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Japanese television broadcaster Yomiuri TV has found a novel new way to recruit young new employees to their company. They utilize Skype chat and video to conduct the interview.

The thinking behind the process is not to only demonstrate how “hip” they are to new technologies but also to provide an opportunity for many applicants to appear before the interviewers without taking on the cost of taking a bullet train ride to Osaka… perhaps a large expense which may not even yield a job.

Though the positions applied for DID have an IT connection, the ability to use the online chat inherently demonstrated at least a minimal required knowledge of new media technology.

It’s interesting to see traditional, established “old school” type of companies attempt these types of technologies. Normally, only tech related companies have done so in the past. Let’s hope we’ll see more companies around the world do the same.

[Via RBBToday]

Tags: Japan, News, Technology, Trend by Robert Sanzalone
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Japan is known as the world’s No. 1 producer of high quality video games. After all, companies such as Nintendo, Sony (Playstation) or Sega are rooted in this country. In the light of this, it seems strange that the leading online game service in Japan comes from Korea: Hangame (only accessible with IE). At certain times, over 100.000 users are logged in simultaneously!

One reason for the success might be the very early entry into the Japanese market in 2000 just after having established Hangame Korea in 1999. Since then, the service became very popular through cooperations with various Japanese Web companies and constant upgradings of its site.

Hangame slowly evolved into a huge gaming platform. Now the provider offers over 160 games from various genres. Hangame basically distinguishes “casual games” (featuring puzzles and easy to understand games) from “hard core games” (like RPGs or strategicals).

Pictures: Some selected game screenshots

Games are connected with avatar offerings. The site also features clubs and communities in which players of certain games can interact with each other. In the so-called Link Link Town, they can even do so by using avatars. Users can also communicate via the bulletin board or blog and chat on the site.

Picture: Hangame avatar in Link Link Town

Company and Business model
NHN is Korea’s biggest Internet company featuring Hangame Korea (also No. 1 in Korea) and the country’s biggest search engine Naver in its portfolio. NHN Japan was formed thorugh a merger of Hangame Japan and Naver Japan in 2003. Hangame Mobile Japan naturally exists as well.The company currently employs over 400 people in its Tokyo headquarters.

Hangame has millions of users all over the world and claims to be the world’s biggest online game portal. In Japan, NHN makes the most revenue by selling special avatars to customers (i. e Nike or Louis Vuitton wearing avatars) while choosing basic avatars is free. Also, many games feature in-game shops in which real money must be spent to obtain items such as more powerful weapons, armor etc. Some features in games (like saving high scores) can only be accessed by premium account holders/subscribers.

Opinion
The quantity, variety and quality of games is very good if not outstanding. Most of the games are localized from Korea. While the casual game section does its job some of the offerings in the hardcore game section are surprisingly good in terms of graphics, audio, playability and depth. They can in no way be compared to the simple flash-based games we know on other gaming sites.

Users can try and play the basic version of games before deciding to spend money to access the full version. This approach makes sense and is fair towards customers. Maybe this is also the reason Hangame won a number of Japanese Internet awards in the past.

Also I personally like the wild design and structure of the Web site - much like a video game itself. The level of activity in the blog and community sections is suprisingly high.

The premium plan with its “Han-coin”, premium point and premium ticket systems is too complicated however.

Also it is very annoying to be forced to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to play games. Moreover, Hangame’s service is not browser based so that time-consuming software downloads are required (i.e. 60 MB for the initial download). Given the high quality of graphics and audio in some games, this has to be regarded as unavoidable. Thankfully the registration process is quite simple yet Japanese only.

See Also: (in English)

1. NHN Korean HQ site

Tags: Company, Japan, Korea by serkantoto
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On the twitter Japanese localization news, newly-opened Twitter Japan development blog explains what items are on their task list on localization process.

In their current plan,

• They are making Japanese version on top of current (running) system.
• Japanese users and world users belong to the same account space.
• They do NOT make another Japanese version of twitter only with newcoming Japanese users.
• There are NO filtered public timeline only with Japanese messages/users. Japanese users will see English messages, vise versa.
• Both Japanese and original users/messages/following/followers/favorites are shown in mixed
• Menu/Help/etc. will be translated. Translated Japanese will be available triggered by menu, or by accessing different URL

Also, they mentioned cellular phone browser improvement plan in other entry.

As far as I read them, what they are planning is only adding text localization feature to the original twitter, which should not be a lot of work, since Twitter is made by Ruby on Rails and Rails has built-in localization support. It is possible that continuous performance tuning on Twitter may remove the localization related codes and recovering them more difficult though.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Takigawa Lardux Christel Masami, born 1977, is a Japanese news anchor. She has become an internet phenomenon in Japan like Mélissa Theuriau.

A website called Gedo-style created a funny image generator called ‘Takigawa Christel generator‘ which creates a video capture image with a fake caption.

See Also:

1. A youtube movie of Christel Takigawa
2. A youtube movie of Mélissa Theuriau, voted most beautiful woman in the world.

Tags: Japan, Joke by shunichi arai
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Probably you may noticed that two new editors joined Asiajin. It’s a big first step to make Asiajin to be a renowned blog about Japanese and Asian IT.

Hiroumi Mitani is working at international development office of Rakuten. He is the first guy who contacted us for joining. His Japanese blog is here.

Serkan Toto is a German based in Tokyo. He is sharing a passion with us to introduce Japanese IT to the rest of the world. Currently, Serkan prepares to start his own IT company in Tokyo. He runs a his own blog ‘Tokyotronic‘ on Japanese IT.

It’s really delightful to welcome two passionate bloggers to Asiajin. Please expect us to produce a lot of great articles this year!

Tags: Announcement by shunichi arai
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* Numbers of job openings in USA and Japan were taken from indeed and Jobdirect, respectively. C language is omitted due to the technical difficulty.

Do you have any idea why C++ is popular in USA and PHP is popular in Japan?

* This article is reproduced from “yukoba no nikki” by Yu Kobayashi with permission.

Tags: Japan, Technology, Trend by shunichi arai
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Newsing is a social bookmark service similar to Digg. The big difference is a coloured circle beside the bookmarked news title. It’s a graphed circle with red and gray and “circle” means thumbs up and “cross” means thumbs down.

newsing.jp

Users can express their attitude to the bookmarked news by clicking either a red circle or a gray cross. You might not familiar with this expression but it is quite general and familiar in Japan.

In western countries “check” is a sign for correct. But in Japan “check” usually used as a sign for wrong.

The sign for correct is “circle( Maru in Japanese)” and the sing for wrong is “check” or “cross( Batsu in Japanese)”.

You can see how it’ s used in Japan by watching a famous quiz TV program during 80’s in Japan. It was kind of a reality show. Thousands of people joined to the quiz contest to travel from Tokyo, Japan to New York, U.S.A.. By answering correct answers certain numbers of participants could survive to travel further. First, 100 people can go out from the main stadium to Narita Tokyo international airport. And finally only three people survive to reach New York and fight final quiz battle to be a champion of quiz.

Trans America Ultra Quiz: YouTube

Well “circle” is a shape that means a lot in Japan.
If you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger that means “money”; representing a coin. And the circle is of course even used in a national flag.

You can find “circle” and “cross” also in buttons of playstation controller. “Cirle” is normally used to accept the commnad and”Cross” is used to cancel the command for typical Japanese games.

Kotonoha is a unique service collecting comments to the questions posted by users.

Kotonoha

Various type of questions are posted by users from silly one to the serious one. You can see how people react to each questions by reading the comments posted for “Circle” or “Cross” of that question.

So how was your day today? Maru or Batsu?

Tags: Company, Japan by hiroumi
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January 18th, Tokyo - DeNA, a company which runs Mobage town, will establish a subsidiary in the states. “DeNA Global,Inc.” will be located in California, supposedly San Francisco Bayarea. They will launch a US version of their very profitable mobile business there.

Also they revised upward their net profit forecast from 4.5 billion to 6.3 billion. The revenue and operating profit forcased was revised from 25.5 billion to 29.0 billion yen, and 9.0 billion to 12.5 billion yen, respectively.

See Also:

1. Our Mobage Article

Tags: Company, Japan, News by shunichi arai
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On Tuesday, the monthly Tokyo2point0 event in Omotesandou/Tokyo was held for the 8th time. The venue was really packed. Andrew Shuttleworth (the organizer) told me he would love to see more people to RSVP before coming. Also, companies can contact Andrew directly for sponsorship to help the volunteers currently running the event.

You can sign up directly on the Tokyo2point0 site itself, go to Tokyo2point0’s Facebook group or get some information on Mixi.

Besides the (very important) networking part, the event mainly focused on three presentations. Two of them were English only. Judging from what I have seen, the Japanese people present were able to follow the speakers without problems though.

1) HTML 5
Michael Smith from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) delivered a detailed speech about HTML 5. Mike talked about the changes the fifth major revision of the Web’s main language will bring.

(all pictures in this posting courtesy of my friend Professor Ichinohe)

The core issue HTML 5 addresses is the problem of interoperability between browsers. The W3C is working to determine conformant user agent/Web browser behavior to overcome one of the biggest obstacles Web developers are faced with nowadays.

The new HTML version is still a draft. Michael was expectedly not able to predict precisely when all advantages HTML 5 delivers will come into effect.

(This presentation was off-the-record so the video will not be published.)

2) ONGMAP
Yuki Naotori from Open Associates/7ns presented his Award-winning Google maps mash up “ONGMAP”.

ONGMAP is thankfully also available in English. The service is describing itself as being the sum of “Google Maps+Web API+Tons of Geo Data”. Yuki said he wanted to create a very easy-to-use Web site.

Users can click on an area of interest on ONGMAP and the service scrapes various info about that particular place from external sources. Depending on the country, this info may include:

- weather
- WiFi spots
- local events
- hotels, restaurants, schools, convenience stores, beauty salons (!) and much more
- videos
- etc. etc.

Yuki also talked about his new project called “Japaaan”. In essence, Japaaan is a social network for people interested in discovering Japan’s “hidden” and cool tourist spots. Moreover, members will also meet offline and actually travel to selected sites. Gaijin and Japanese people are invited to join.

You can view Yuki’s presentation slides here.

Watch his presentation here.

3) Trendmap
My Swiss friend Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects caused a great stir last year in the Web world with what inititally was a joke. His company basically used the Tokyo metro map as a design background to display the relationship between Web services worldwide. Oliver told me he wanted to use this idea for the company name cards and later was overwhelmed by the huge international interest in his concept!

The map illustrates popularity, success, importance and other factors of about 200 Web sites from all countries. You can download the second version (from July 2007) here for free (PDF).

Oliver explained the yet-to-be released third and updated version of the Web trendmap. This time, Information Architects decided to go for an isometric approach.

Watch his presentation here.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, Person, Technology, Trend by serkantoto
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My friend omo created ‘Favidle‘, flickr variant of ‘hot or not’. Favidle obtains images from flickr with tags like ‘woman’, ‘girl’, etc… If user clicks a ‘Favor’, the image will be saved into their album and shared as a favidle. Here’s my fav album.

Very simple site, yet quite appealing.

See Also: (in English)

1. An official blog

Tags: Japan, New Service by shunichi arai
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