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
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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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Mixi, No.1 Social Networking Service in Japan, today announced that Batara ETO will leave his CTO job at the end of December, 2007.

Eto, who is originally born in Indonesia recently naturalized (his former name was Batara Kesuma), is well know as a person to suggested Social Network Service in E-Mercury, the former name of Mixi, Inc. Mixi is the one of the biggest net services in Japan now and its traffic is generally well-handled by Mixi’s engineering team lead by him. He became Mixi’s CTO in December 2005 and sometimes made presentations about huge website scalability architecture on LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl) technology.

Mixi’s announcement does not include if they name another CTO or leave it blank. Eto will remain as a “Gijyutsu Komon” (Technical Adviser) so it is unlikely that he moves to other SNS competitors such like Gree(No.2 users), MySpace(opened Japan page) or friendster(recently added Japanese localization).

See Also:

Disclosed information about Batara Eto’s resign [J][pdf]

Batara Kesuma’s presentation [pdf] at MySQL Users Conference 2006, Santa Clara, CA

Tags: Japan, News, Person by Akky Akimoto
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The first part of Bounen Kaigi report is here

Hosts’ topics

Co-hosts talked which net services they are interested in recently, their own project plans for 2008.

Sponsor corner

From all attendee’s votes for “The Kanji letter of 2007″, Yahoo! Japan guys chose a letter “Warai”(langh, smile).

The 4 voters for “Warai” played “Janken” (Rock, Paper, Scissors) to win a prize, SoftBank(*1) Cellphone 913SH G TYPE-CHAR, Char Aznable’s custom version(*2).

(*1) SoftBank, the 3rd share in cellularphone carrier in Japan, owns over 40% share of Yahoo! Japan, which is higher than US Yahoo! Inc’s 33%.

(*2) “Char Aznable” is a popular character in animation “Gunzam”. Its battery-charger is robot(mobile-suit)-head shape. This ridiculously expensive limited model was sold out in spite of its price, 130,000 yen (1200 USD).

Zentai Kaigi(everyone’s discussion)

The last, and probably the most important session is, as always, Zentai Kaigi. all attendee were teamed up by 6 people to make up a new net service idea to tuckle a challenge.

The challenge was to think about new innovative service by filling up lacked part to this sentence,

There are much more conferences and unconferences actively held in 2007 lead by networks on social network services, weblogs and movie-shared sites. Now, at the end of 2008, you are looking back that your accidentally invented meeting-support-service caused all the rage, made people have 20 times more conferences than before.

This revolutionary service, (________), solved the typical (________) problem on meeting by (______ing) with utilizing (________) on the net.

1st prize was given to the team “Cancel wo dogenkasento ikan”, which adds user-reputation review system on top of　study meeting management system, to be able to exclude habitual “no-show” applicants.

“Dogenkasento ikan” is one of 2007’s buzzword, which is Miyazaki prefecture dialect means “must solve by any means”.

Bounenkai of Bounen Kaigi

After-party was held at Izakaya (Japanese style bar) in Roppongi with around 7-80 attendee. Every year-end, this after-party has been deepening exchanges among entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers and other influencers.

See Also:

Yahoo! Japan part detail report by BroadBand Watch [J]

Event report: Bounen Kaigi 2007 (a lot of pictures) [J]

Tags: Community, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The 5th annual year-end conference “Bounen Kaigi 2007″ was held at Yahoo! Japan meeting room, Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi, Tokyo. This year’s sponser is Yahoo! Japan.

Bounen Kaigi, which name is an original word made from “Bounenkai”(year-forgetting party in Japanese) and “Kaigi”(meeting, conference) started in December 2003, by Gen Taguchi, the owner of the most influent net business Japanese blog 100shiki, and Daiya Hashimoto, a famous book review blogger (Jyoho Kogaku Passion for The Future).

Noticable Net Services in 2007

The first part of the conference is the Taguchi/Hashimoto’s 10 noticable websites picks.

1. NicoNico Douga/Zisoku Nicometer Movie CGM service and its ranking
2. Nounai Maker - Online Generator of your brain-image for fun
3. Girl of Summer/Ustream - video aggregation mashup using Ustream
4. Hatena Tokumei Diary　- anoymous group blog by Hatena
5. iKnow Social Network for English learner
6. twitter
7. tumblr
8. Picnik
9. Kiva
10. Ren-ai 575 user generated Senryu(Japanese style short poem) BBS

They collected online-vote from their readers and chose interesting sites from the list. These are NOT the most popular websites in Japan, but rather sites which are getting attention by early adaptors. Some of them may be bigger in 2008.

Yahoo! Japan’s 2007 top keywords and other trend

Yahoo! Japan’s employee explained the most searched words 2007.

They also disclosed some number of search trends around Mixi, Mobage-town, Kao Cheki, Purofu, celebrity search, etc.

Tags: Community, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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We’d like to announce the arrival of a weblog called ‘Asiajin’ which introduces Asian Internet startups to English speaking readers.

Asiajin will provide you information about Asian Internet trends, company profiles, key people, communities, conferences and events. We provide you essential information for professionals who want to do business in Asian market.

You may or may not already know us — “Akky” (Hiroki Akimoto) and Shunichi Arai - as we have been active bloggers on the Japanese scene for some time now. Akky’s weblog was voted ‘Alpha blogger’, one of the most prominent blogger awards in Japan whereas the Japanese government identified Arai as a ‘genius programmer’.

We both have technology backgrounds and a deep interest in the Internet industry and after attending a Web related conference in San Francisco, became concerned that Asian startups may be virtually invisible to the rest of the world.

Our objectives are to introduce Asian startups to the world and to strengthen relations between Asian Internet communities.

Asiajin means ‘Asian people’ in Japanese and the name was chosen in order to act as a unifying catalyst for the market in Asia.

At present Asiajin provides articles regarding Japanese companies and is gradually expanding itself to cover broader areas. Two Taiwanese journalists are expected to contribute to Asiajin and Korean startups are expected to be covered in the near future.

Please contact ‘asiajin.info at gmail dot com’ for more information.

Asiajin team. http://asiajin.com/blog/

Tags: Announcement by shunichi arai
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Niconico douga is a rapidly growing video sharing site in Japan. Site’s feature is not very different from Youtube, but one cool difference gained big attraction. The difference is a comment feature which enables users to write timely comments on the video screen itself.

The feature allowed users to share ‘experience’ with other users.

Niconico douga attracted many users quickly. At a start, they superpose comments on streaming videos from youtube servers. Resultingly, Youtube started to refuse accesses from Niconico servers. They were forced to set up their own video servers.

Their own video servers are heavy burden to company’s balance sheet. The company, Dwango is its name, has spent about 600 million yen for servers.

Dwango changed the problem into a revenue. They limit peak time usage, and allow unlimited access only for paid users. 144,000 users are paying the fee and, the sum is 68 million yen per month. Advertisements and affiliates are making 18 million and 15 million yen accordingly.

Niconico douga’s success is backed by a powerful team. Lead developer is Akihiko Koizuka, a very powerful programmer. 2ch’s Hiroyuki is doing an advisor.

Currently Dwango is earning most revenue from ringtone services.

See also (in English):

1. Dwango company site
2. Tokytronic’s detailed article

Niconico douga:

• Page views: 59.5 million page views per day
• Video plays: 15 million plays per day
• Comments: 3.2 million comments per day
• Revenue: 101 million yen per month
• People: Developer, Akihiko Koizuka

Dwango (FY 2007):

• Founded: August 1997
• Revenue: 22.2 billion yen
• Loss: 1,408 million yen
• People: Chairman/CEO, Nobuo Kawakami
• People: President/COO, Hiroshi Kobayashi
• People: Managing Director, Hideki Mori

Tags: Company, Japan, Video by shunichi arai
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