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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