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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 serkantoto
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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 serkantoto
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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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Drecom announced that their board had decided business alliance with, and will raise 900 million yen shares to Rakuten, Japan’s top E-Commerce firm.

Drecom, which is a blog system vendor for small and mid sized companies, also doing web services. Rakuten will be the second shareholder of Drecom with 20.02% stocks, following to the founder/CEO Hiroyuki Naitoh’s 43.2%

Drecom is supposed to spend 600 to 700 million yen out of earning 900 million for repayment of debt.

via BBWatch

See also:

Drecom’s Release [pdf]

Rakuten: online shopping monopoly | Asiajin

Drecom: next scandal or …?

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Hi all. Today I introduce a software from Fukuoka, the city where I’m living.

Backlog is a web-based issue tracking software created by Nulab, a software company based in Fukuoka.

Backlog has a similar functionality to Trac, but its user interface is much more friendly. Backlog’s features are: issue tracking, wiki, subversion support, and webdav file sharing.

Backlog has an English user interface too. If your browser’s language preference is set to English, English interface will appear. The product web site is only in Japanese, though.

The company, Nulab, is earning most of revenue from custom software development. It seems they are not providing a lot of sales effort to sell Backlog.

There are many free alternatives in issue tracking software. It must be quite hard to sell Backlog, but without sales effort, no product can be successful. I really wish Nulab became a successful product company, because there are not many company earning profit from product in Fukuoka. Custom software development is much less attractive workplace for programmers.

I’m using Backlog, and satisfied with it. It’s a much better experience than struggle with Trac’s awful user interface. (sorry Trac lovers)

Tags: Japan, Service by shunichi arai
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When browsing Japanese websites, especially user-generated ones like BBS, you may see a lot of “w” letter at the end of lines on Japanese text. Such like,

“Blablabla www”

Do you know what they are? Those “w”, “ww”, “www” or longer consective “w”s mean laugh, laugh out loud in Japan.

i share Inc. recently researched how people recognizes “www”, with 472 internet users. The result is that 61.2% of ２０’s Japanese thinks “www” as big laugh, against the rest 38.8% think it as “the world wide web”.

The origin of the “www” is, probably,

(笑)

which means “(laugh)”, pronounced as “warai” in Japanese. Then, people who do not have much time to type in Japanese (well, it takes time to type in phonetic codes first, then convert them into Kanji, Chinese origin letters in Japanese), who were on online-game chat and/or instant messengers, started “(warai)” without Kanji conversion

(warai)

shotened,

(w)

later, closing brace was omitted

(w

At last, even the opening brace was erased, as you can distinct them from main text easily, because usually main text are written in Japanese letters. So we now have

w

If you would like to show your laughing more, double it,

ww

If it is LOL, you may want to type three times,

www

So if you see a sentence like “Oh yes, I am serious. www” in Japanese, it means s/he is not serious at all. www

[See also]

(Warai) on Wikipedia Japanese [J]

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Ishinokoe (means “voice of stone”) K.K. announced their newly designed tombstone series “Kuyou no mado” (”commemoration windows”), which has QR Code (Japanese 2D bar code) inside.

This QR Code, enhanced version “Design QR Code”, developed and trademarked by IT Design, can have small extra images in the code, which does not prevent proper code scanning. In this case, the QR Code has the word “Kuyou no mado” at the center.

Visitors of the graveyard will be able to take a picture of the QR Code by cellphone, to access to the deceased person’s memorable photos and profiles.

The site is also planned to have a log feature that records who visits when, then families and relatives can share the history in future, as they said. They are also developing a plan to provide virtual grave visiting by celler phone for young generation’s convenience.

I am sure that this release hits also Japanese media, as this concept is weird even for Japanese people, however, this product also shows that how QR Code are commoditized in Japan. They are now flooding over typical usage on train ads, business cards and coupon flyers.

via Impress K-tai Watch

See Also:

Mobile barcodes:Huge success in Japan so far. | Asiajin

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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The monthly Tokyo2point0 event took place for the 10th time in Harajuku last Tuesday. More info about the event and network can be found on the official Tokyo2point0 site, the Facebook group or on Mixi.

This time, two presentations were held (in English and Japanese), leaving enough room for networking among the attendees (which is in my view always very welcome).

Kakaku.com’s new Photohito service

Kakaku.com (”Kakaku dotto komu”, is their company name) is a huge Japanese price comparison platform (more info here and here) covering a wide range of products from electronics to financial services. In fact, over time Kakaku.com evolved into a full-fledged social shopping service, providing information on over 220,000 different products.

An internal initiative spearheaded by Kakaku.com engineer Shinya Sugiyama made the management clear a budget for the development of a photo sharing site called “Photohito” (which means “photo people” in Japanese). The new service is run under the umbrella of Kakaku.com, not by a separate entity.

Shinya said the first internal pitch was given in July last year and the service went online on February 21st. Shinya’s motivation was triggered by a personal dissatisfaction with current photo management sites available on the web. So he decided to produce a service on his own.

According to Shinya, Photohito is following a “3S”-approach. The site wants to focus on showing pictures for 50%, on sharing for 25% and on searching contents for 25%.

The integration with kakaku.com is particularly interesting. For example, users can not only upload pictures but also state what camera they were taken with. Information retrieved from Kakaku.com’s database can then be used to add details regarding the hardware (i. e. lenses and other accessories). The service makes money when users click on the corresponding links and buy off kakaku.com.

Basic membership and uploading pictures is free. In addition to the integration into Kakaku.com, Photohito wants to sell storage space and advertisements to finance the site.

Shinya’s vision is to transform Photohito into a photo wiki to specifically serve Japanese camera and photo fanatics. To be honest, I didn’t see a real “killer” feature which would make members of other photo management services change to Photohito. The users seem to like it though: In 2.5 weeks, 1,500 people registered and uploaded approximately 10,000 photos already.

According to Shinya, there are no concrete plans for internationalization yet. Photohito is actually run by two people at the moment. Tokyo-based web producer Yongfook took over the design part completely on his own!

You can watch Shinya’s presentation here (direct link).

Press Army

The terribly jet lagged Michael Sheetal, director of Tokyo-based interactive design agency UltraSuperNew, delivered a presentation on “Press Army” (still in Alpha phase), his company’s most recent product.

In its simplest form, Press Army is a tool to monitor, collect and structure reactions to a certain project (i.e. a newly launched web service) found in various kinds of social media. This is done by using APIs from selected media aggregators on the web.

Sources covered by Press Army include Youtube, Technorati and Flickr. Users have the freedom to decide on a given media’s relevance. Press Army retrieves information from these sources and displays them on a single page, providing users with a comprehensive overview on what people think about their personal projects!

Press Army is fully bilingual (English/Japanese) but still in Alpha phase. UltraSuperNew built the site on the basis of PHP framework Symfony and Amazon’s EC2 service (the latter of which Michael couldn’t really recommend to the audience).

The company is still developing additional goodies to be included into Press Army, for example a blog widget. At the moment, it is planned to offer the service completely for free. An enterprise version with more features is supposed to actually generate revenue to cover costs for UltraSuperNew.

I think Press Army is a promising tool to keep control of the impact a given brand, web service, blog or any other product has in social media. Let’s see how the service develops and if UltraSuperNew can raise the resources necessary to efficiently market this cool idea in the industry.

The slides of the presentation can be accessed here. Watch Michael’s presentation here (direct link):
(both videos courtesy of event organizer Andrew Shuttleworth)

Tags: Community, Japan, New Service by serkantoto
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