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Mixi’s CTO to step down


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

Mixi logo

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

Bounen Kaigi 2007 report (2)


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).

Warai

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).

Zaku Phone

(*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.

Discussion Time in Bounen Kaigi 2007

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]

Bounen Kaigi 2007 report (1)


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.

Tokyo Midtown Roppongi

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).

Bounen Kaigi

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

7th-tumbr

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.

Asiajin launches


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/

Niconico douga


Niconico-Douga

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 screenshot

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