Asiajin

On Thursday railway operator JR Toukai announced they will offer full Wi-Fi on the N700 Shinkansen bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka. This route is the most important one in Japan.

Travellers will be able to access the web in all seats for the first time in Japan. The Wi-Fi connection is even supposed to work in tunnels. The service will also be available at all stations between Tokyo and Osaka.

JR Toukai says they will install 32 hot spots in the 16 wagons of the N700. The company promises the service will be ready in March next year.

Via Nikkei Net

Tags: Company, Event Report, New Service, Technology by Serkan Toto
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Celebration of new Firefox 3 launch was held at a hotel in Shinagawa, Tokyo, with over 300 people, Mozilla Japan staff, developers, translators, web designers, engineers, bloggers and others.

Contributors, Mozilla’s new CEO John Lilly, Mozilla Japan chairperson Satoko Takita

Firefox Ice Trophy

Foxkeh!!, Japan made mascot to appeal Japanese internet users

The next Firefox 3.1 (planned late 2008) code name was recently named “Shiretoko” after Japan’s national park in Hokkaido.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Mobile Party is a website which supports Japanese wedding celemony afterparty, by utilizing atendee’s cellularphones.

In Japan, usual wedding day goes with the celemony (one of Shinto, Buddism, Christian-style, etc. no matter what their religion), formal reception and casual after-party. The first two usually involves families and relatives with few close friends (the size depends on richness and lifestyle, of course) mainly for elders, then the casual after-party (called “Nijikai”, means the second party) is held at bigger venue with more friends and acquintances, only with young people without family members and relatives.

For this Nijikai, kanji (=party organizer, could match with best man/bridesmaid) are supposed to make an good event schedule with quizes and games related with the marriaging couple.

Mobile Party is targetting for this Nijikai, and effectively uses mobile web application. That means, you can depend on all atendees have a web capable cellularphone in Japan.

By 30,000 yen (US$300), bride and groom’s profile, message boards, photo gallery, party quiz about the couple, bingo game (so typical for nijikai) and direct messaging among atendee’s (as nijikai is often a occasion for another matchmaking) are provided on mobile site.

messages typed in from atendees during party are viewable from PC website by the married couple

See Also:

Foreign game designers in Tokyo celebrates nijikai with original videogame / GMAN-GAMES

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
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Movie and music rental store operator Geo said yesterday they plan to buy all outstanding shares from Posren (post rental), Livedoor’s online DVD rental service for 560 million Yen ($5.3 million). The deal is supposed to take place July 1st.

Geo tries to close the gap to market leader Tsutaya, which operates Discas for renting DVDs and music CDs online. Another competitor is DMM. Tsutaya announced a new distribution for HD video just a few days ago. Aichi-based Geo’s own service is called Geo Land.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Firefox 3 release press conference was held at Takanawa Prince Hotel, Tokyo Japan.

Satoko TAKITA, chairman of Mozilla Japan gave the first announce of Firefox3 release in the morning at 2:00 a.m. 18th June (in Japan Standard Time), with looking back how they have been updating Mozilla products for years.

Mozilla Japan’s two missions

Firefox occupies 11.8% of browser share in Japanese market. Ms. TAKITA said that two things are important to spread Firefox more. One is to encourage communication among developers between Japan and the world, and the other one is to let Japanese companies use Mozilla’s Open Source technology to assist their development force.

Firefox 3 new features

Mozilla Japan Technical Manager Masayuki NAKANO introduced new features of Firefox3, such like Smart location bar, OS-integrated user interface, improved Add-On manager, HTML5 offline browse, etc .

Default search engines selection for Japan added Wikipedia Japanese and Oshiete goo!, one of the most popular Q and A site (like Yahoo! Answers).

It is also noted that Camellia, Japan made encryption technology is took in the new Firefox.

Camellia

A person from NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories explained the newly adopted Camellia encryption technology on Firefox3. Camellia was originally made by Mitsubishi Denki research in 2000, and was explained that is competitive method with leading encryption standard AES.

Firefox no Tomoshibi

Daisuke AKATSUKA, freelance developer who has been involving Firefox Add-On development, talked on his Firefox3 download promotion project “Firefox3 no Tomoshibi” (lights of Firefox3).

On this site, every single Firefox3 download will be visualized on Japan map as a flash. Demo was done with current version Firefox2.

[Update]

The release time is cleared now. 02:00 18th in Japan time.

[Update 2]

I could download it at 01:52.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Following Fenrir’s announcement of internationalizing their Sleipnir browser just a few days ago, now Japan-based Lunascape announced today they opened an office in the USA to promote their web browser of the same name more efficiently overseas.

Lunascape, Inc. with a capital stock of 300,000 USD will be located in Silicon Valley. Founder and CEO Hidekazu Kondo will lead the subsidiary. He will continue to direct operations in Japan.

The Lunascape browser is available in English (version 4.7).

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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The Japan’s biggest conference on Ruby, RubyKaigi 2008, is going to be held on 20th(fri)-22nd(sun) June.

Tickets for main sessions are already sold out. However you can attend to sub-sessions, poster sessions without ticket. I will give a talk as a part of sub-session on 21st (in Japanese).

Tags: Community, Japan by shunichi arai
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On Sunday, 15th June, The Happy Web Weekend, the event around microformats/Web Standards event was held in Ochanomizu, Tokyo, with John Allsopp, microformats authority and microformats book author from Australia.

Semantic Microblogging / Masahide KANZAKI

Masahide KANZAKI, who is well-known by his web standards and RDF infomation website The Web KANZAKI, which has been providing useful web tech info from the early web era, gave a presentation around 1. semantic web on microblogging and 2. geolocation and geohash applications.

Lunch break + Panel discussions

Networking lunch time followed by panel discussions with today’s two speakers, John Allsopp and Michael Smith. Satoshi KIKUCHI, the main organizer of the event from Actlink, brought up two hot topics,

Is microformats good for SEO?

The answers by both are the same “yes, but for pursuading your boss.”. SEO is not the essential purpose of microformats, though search engines are favor pages using web standards.

How iPhone changes mobile web?

Both encouraged you to invest/develop web applications for iPhone, instead of using native applications on SDK, to make your applications universal over other mobile devices like Nokia, Google Android.

Basic Microformats / John Allsopp

The main guest John Allsopp explained basic microformats, which adds information on regular HTML without breaking original code, also gives more machine-readable info to other net services like search engine, aggregation service, etc.

He showed several microformats, XFN, hCard, hCalendar, hReview, etc. with sample format, real usage on major websites and helper tools like browser add-on by which you can get those microformats information in visualized.

HTML5 Overview / Michael Smith

Michael Smith from W3C, who works based at Keio Univ., one of three W3C host organizations, spoke on HTML5 status.

He also talked about major browsers’ mobile version status updates, latest/beta web browsers’ cool features should be watched.

Where’s your web at? / John Allsopp

John Allsopp again talked this time on wider variety of web devices and how to deal with them.

When we have more different web devices to access the web, like from cellularphone, game console, car navigation and home appliances, developer/designer need to think about what usability are for them.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Ofcourse, you know about Aaron chair of Harman Miller. However, you probably haven’t heard about Cruise & Atlas from Okamura, a Japanese office furniture maker.

Cruise & Atlas is a set of chair and desk, which is consisting a mutually dependant pair. It has a really futuristic appearance. It looks like a chair from a Sci-fi movie.

The chair ‘Atlas’ has a very unique, low and reclined position. User sits like a Formula-car driver. The chair needs its special desk called ‘Cruise’ to fit with that special position. The desk is consisted with two boards, one is an adjustable inclined keyboard desk, and another is a desk to put displays.

Cruise & Atlas is a really expensive furniture. It costs 370,000 yen ($3,700).

Akky and I are using Cruise & Atlas, and quite satisfied with it. If you have backache or headache, consider having one?

I also recommend Contessa or Baron, great ergonomic chairs from Okamura. Those can be used with a normal desk. Probably it fits better for Asian people than Aaron chair. Also those have more reclined position than Aaron chair, so it may fit well for programming task.

Tags: Japan by shunichi arai
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livedoor announced its popular Cos-Play (Costume Play, dressing up in fictional characters most of which are from Anime/Manga) site’s renewal and English localization today, June 12th 2008.

The site “Cure” was opened in 2001, has been getting 300,000 registered users including 60,000 “Cos-Player”, and now 50 million page views in a month, which is the biggest in Japan.

Cure, even though they have been having Japanese site only, got more than 10% of their users from overseas, and that ratio is still growing. So they decided to internationalize the site aiming for more users from America, Asia and Europe.

Their mobile site ( http://m.curecos.com/ ) has been also remodelled, however, the access to the mobile site is limited to Japanese major carriers, NTT Docomo, KDDI au and Softbank Mobile.

See Also:

Press Release [J]

Tags: Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
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