people. None of these sites require you to download software.

Dream Tribe

This site will be established next month by Shogakukan, a famous media publisher based in Tokyo. In a recent Nikkei weekly article I read the company hopes to generate 30 million Yen of revenue (288,000 USD/186,000 Euro) in the first year with Dream Tribe (via ads since usage of the site is free).

The site promises to become a professionally made platform for user-generated media of various kinds (music, manga, novels etc.).

Tegaki

Tegaki is the name of a unique blogging service. Launched at the end of last year, the site quickly attracted a large number of users. Using the PC mouse, Tegaki lets bloggers create “hand”written articles. Texts can be combined with selfmade pictures.

Registration takes 5 seconds and the best thing: Tegaki is fully available in English. Bravo!

Pixiv

Another popular site of the creative kind is Pixiv. The number of registered users passed the 100,000 mark 2 months ago.

While some the services presented in this list are rather simple in structure, Pixiv is in fact a full-fledged SNS for creative people. The platform makes it possible to set up profiles, send messages, submit comments about other members’ works, save bookmarks, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, Pixiv is Japanese only. Registration is fairly easy though. Just submit your email address, click on the link in the email sent to you by Pixiv seconds after and fill out a simple registration form.

Flipbook

Flipbook lets you draw basic anime sequences. Although tools are limited (Flipbook is completely browser-based), I found some amazing ideas on the site. Luckily, the service is translated into English.

All works can be integrated into blogs and commented on.

Kokuban

Users can create images on a blackboard (kokuban in Japanese) and record the “production” from start to finish. The Flash-based site is Japanese only but registration is not needed.

Although Kokuban is pretty simple, some really cool stuff can be found here! The site launched in February this year and as of now, nearly 140,000 works are saved on the site already.

Noughts

Noughts is another platform where users can create images via their browser. This site is a little more sophisticated, offering more colors, functions and a slick user interface. Noughts also looks cooler and more professional than most of the other sites presented in this post. Unfortunately, there is no English version.

All images can be saved and integrated into blogs. Noughts also has its own store where people can buy T-Shirts with their favorite images. This actually makes a lot of sense.

Hatena Haiku

Hatena, THE online heaven for all Japanese geeks, has been covered in Asiajin quite a few times (i.e. here). For some reason, the site also offers its users a platform to submit and share haiku (a special kind of Japanese poetry). And it proves to be extremely popular!

The sub-site is aptly named “Hatena Haiku” and Japanese only. Registered users just enter a title into the Haiku form (displayed in light pink on the screen shot above), followed by the haiku itself. All poems can be commented on and discussed.

Hatena Haiku also features a drawing function so you can submit “handwritten” texts as well (example).

As Asiajin reported, Hatena USA also established an English version of Hatena Haiku in February this year!

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

This month’s Tokyo2point0 event again took place in Harajuku and again it featured two great presentations. This time both speakers were Japanese!

Behind the doors of Cybozu Labs

Asiajin’s very own Akky Akimoto delivered the first presentation. Please note he doesn’t want pictures of himself published.

Personal background

Akky is one of Japan’s most famous tech bloggers. In fact, he is a professional which is very rare even in this blog-crazy country.

His company-sponsored blog on Web 2.0, IT and Tech stuff is, for example, ranked at No. 12 in Japan on feedmeter. It is No. 23 according to the list of the most popular blogs from the livedoor Reader (the favorite among Japanese geeks).

Before becoming an A-lister blogger, Akky started his career as a programmer whose speciality is internationalization and release engineering. His international career includes stints in Vietnam, the UK and the USA where he used to live in San Francisco. Akky is also authoring books and columns in various Japanese high-profile Tech media.

Cybozu as employer

Cybozu is an independent vendor of packaged software (focusing on groupware), directly competing with powerhouses like IBM/Lotus or Microsoft (Exchange). The company was founded in 1997 and listed at the Tokyo Stock exchange just 4.5 years later (in record time at that date). Almost unknown in the west, Cybozu now serves 26,000 customers (2.5 million end users) in Japan. In its market segment, Cybozu has the largest market share in this country.

Cybozu Labs’ role

Akky went on saying he is actually working for Cybozu Labs, a 100% subsidiary of Cybozu.

Cybozu Labs is a completely separated entity: geographically, culturally and economically. I have seen the Labs office myself and can confirm the very Non-Japanese environment there! It was established in 2005 by the parent company to attract engineering talent, to accelerate business development and to boost global competitiveness.

According to Akky, the now 12 engineers quickly managed to earn a lot of respect in the Japanese web community. As a side effect, general attention in the media and tech community was created for Cybozu itself. Given the drastic shortage of talent in Japan’s IT sector and the tendency of Japanese people to prefer big-name companies for employment, the establishment of Cybozu Labs must actually be seen as a very smart move.

Cybozu Labs products

Akky presented a selection of products made by Cybozu Labs:

Pathtraq

Pathtraq is a tool to monitor and measure surfing behavior of individuals who agreed to the terms of use. Pathtraq’s main purpose is to filter what its users regard as the hottest topics on the web at the moment. Akky said the service can roughly be compared with Alexa.

Japanize

Japanize is essentially a translation plugin for menus on web pages and dependent on the participation of its members. The site quickly attracted people interested in Non-Japanese web services. There are over 40,000 active users per day whilst contributors already translated menus of over 760 web services from English (and other languages) into Japanese. An expanded service called Mylingual is also available not only for translating foreign languages to Japanese but also for translating menus in any language (out of 56) into German, English, Spanish and others. The service is not yet well known among the potential target users though.

Altspace

Altspace is a member-only forums service. Using the site is free but an invitation is needed for registration.

Doukaku

Web engineers in Japan form a very cohesive unit (by the way: In English, Japanese programmers prefer to be called “engineer”.). That’s why Cybozu Labs decided to create a meeting point specifically for geeks. Doukaku is a platform on which Japanese engineers take part in programming quizzes from their favourite programming languages. Now more than 10 different language codes can be compared on the same question.

S6

Akky delivered his presentation with a HTML/Javascript based tool called S6 which is also made by Cybozu Labs.

Akky’s own service: Narabe

In parallel to his activities at Cybozu Labs, Akky in the last months – together with a partner - secretly developed a Web 2.0 platform offering a completely fresh approach. “Narabe” (still in closed beta) will soon be released simultaneously in Japanese and English (OK, this is a must as Asiajin’s big man).

Narabe’s tag line is “Compare everything”. The goal is to let people contribute comparisons of any kind as easily as possible. As one of the beta testers, I must say this user-friendly approach works. Using tables, Narabe lets members compare basically everything under the sun: software, cars, web sites, events, persons, restaurants etc. etc. All subjects and criteria can be freely chosen and commented on.

Presentation recorded by Tokyo2point0:

Phishing & Web 2.0 Security

My friend Gohsuke Takama presented the latest state of affairs on the dangers of phishing and security on the web. He is founder and owner of Meta Associates, a renowned IT journalist, the only Japanese board member of Privacy International and founding supporter of the CPSR. Wow!

Picture: Gosuke Takama from Meta Associates

Gohsuke’s presentation was actually very detailed and he touched upon a large number of topics.

Phishing and cybercrime in general

After presenting classic examples of email phishing in text and HTML form, Gohsuke delivered some details coming from McAfee’s Criminology Report 2007. The study reveals for example that the number of Americans affected by phishing/online banking fraud is in the millions. The FBI estimated the total cost of cybercrime to be 67 billion USD in the USA alone (in 2005).

Gohsuke also briefly explained some crime techniques such as website spoofing, sniffers, IP hijacking, pharming and others.

Crime in Web 2.0

Today’s Web 2.0 environment offers criminals a number of additional tools for their illegal activities. Gohsuke said that now the danger of exploiting social interaction, protocols and norms comes into play. According to him, the “human factor” became more and more important in cybercrime in the last years.

Gohsuke added a couple of recommendations for Web 2.0 developers regarding security issues:

• Don’t copy and paste AJAX code without understanding how it really works.
• Develop user interfaces with having in mind opportunities for attack by criminals.
• Test your products carefully before launching them.
• Address specialized 3rd party security services to decrease the danger of crime on your Web 2.0 site.

Presentation recorded by Tokyo2point0:

More info about the Tokyo2point0 event and network can be found on the official Tokyo2point0 site, the Facebook group or on Mixi.

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

Today, YAPC::Asia 2008, one of the biggest Perl conference, had been held at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Serkan, Akky, and I attended the conference.

This time, YAPC has three parallel sessions during two days, and number of registered attendees reached 500. With a help of abundant sponsorship from Perl user companies such as Recruit, livedoor, DeNA, mixi , Yahoo!, and so on, the conference has a free dinner and lunches. It’s really a generous deal considering mere 4500yen ($45) entrance fee.

The atomosphere was truly international. Many people are attending from overseas. Half of sessions are done in English.

Jesse Vincent introduced his new distributed database called Prophet. Prophet is an asynchronously replicated distributed database system. It means user can change the database when he’s offline, and can upload when he gets connected. Jesse implemented a bug tracking system on it.

Ikuhiro Ihara revealed Livedoor’s spam filtering engine. Livedoor is providing many services such as blog, wiki, and bulletin board system. All services share same engine to previous dataset of spams. An automatically created IP based apache filter rejects 50,000 to 5 million accesses each day.

He said, on New Year’s Day, everyone writes “Happy new year” on a same time. His filter needs an ad hoc fix not to label those posts as spams.

YAPC::Asia 2008 is organised by volunteers (shibuya.pm). I want to thank them for organising such a great event every year.

I will write a photo report of the conference dinner later.

Tags: Community, Japan // Add Comment »

Here comes a new idea directly from Japan to make life on the web a little easier.

Llamerada, a Japanese web engineer, coded a Flickr mashup on AJAX interface. He announced the release today on his blog.

So what is this about?

The basic idea is to make search on Flickr more comfortable. Llamerada wanted to display as many as 16,000 photos in grid style (retrieved by Flickr’s API and based on Flickr tags), make use of Google Maps flavored AJAX interface and arrange similar photographs close to each other within the grid by using a self-developed algorithm.

The new service is named “TagGrid of Flickr Popular Tags”.

As can be seen on the screenshot, the overall view of tags comes to play in the box on the right hand side. However, various tags like “Japan”, “girls”, “animals”, “Ireland” etc. are wildly mixed together on the “map”. Some of the tags form a cloud, making them impossible to read.

Pictures tagged “animal”, for example, are grouped in the box on the left. In fact, browsing by tags is more comfortable this way. However, similar photos were not necessarily arranged next to each other when I tried out the application.

So some more work needs to be done to make this cool idea worthwile. There is no language or cultural barrier here so it is easy to check TagGrid out yourself.

Tags: Japan, New Service // 1 Comment »

On Friday, Japan’s very own video portal and geek paradise Nico Nico Douga announced a partnership with this country’s most influential web site, Yahoo! Japan.

First, Nico Nico decided to expand its “ichiba” (market place) offering by adding a Yahoo! Shopping button beneath all of its videos. Users can alternatively click on an Amazon button to see merchandise which is somehow related to the videos they are watching. Moreover, it is possible to download music and ringtones.

Picture: New Yahoo! Shopping button

Picture: Search results from Yahoo! Shooping

It is about time Nico Nico Douga made a move. While the site is wildly popular especially in the otaku community, Dwango (Nico Nico Douga’s parent company) is said to lose around 100 million Yen a month due to high server and other costs.

Further moves announced

Also, Yahoo! Japan now integrates videos from Nico Nico into its search index (under the video tab). This is the first time Nico Nico shares information with outside parties. Users still need to login in order to actually view the material though.

As a third result of the collaboration, it is planned that users owning a Yahoo! Japan ID can soon login to Nico Nico without registering to the video service (probably by OpenID).

If this collaboration doesn’t help Nico Nico to further expand its user base and sales, I don’t know what will.

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

The Japanese government is planning to legislate regulations of “harmful” Internet content. Now, Liberal Democratic Party’s Sanae Takaichi is preparing to pass an Internet censorship law.

Now several groups are acting against the legislation.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Rakuten, DeNA, and NetStar made an official statement against the legislation. One of the leaders of this action is Masanori Kusunoki (@masanork or mkusunok at hatena, both in JP), a deputy CTO of Microsoft KK.

MiAU (JP) (Movement for the Internet Active Users) is a vocal political NPO acting against the abuse of copyrights and Internet censorship. They are acting against the law too.

WIDE project made a statement in English too. WIDE is a leading Internet research group in Japan.

Tags: Community, Japan // Add Comment »

The Japan’s biggest conference on Ruby, RubyKaigi 2008, will start to sell tickets from 10th of May 10:00 JST (GMT+0900). Ticket will be sold out immediately (in few hours, probably).

The conference will be held from 20th-22nd June, but talks are planned only on 21st and 22nd. The venue is Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba City, Ibaraki, Japan, 45 minutes from Tokyo.

RubyKaigi 2008 is a less international conference than YAPC::Asia 2008. Most talks will be given with Japanese, but still a few talks in English are planned at this moment. If you are living in Japan, or East Asia, it is worth considering to join.

Ticked can be bought at Lawson convinience store chain in Japan. If you are living outside of Japan, you have to contact them by e-mail.

I’m going to talk at the conference too. See you there.

Tags: Community, Japan // Add Comment »

I noticed that the animation gif gallery on Niconico Douga is on del.icio.us popular.

Some people may think what the hell it is. It is not a free-icon gallery.

As the page is a kind of secret page, there are no explanation on it. The page title means “No Title” in Japanese. These icons have been made (and still increasing) for Niconico Douga’s top page, where these animation icons are randomely displayed. If you are a registered user and logging it, you will see them.

So what is the purpose of them? Nothing. It seems that the people inside originally made them just for pleasure. Sometimes that space also shows ad animation GIF recently.

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

The Japanese are known to be one of the most fashion-conscious people in the world. And rumor has it they are the busiest. Their purchasing power is very high. Moreover, Japan boasts one of the largest markets for print magazines in the world.

Combine these elements and out comes a web site like nekore.

The service is presumably unique on a global level: Consumers are able to order items they stumble upon in fashion magazines without getting in touch with manufacturers or retailers! All they need to do is to register at nekore.com, email the page number of a magazine (the list is here) and location of the pants, jacket, pair of shoes etc. on the page and wait. A mobile site is also available.

Picture: nekore home page (main menu points translated in red)

Picture: Selection of magazines

Employees of the service investigate if the item in question is available, (if yes) wait for the payment and then complete the whole transaction by delivering a package to the customer’s door! Customers can choose between credit card payment, COD, bank transfer and payment at convenience stores.

The delivery is done by nekore’s parent company Yamato Holdings. Yamato is a huge Japanese logistics company but primarily known as a parcel delivery giant in this country. It established nekore in November 2004 as the first service of its kind. Similar sites include magaseek and Love Fashion! JO.

Although Yamato can use its own transportation infrastructure, pricing is rather steep. Depending on the value of the order, nekore charges at least 3,800 Yen (36 USD/23 Euros) for the transaction. For some strange reason, the minimum price for orders based on finds in magazines for men is 1,000 Yen higher. The site seems to be doing OK though. It became profitable in March last year.

nekore’s offering is ideal for people who don’t have the time or nerves to search for specific items on their own. Moreover, customers in rural or remote areas might be in the target group as well.

While the business model makes sense in a way, I am sure a web service like nekore would fail in Germany, for example (where I hail from). This is simply because most customers there would feel the prices are too high.

How about North American and European (Non-German) customers?

Tags: Japan, Service // Add Comment »

Today’s launched MySpace new feature, MySpace Karaoke, seems inaccessible from Japan, as you know, the birthplace of karaoke.

We apologize, but this content is not licensed in your region, and therefore, cannot be played.

We are working on launching international sites soon so please be sure to check back with us.

Sing your heart out!

MySpace Karaoke team

Well, not a big deal, actually.

• MySpace Japan exists so they may have different service plan, as the blocking page implies.
• MySpace is not popular in Japan, anyway. Mighty Mixi might be thinking similar service
• music copyright processing tends to be restricted by country border (sigh)
• No Japanese songs, I assume (cannot check from here!)

On Japanese internet, there are several paid internet-karaoke services (Paso kara hodai, karaoke@dam, Internet Songbank, etc.), but they are not “social” services but just audio (without vocal) download services.

Another example of regional restriction, Pandora, the popular internet radio, is not usable from Japan.

Tags: Japan // 3 Comments »