Asiajin

Q: What is the favorite notebook brand with Japanese developers?

MacBook? maybe.

Vaio? no.

It’s Toughbook.

Toughbook business laptops are marketed with ‘Let’s note’ brand in Japan. This ultra-light notebook has a surprisingly large share amongst Japanese developers. If you are looking for light (940g~1.5kg. 2lbs~3.3lbs), tough (water resistant) and long battery life (>6hours) notebook, it’s the answer.

Well. Why Toughbook? Japanese people tend to move with public transport. So, heavy notebooks are real pain. I think it’s a very good choice for every Asian people, especially for women.

Probably they should use another brand name than ‘Toughbook’. They should have read Al Ries.

Coincidentally, Asiajin founders are using same made-to-order burgundy-red Toughbooks:)

See also:

1. An Engadget article.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Shunichi Arai
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Nihon PHP User Kai(Japan PHP Users Group) is a community about PHP, open source script language and environment.

It aims to,

• contribute to the development of PHP
• further research and share PHP related info
• promote communication and technical exchange amongst PHP users

In order to make PHP more friendly to the Japanese Web Development community, some people from the group have been committing features to PHP (versions 3 through 6!) which has enabled PHP scripts to be written with Japanese encodings along with the ability to read and write data, as well. Because the these Multi-Byte encoding systems can be used with Korean, Chinese and other languages it is useful to other (Non-Japanese) communities, as well.

Along with new features to the language itself, another part of the group is working to keep the PHP manual well documented and localized in Japanese.

Planet PHP Japan is a one-stop blog aggregator that brings together group member weblogs who write about PHP in Japanese.

The 29th monthly PHP study meeting (2007-12-23, Tricorn meeting room, Yotsuya, Tokyo)There are no requirements to join the group, so please check the event calendar and/or the mailing-list.

Tags: Community, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Mobage town, a social network and gaming site for mobile phones, is now in deep crisis.

From December 10th, the Japanese government has requested mobiles phone companies to filter web content for minors. The filtering policy is very strict. It prohibits minors from accessing web sites in ‘communication’ criterion. ‘communication’ means all web sites with forum, chat, comment, or social network feature. So, Mobage falls into that criterion.

50% of Mobage users are minors. It will hurt DeNA, the operator of Mobage. Nomura securities, Japan’s leading stockbroker, downgraded DeNA’s rating. DeNA’s stock price fell 30 percent.

Nobuo Sakiyama, a social activist, criticized the fact that mobile phone companies are filtering web sites with gay and lesbian, political or religional topics.

See Also: (in English)

1. DeNA’s stock quote

Tags: Japan, News by Shunichi Arai
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Mixi is the biggest social network service in Japan. It has 11 million users so far. It’s a phenomenon. Before Mixi, the Web was not attractive enough for non-techie people. Mixi changed that. Mixi changed the daily social life of Japanese people.

Batara Eto – an intern from Indonesia – proposed the project to clone Friendster in 2003. He developed the site in the next few month. The site was named ‘mixi’. It’s quite a remarkable example which shows the diversity of the workforce is the key to success.

Mixi is not very different from Friendster, but there is a small but significant difference from Friendster or Orkut. Mixi has a blogging feature. It really helps to keep users visiting the site. Mixi is actually a social blogging tool.

The company’s name is ‘mixi’ too. Its former name was ‘e-mercury’ but the name was changed to ‘mixi’ after the huge success of the service. Initially, the company was founded as an Internet job agency. The job agency service, ‘find job’, is a quite profitable business too.

The founder Kenji Kasahara is a young quiet person. He looks like an introvert ‘Otaku’ kind of person. Probably he’s a much more acceptable role model for the younger Japanese generation than aggressive Livedoor or Rakuten founders.

See also: (in English)

1. A Mashable article about mixi
2. FY2007 Q1 Earnings Results Briefing Session(April-June 2007)
3. A Financial Times article – September 14 2006

Mixi (as of Oct. 2007)

• Type: Public (2121)
• Founded: Jun. 3rd 1999
• Went public: Sep. 14th 2006
• Sales: 5.2 billion yen ($45 million)
• Profit: 1.1 billion yen ($9.6 million)
• Users: 11 million
• Page views: 11.75 billion / month
• People: CEO, Kenji Kasahara
• People: CTO, Batara Eto (born 1979, formerly known as Batara Kesuma)

Note: Batara Eto will resign from the post in December 2007.

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
14 Comments »

Kin-en-style (禁煙スタイル, smoke-free style) is a restaurant listing site which only lists smoke-free places.

Japan’s smoking regulation law is not as rigid as the USA or European countries. They can smoke at almost every bar, restaurant and cafe (except Starbucks). The Japanese smoking rate is 30.9%, a very large figure.

Not everyone is happy with the situation. Some anti-smoking protestants are fighting for smoke-free Shinkansen super express trains. Kin-en-style is a fighter from the web industry.

I bet Kinenstyle is not earning big money yet. But their listing has very much expanded and now it’s useful; useful alternative restaurant site of Japan. The owner of the site is unknown.

See Also:

1. Their English site (still empty)

Tags: Japan, New Service by Shunichi Arai
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