Asiajin

This month’s Mobile Monday Tokyo event (held on March 24th near Hibiya park in central Tokyo) was actually an awards show. The so-called “MoMo Tokyo Peer Awards” event featured a total of 12 companies aiming to go to Malaysia in May to represent Japan in the Mobile Monday Global Summit.

Speaking time was limited to three minutes – the awards show was based on an “elevator pitch” approach.

Bluntly put, I am not sure if all of the contestants were aware what kind of opportunity the event on Monday represented to them. Most of the presentations simply didn’t seem to be well-prepared (slides, flow, language, organization). Some were even just awful, I am sorry to say. Given that approximately 200 industry insiders were present and Mobile Monday events generally attract a lot of attention in the media, this is beyond my understanding.

Contestants and winners

Competing companies were divided into three groups:
1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program
2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing
3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

The winners are marked with “*”.

1) Academic: Students in an accredited University program

Mobile Krishna* (information service for tourists in India with no website)
BCmoney MobileTV (recommendation and monetization service)

2) Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing

Stargame’s* (translation service)
Choten.tv (3G videocall system)
Starling Software (mobile web technology)
UTUTU (social counter system “Kaztool”)

3) Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding

J-Magic* (face recognition system)
GMAP (location-based map service “Find Tokyo”)
Mobile Healthcare (management system for various diseases “Lifewatcher”)
Naviblog (speech-to-mobile blog service)
Next Ninja (mobile video service)
Rockbird (mobile CMS)

My personal favorites services of the show were Rockbird (marketed as “Dreamweaver” for mobile applications), Next Ninja’s video technology and Lifewatcher-which I liked the most. More on the winners can be found here.

Opinion

From the 12 companies listed above, English web pages are offered by only six contestants. The same goes for the services pitched themselves. From the three winners, two companies offer Japanese-only web pages and services. Mobile Krishna is not online at all-go figure.

At least, J-Magic’s CEO Takuya told me English translations are being prepared. Overall though, it is commendable that eight representatives of Japanese companies went onstage and made a presentation in English to such a large audience!

I liked this month’s Mobile Monday event much better than the one in February. The venue itself (20F of Shinsei Bank’s HQ) was cool and suitable for an event of this size. The show was followed by a networking session during which attendees could get more information on the competing companies at their exhibition stands.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community by Serkan Toto
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Nifty Laboratory, a marketing research section of Nifty, which owns one of the biggest ISP in Japan @nifty, also provides big blog hosting service Cocolog, announced its new splog(spam blog) filtering technology combining several different splog finder methods.

They also applied the filter to Japanese blog articles, sampled 100,000 for each month from their 450 million article archives (which they claim 90 % of Japanese blog articles). The result is, averagely 40% of blog entries are spam in Japanese blogosphere.

Japanese blogosphere is known the biggest in the world by numbers, as reported often on Technorati’s quarterly State of the Blogosphere report.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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I admit to being a net video junkie. More often than I probably should, I find myself spending time on sites like Youtube, Nico Nico Douga or Veoh. As there are hundreds of services of this kind on the web now, search engines specializing in digging up videos started emerging in the past months.

One promising video search service and a genuine Japanese product goes by the name of Fooooo. Daisuke Tanaka, director at Bank of Innovation (the company behind Fooooo), was kind enough to personally give me some insight on the service on a recent occasion.

Full-fledged video search service

At the moment, Fooooo is able to search a whopping 130 million videos from nearly 100 sources from the most different backgrounds. User can browse the site through accessing 18 different categories, they can view the most popular videos of the moment as suggested by Fooooo and -of course- can search via keyword input.

In the latter case, users don’t have to type in the whole search term since the service will complete it for them. When typing, Fooooo simultaneously offers a handful of contextual suggestions displayed in a container under the search box. This is a really cool feature and I found many interesting videos just by that way!

Moreover it is possible to limit search by play time of the videos and different channels.

As the world’s first video search engine, Fooooo established a Facebook application with which you can use main functions. The application works well but I personally prefer the “traditional” way of accessing the site itself. Fooooo also offers a widget and an RSS function.

Going global

Fooooo faces a couple of competitors in the video search field: Blinkx, Truveo, Dabble, EveryZing and newcomer mefeedia to name just a few. The Japanese player approaches video search in a different way however. Blinkx for example utilizes speech recognition technology to search within videos and puts its services in a much broader context. From a function-based point of view, Fooooo is rather comparable to video aggregators Truveo or Dabble. In my opinion, Fooooo is superior in terms of design, usability and size of database accessed.

Daisuke told me he wants to accelerate internationalization of his service. The initial homework is done already since the company undertook a considerable effort to fully translate Fooooo. Main languages covered at the moment include:

• English
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian

This is an impressive list. In addition to the translation, Fooooo differentiates the “most popular” videos of the day (prominently displayed in the middle of the home page) by country/language selected. As a German, I have to say the Teutonic version is not translated well though. The English and Japanese sites are alright. I am not sure about the other languages.

However, many more Japanese web companies should go the “Fooooo-way” and make their services available for a global customership from the get-go.

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by Serkan Toto
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YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) Asia 2008, one of the biggest hacker conferences in Asia, will start attendee registration on March 25th. Seats will be sold out really soon.

YAPC is a bilingual (Japanese/English) conference and expecting many international speakers and attendees. YAPC will be held in Tokyo on May 15th-16th.

Larry Wall gives a key note. You shouldn’t miss this opportunity.

Tags: Community, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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Weathernews Inc., the world largest private weather service company headquatered in Japan, is conducting the 5th year “Sakura Project (Cherry-blossom project)” with involving over 17,000 users around the nation via cellular phone browsers.

People, willingly registering this nation-wide CGM project on the Weathernews mobile site ( http://wni.jp/ , seems only available from Japanese cellularphone), are assigned to become a “Sakura Monitor”, who sets one specific cherry-blossom tree around their home, and send its information such like tree’s “address”, “age”, “how sun shines” and pictures (taken by cellphone).

Weathernews will respond to the infomation sender users to provide the tree’s flowering forecast within 48 hours, as they told. The company boasts that their 5 years collected data contributes to more accurate cherry-blossom forecasting.

In this season in Japan, many of portal websites, individual specialized sites competes to provide cherry blossom viewing spots info.

See also:

Yahoo! Japan category “Hanami”(Cherry Blossom Viewing) [J]

Tags: Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
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