Asiajin

On Friday, Japan’s very own video portal and geek paradise Nico Nico Douga announced a partnership with this country’s most influential web site, Yahoo! Japan.

First, Nico Nico decided to expand its “ichiba” (market place) offering by adding a Yahoo! Shopping button beneath all of its videos. Users can alternatively click on an Amazon button to see merchandise which is somehow related to the videos they are watching. Moreover, it is possible to download music and ringtones.

Picture: New Yahoo! Shopping button

Picture: Search results from Yahoo! Shooping

It is about time Nico Nico Douga made a move. While the site is wildly popular especially in the otaku community, Dwango (Nico Nico Douga’s parent company) is said to lose around 100 million Yen a month due to high server and other costs.

Further moves announced

Also, Yahoo! Japan now integrates videos from Nico Nico into its search index (under the video tab). This is the first time Nico Nico shares information with outside parties. Users still need to login in order to actually view the material though.

As a third result of the collaboration, it is planned that users owning a Yahoo! Japan ID can soon login to Nico Nico without registering to the video service (probably by OpenID).

If this collaboration doesn’t help Nico Nico to further expand its user base and sales, I don’t know what will.

Tags: Japan, News, Video by serkantoto
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The Japanese government is planning to legislate regulations of “harmful” Internet content. Now, Liberal Democratic Party’s Sanae Takaichi is preparing to pass an Internet censorship law.

Now several groups are acting against the legislation.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Rakuten, DeNA, and NetStar made an official statement against the legislation. One of the leaders of this action is Masanori Kusunoki (@masanork or mkusunok at hatena, both in JP), a deputy CTO of Microsoft KK.

MiAU (JP) (Movement for the Internet Active Users) is a vocal political NPO acting against the abuse of copyrights and Internet censorship. They are acting against the law too.

WIDE project made a statement in English too. WIDE is a leading Internet research group in Japan.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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The Japan’s biggest conference on Ruby, RubyKaigi 2008, will start to sell tickets from 10th of May 10:00 JST (GMT+0900). Ticket will be sold out immediately (in few hours, probably).

The conference will be held from 20th-22nd June, but talks are planned only on 21st and 22nd. The venue is Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba City, Ibaraki, Japan, 45 minutes from Tokyo.

RubyKaigi 2008 is a less international conference than YAPC::Asia 2008. Most talks will be given with Japanese, but still a few talks in English are planned at this moment. If you are living in Japan, or East Asia, it is worth considering to join.

Ticked can be bought at Lawson convinience store chain in Japan. If you are living outside of Japan, you have to contact them by e-mail.

I’m going to talk at the conference too. See you there.

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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I noticed that the animation gif gallery on Niconico Douga is on del.icio.us popular.

Some people may think what the hell it is. It is not a free-icon gallery.

As the page is a kind of secret page, there are no explanation on it. The page title means “No Title” in Japanese. These icons have been made (and still increasing) for Niconico Douga’s top page, where these animation icons are randomely displayed. If you are a registered user and logging it, you will see them.

So what is the purpose of them? Nothing. It seems that the people inside originally made them just for pleasure. Sometimes that space also shows ad animation GIF recently.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The Japanese are known to be one of the most fashion-conscious people in the world. And rumor has it they are the busiest. Their purchasing power is very high. Moreover, Japan boasts one of the largest markets for print magazines in the world.

Combine these elements and out comes a web site like nekore.

The service is presumably unique on a global level: Consumers are able to order items they stumble upon in fashion magazines without getting in touch with manufacturers or retailers! All they need to do is to register at nekore.com, email the page number of a magazine (the list is here) and location of the pants, jacket, pair of shoes etc. on the page and wait. A mobile site is also available.

Picture: nekore home page (main menu points translated in red)

Picture: Selection of magazines

Employees of the service investigate if the item in question is available, (if yes) wait for the payment and then complete the whole transaction by delivering a package to the customer’s door! Customers can choose between credit card payment, COD, bank transfer and payment at convenience stores.

The delivery is done by nekore’s parent company Yamato Holdings. Yamato is a huge Japanese logistics company but primarily known as a parcel delivery giant in this country. It established nekore in November 2004 as the first service of its kind. Similar sites include magaseek and Love Fashion! JO.

Although Yamato can use its own transportation infrastructure, pricing is rather steep. Depending on the value of the order, nekore charges at least 3,800 Yen (36 USD/23 Euros) for the transaction. For some strange reason, the minimum price for orders based on finds in magazines for men is 1,000 Yen higher. The site seems to be doing OK though. It became profitable in March last year.

nekore’s offering is ideal for people who don’t have the time or nerves to search for specific items on their own. Moreover, customers in rural or remote areas might be in the target group as well.

While the business model makes sense in a way, I am sure a web service like nekore would fail in Germany, for example (where I hail from). This is simply because most customers there would feel the prices are too high.

How about North American and European (Non-German) customers?

Tags: Japan, Service by serkantoto
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